Kazimierz Duriasz, a poor railwayman, lived with his wife and son in the Warsaw suburb of Targówek – 15 Gilarska street. From 1942 until the end of the Nazi occupation, he hid Dawid, the son of Szlomo Kornblum.
Before the War, Szlomo Kornblum was a writer, a journalist and the owner of a haberdashery store. His wife, Lonia, was an educated and progressive woman. Before their marriage, she was a kindergarten teacher and later ran a clothing store in Warsaw on ul. Rymarskiej. The couple had one son, Dawid, but they also raised Estera, Liona’s niece, as well as Icchak, Szlomo’s son from a previous marriage.
In 1940, the Kornblum’s apartment, at 17 Pańska street, found itself within the borders of the Warsaw ghetto. Behind its walls, the family supported itself by sewing leather wallets which Lonia and Icchak sold on the ”Aryan side”. In the summer of 1942, when the Nazis began deporting Jews to the death camps, Lonia and Estera found themselves among the first groups of people to be transported. Szlomo then decided that he had to do everything in order to save, at least, one of his children.
Thanks to the intercession of friends, he found a Polish family whom he paid, for six months up-front, for them to agree to take his son Dawid, who was ten years old at the time. In December 1942, the boy, within a group of workers, was smuggled outside the walls and was collected by a woman who led him to the Durjasz family. From that moment, according to an obtained birth certificate, this hidden Jew carried the name ”Władek”.
The child spent entire days in a cramped cell which he could only leave after dusk. There was often not enough food in the Durjasz household. Szlomo Kornblum perished in the ghetto and so his son’s upkeep could no longer be paid for. Despite the difficult situation, Mr Durjasz did not send the boy away. He cared for him until the liberation of Warsaw’s Praga district in November 1944. He then passed the boy on to the Jewish Committee.
Following the end of the War, Dawid moved between homes and orphanages. He still concealed his Jewish identity, using the name ”Władysław Mireski”. In August 1945, he met up with his brother, Icchak, who had managed to escape from the ghetto and who had survived the War. In the spring of 1948, he emigrated to Israel.
