Zdzisław and Jadwiga Przybylski were teachers. During the occupation, they lived in Warsaw at 6 Pańska Street. In the autumn of 1942, a friend asked them to hide two Jewish women who were being blackmailed.
The sisters, Maria and Julia Szliferstein, hid in the Przybylski home until the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising. During this time, they used fake documentation under the name Głowacki.
Zdzisław Przybylski had hidden a Jew once before, though it was clear that by doing so, he was putting his whole family in danger. The Przybylskis’ teenage daughters were also active in the underground. The elder, Jadwiga, had completed an underground course in nursing. To this day, she remembers the horror of the burning ghetto in 1943.
Tragically, denouncers discovered that the Przybylskis were harboring Jews and the family was forced to flee their own home. Jadwiga, who was fifteen when this happened, found a temporary shelter for the Szliferstein sisters through her Home Army connections. Jadwiga’s younger sister, Wanda, who perished in the Warsaw Uprising, had kept a journal in the years 1942-1944. Published after the war, it inspired the writer Henryk Grynberg to search out the Przybylskis and appeal to have them recognized as Righteous Among the Nations.