Henryk Kozłowski was born in 1921 in Urszulin. When the Nazis came to Urszulin and the nearby villages, they took severe actions to exterminate the local Jewish population. Most Jews were killed. Henryk’s mother Marianna Kozłowska (née Jung) was hiding an eight-year-old Jewish girl Miriam Zunszajn for three months. She introduced her to the people as her sister’s daughter Marysia Kozłowska. Her sister lived quite far away from Urszulin, so taht nobody knew if she had such a child.
The girl was from Wereszczyn, a village located about 5,5 km to south-east of Urszulin, where her entire family had been killed. Henryk and his mother kept knowledge of this girl’s background a secret, being afraid of the neighbors’ and the local Home Army unit’s reactions, as they were aware that sometimes, local people informed the German authorities about Jews and about those who hid them.
After three months, as Henryk Kozłowski thinks, an organization (probably Jewish) in Grabniak, asked about the girl. When the war ended, Miriam was taken to Israel. Still later, she visited Henryk and went to the places she remembered from the past. She also founded a monument in Wereszczyn. In 2008 thanks to her efforts Henryk on behalf of his mother received the medal “The Righteous Among the Nations.”
