Włodzimierz Maruczyński worked as a court assessor in Drohobycz. During the German occupation, he had, for many months, been helping a group of Jews hiding in the apartment of one of them, Chaim Krochmal, at ul. Stryjska 105. The people he saved wrote the following words about him in their statement made in 1949: “we owe our survival until liberation to his selfless and candid help”.
Chaim Krochmal, his wife Rachela, their son Adam, and his daughter-in-law Adela went into hiding, together with Henryk Bakenroth and his wife Amalia and Chune Beller and his wife Basia, even before the creation of a ghetto in Drohobycz, in January 1942. A sealed-off district for Jews was created by the Germans in September of that year. The families remained in hiding until August 1944 when Soviet troops came to Drohobycz.
Włodzimierz Maruczyński had been providing the Jews with food, medicines, and clothes and also keeping them updated about what happening on the front. After Maruczyński was forced to move to Przeworsk, he continued to travel to Drohobycz in order to make it possible for the people in hiding to satisfy their basic needs – he brought them food and medicines for the most part.
In their statement made after the war, the saved Jews wrote: “we had nothing and Maruczyński was not counting on any material reward from us. He did what he did because he was an opponent of Nazi ideology and could not stand idly by and watch as other suffered”. Maruczyński’s daughter, Renata Ciszewska, wrote the following words to describe the reasons behind her father’s actions: “my father had been providing ten Jews with food for several dozen months because of the humanitarian values he believed in and his political convictions”.
After the war was over, the saved Jews were repatriated to the Recovered Territories and settled in Wałbrzych. Maruszyński moved to Tczew.
He corresponded with the people he saved until 1968 when “such ties had to be severed”, as Renata Ciszewska wrote in 1991, probably hinting at the anti-Semitic campaign in Poland organised at that time and at the temporary discontinuation of diplomatic relations between Poland and Israel.
The Yad Vashem Institute awarded the Righteous Among the Nations title to Włodzimierz Maruczyński in 1995.
