"I thought I was safe with my wife, that nothing bad could happen to me with her," her husband, Leon, thought of Alicja Guz during the darkest period of the occupation for Jews. And he was right. Thanks to her energy, "good looks," and acting skills, four other Jews survived the occupation in a hideout in Warsaw's Praga district. The help they received from many fellow Christians was also significant, including Apolonia Przybojewska, later awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations.
It was a frosty December morning in 1942. More than a quarter of a century had passed since the liquidation of the Mińsk Mazowiecki ghetto. Jews who had managed to survive the August massacre worked at several jobs in the city, including the Rudzki factory complex, which produced metal products. Among them was the young Guza couple – 28-year-old Leon and 27-year-old Alicja. Both had already experienced numerous occasions when they had miraculously evaded the German killing machine. Now they were doubly determined to survive. Their daughter, Basia, had been born just a few weeks earlier. Immediately after her birth, with the help of a non-Jewish friend, they placed the infant as a foundling in the Father Boduen Orphanage. They believed their daughter had a better chance of survival there. They longed to be reunited with her. Instead, they found themselves on the verge of tragedy.
Suddenly, a Jewish worker burst into their quarters at the plant's power plant, alerting them that the factory was surrounded by Germans. The Guz family immediately fled toward a hiding place they had chosen in advance. It was a shed, located away from the main buildings of the complex, where bales of pressed wood chips were stored. The couple pushed them aside and hid behind it.
"With our hearts beating hard, we listened for sounds from the factory grounds. Suddenly, we heard footsteps approaching the shed. Judging by the heavy footsteps, we guessed it was a German. We held our breath," Leon Guz recalled years later. Moments later, they found themselves face to face with a gendarme.
"This is the end, I thought. Meanwhile, the gendarme, silent, watched us intently and at one point put his finger to his lips. Without a word, he began to stack the shavings back. Another German appeared in the shed, asking him if he had found anyone. "No," he replied, "there's no one here." Hearing those words, I thought I was dreaming," Guz recalled.
The couple remained in the hideout for several more hours. They emerged only when they heard the voices of their fellow prisoners outside. Unlike the ten Jews the Germans took from the factory to be shot, they were lucky once again. Soon, they were lucky again. They found themselves in an asylum, where they survived until the arrival of the Red Army.
Values worth living for
The couple came from impoverished Jewish homes. Leon (Lejb) was born in 1914 in Kovel, Volhynia. During the interwar period, his family settled in Warsaw. His mother died just before the outbreak of war. His brother Szymon was mortally wounded during the bombing of Warsaw in September 1939. Until the spring of 1941, he lived in a tenement house at 40 Zamenhofa Street. At first, he lived only with his father and younger brother, Zelig, and later with his wife.
Alicja Guz (Surla Matla Szarfsztejn), born in 1915, came from Mińsk Mazowiecki. Her parents ran a shop there. She had two brothers: the younger was named Szlamek, and the older, Gerszon (in her memoirs, Guz uses his postwar name and surname – Tadeusz Skoczeń). From the age of 16, she lived in Warsaw, where she worked as a nanny. She met Leon by chance in Michalin near Otwock in late 1938. They formalized their great love on December 10, 1939, at a modest ceremony in the capital, which was already occupied by the Germans. They soon moved in together.
During the horrors of war, as repressions descended upon the Jewish population, Leon experienced moments of despair, sometimes falling into apathy. As he repeatedly emphasized in his memoirs, only Alicja's presence made him feel safe and gave him the energy to continue his fight for survival. She was resourceful, courageous, and resourceful. Moreover, she possessed qualities that significantly facilitated his ability to navigate the German terror.
"Few people, not knowing her, thought she was Jewish," Guz wrote. "She spent her entire youth in a Polish neighborhood, her features were nothing like those of her countrymen, she made friends only with Poles at school, and finally, she recited her prayers without hesitation, and the word 'Oh Jesus' was a reaction in moments of surprise or fear. As it later turned out, these were values worth their weight in gold, worth their lives."
