A Meeting of Eighty-Year-Olds

red., 16 November 2016
During the Holocaust the Firuta family helped save the life of the Jewish siblings, the Bonders. Only Bolesław Firuta and Józef Bonder are still alive today. They are both 82. On November 29th the Righteous and the Rescued met again, years later, in New York, at a dinner organized in honor of the Righteous by the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous.

The Jewish siblings escaped from the ghetto in the town of Skałat in the Tarnopol voivodeship in 1941. Their parents were killed. The fourteen-year-old Józef and his sister made their way to the village of Ostra Mogiła and to the Firutas’ farmstead. They were hiding there until the liberation in 1944.

After the war Józef Bonder left for New Jersey, US. Bronisław Firuta’s family was resettled to Lower Silesia after the Tarnopol area was annexed to the USSR. They were unable to contact each other for many years. It was only recently that the Firutas have been found.

The Rescued applied to the Yad Vashem Institute to decorate Bronisław Firuta with the title and medal of Righteous Among the Nations, which took place in 2006.

Their recent meeting, 65 years after the previous one, was made possible by the New York-based Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, a financial supporter of Righteous (including 510 of the Polish Righteous) the world over. Firuta and Bonder’s story was reported by a number of major American media outlets.

More information available in the report at...