Yad Vashem honored new Righteous Among the Nations

Joanna Król, 16 November 2016
The late brother Kazimierz and Józef Moskwiak, as well as their wives Adela i Celina, together saved three escapees from the Siedlce ghetto during the Holocaust. A ceremony took place today in which they were honoured with the title of Righteous Among the Nations.

The ceremony took place in the Centre of Culture and Art in Siedlce. Among the speakers were the Mayor of Siedlce, Wojciech Kudelski, and Zvi Rav-Ner, Israeli Ambassador to Poland.

Józef and Celina Moskwiak helped shelter Sala Radzyńska-Alberg and her son Michal. They hid them in their home in the Warsaw suburb of Praga. Sala’s husband, Boruch Alberg, was hidden in the home of Adela and Kazimierz Moskwiak in Siedlce. Unfortunately, he did not live to see the end of the War – he contracted a heavy dose of typhus and died.

The Moskwiak family also helped Sala’s brotherin-law, Emanuel Alberg, who was on the ”Aryan side” using the false name of Jan Emil Karpiński. It was actually his children, Andrzej Karpiński, Anna de Tusch-Lec and Elżbieta Kofman who handed the Righteous medals and certificates, awarded by the Yad Vashem Institute, to the descendants of the Moskwiak family.

During the ceremony, Ambassador Zvi Rav-Ner awarded honorary Israeli citizenship to 83 year old Stanisław Leszczyński. Stanisław, his brothers Franciszek and Józef, as well as their parents Bolesław and Anna, saved thirteen Jews from the Holocaust in Siemiatycz. They saved eight members of the Feldman family, as well as the five member Kuperhand family (Grodzicki). More on the Leszczyński family can be found on our ”Stories of Help” website.

Based on material supplied by the Israeli Embassy in Warsaw