Escape from Hell
At the outbreak of war, Leon Guz was the sole breadwinner for his family. He worked in a wholesale fur warehouse at 32 Świętojerska Street. When the Germans entered the city, he wrote, the terrified owner was ready to hand over all her precious merchandise in the event of requisition. Therefore, he and two colleagues hid most of the goods with Christian contractors. Then he began trading them, accumulating considerable savings. Thanks to these funds, he and his household lived comfortably until the summer of 1940, in fact, as he himself put it, "almost carefree." They had no shortage of food, and the apartment was teeming with guests.
However, as the financial mountain began to melt and the cost of living in the Jewish quarter rose, Guz couldn't find a similarly lucrative source of income. Subsequent businesses, such as the potato trade, brought him little profit. The futility of these efforts, the inactivity, the closure of the ghetto in November 1940, and the constant threat of German repression, including deportations to infamous labor camps, plunged the 26-year-old into depression. He grew thinner and wasted away. Consequently, a concerned Alicja ordered him to leave Warsaw for her family in Mińsk Mazowiecki, where life was much more peaceful. Interestingly, Guz arrived safely and comfortably with a group of other Jews in the back of a German military truck. They were escorted by Wehrmacht soldiers bribed by Gerszon Szarfsztejn, Leon's brother-in-law.
Dark days
The Minsk ghetto, where over 5 people were crammed, had relatively tolerable living conditions. It was not fenced, so Jews could move around the city relatively freely.
Guz moved in with his in-laws on the first floor of a wooden house at 6 Mireckiego Street. Shortly after moving in, his brother-in-law, who was a group leader for Jewish workers at the outposts, arranged for him to work on the construction of a German military airfield in nearby Janów. Along the way, Leon had the opportunity to observe Hitler's troops preparing to invade the USSR.
Later, Guz worked successively at a railway station, in Red Cross warehouses, and in the so-called impregnation plant, where railway sleepers and traction poles were impregnated.
Meanwhile, Alicja, who had already reached him in June 1941, took up trading between Minsk and the Warsaw Ghetto. She exported food to Warsaw and brought back items such as clothing, earning considerable profits. She tried to minimize risk. She had an official pass from the Judenrat to travel by train. Due to her "good location," she was not harassed by blackmailers. Depending on the circumstances, she entered the ghetto through smuggling facilities – mainly tenement houses adjacent to the borders of the closed district – the courthouses on Leszno Street, or simply through the gates, when it was known that the entire guard had been bribed. Although this was a deadly risky practice, she never experienced a serious mishap.
The darkest period for the Guzas was the second half of 1942. First, they received terrifying news of the "Grand Aktion" in the Warsaw Ghetto. Leon's father and brother miraculously escaped to the "Aryan side." They were then evacuated to Minsk by Gerszon Szarfsztejn and his partner, 33-year-old Apolonia Przybojewska, a Pole with German roots.
On the morning of August 21st, the liquidation operation also began in the Minsk ghetto. It was exceptionally brutal. The Germans and their Ukrainian and Latvian henchmen murdered approximately one thousand people on the spot.
"We entered the Jewish quarter. It was a terrifying sight," Guz recalled. "It seemed to me I had entered a cemetery or a dead city. On both sides of the street, on the sidewalks, in the doorways, corpses lay scattered. Some were still alive, moving, looking at us with pleading eyes. I searched among these victims for my loved ones."
During those days, Leon's father and brother, as well as Alicja's parents and younger brother, were sent to the Treblinka extermination camp. Of the two families, only the Guzowie family and Gerszon Szarfsztejn survived the operation.
Leon was particularly lucky. He found himself among a crowd of surrounded Jews waiting at the Minsk station for a train to the extermination camp. He then noticed that a drunken Ukrainian guard had fallen asleep in the gate he was guarding. Without thinking, Guz crawled up to him, then jumped over him and began to flee – without being noticed. He then hid for several days in the so-called "soothing plant." Interestingly, food was brought to him by a worker active in the local clandestine structures of the national camp.
The Guza family was among the approximately 400 surviving Jews from Mińsk. For the following months, Leon lived and worked at the Rudzki factory mentioned earlier. Meanwhile, at the end of November 1942, Alicja gave birth to a daughter, Basia. Thanks to the help of Dr. Olgierd Mackiewicz, she was able to give birth at the local maternity ward. Moreover, the doctor was associated with Żegota, a humanitarian organization affiliated with the Government Delegation for Poland, dedicated to helping Jews.
A week after her birth, they decided to take a dramatic step. Through Przebojewska, they placed the girl in a Warsaw orphanage at 75 Nowogrodzka Street. Afterward, Alicja would visit the child with her periodically. To allay suspicions, they told the nuns running the facility that they wanted to check on "their foundling."
Prague Asylum
After the adventure described in the introduction, the Guz family became acutely aware that remaining at the Rudzki factory meant death. They had to find a safe hiding place. And then, unexpectedly, the wife of a Polish engineer working at the plant—and, let's be clear, not a close friend—came to their aid. She gave Alicja the original birth certificate of a girl sent to work in the Reich. With this document, Leon's wife obtained a Kennkarte (German identity card) and began life "with Aryan papers" as Józefa Sowa.
The next step was renting an apartment. Lacking the funds, they had to find partners with sufficient capital. And so, they recruited Mosze Zyserman, his wife Tauba, and his younger brother Herszek, who had a considerable amount of money, into their survival group.
In early January 1943, Alicja, with Przebojewska's help, rented an apartment at 64/121 Targowa Street. The apartment was approximately 20 square meters and was located in the attic of a tenement building.
Once all five tenants were in the apartment, an additional wall of planks was built under the sloping roof, creating a hiding place. The Zysermans and Leon were to hide there whenever Mrs. Ziuta—the only official tenant—had guests.
Responsibility for the entire group's survival rested on Alicja's shoulders. She provided them with provisions (she made small purchases at a few shops to avoid arousing suspicion), water (she couldn't make frequent trips up and down the stairs with a bucket), and disposed of waste in the hallway toilet (which, contrary to appearances, required a clandestine approach to avoid attracting attention). Above all, she skillfully played the lonely Christian woman to her neighbors, quickly winning their sympathy. She even took care of such details as organizing Józefa's name day.
Moreover, to maintain appearances, Mrs. Ziuta found a job in the newspapers that was convenient for the whole company. And so, officially, she earned money by gluing paper bags in her apartment for a certain Praga cooperative. In reality, Leon and the Zysmans happily took over this task for her—in this way, they relieved the boredom of everyday life.
The entire group—including Gerszon Szarfsztajn, who joined them for the final weeks—managed to survive on Targowa Street without any major mishaps until the Red Army captured Praga. On September 14, 1944, they were finally able to emerge from hiding.
Post-war fate
After the war, the Guza family settled first in Mińsk Mazowiecki, and then in Warsaw. Besides their daughter, Basia, whom they had taken from an orphanage in 1945, they had a son, Jerzy, born in 1947. Alicja suffered a heart attack due to the emotional impact of the events of March 1968. She subsequently suffered from illness for many years. She died in 1980. Leon, a longtime journalist for "Trybuna Ludu" after the war, passed away only in 2010, at the age of 95.
For her help to the Guzy family, Apolonia Przebojewska was awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations in 1984. However, as Leon's memoir, "Targowa 64," reveals, many other non-Jewish compatriots also offered them support, without which they would not have survived.
When writing the text, I used, among others, the book by Leon Guz entitled "Targowa 64. Dziennik 27.01.1943-11.09.1944", Warsaw 1990.
