The 17th episode of film miniatures from the “Not only the Ulmas” series is now available on the IPNtv channel. The film “The Village Paid for Sheltering Jews” presents the story of the Wąsowski family from Cegłowo near Mińsk Mazowiecki in the context of the bloody German pacification of this town on 28 June 1943. Of the heroic family’s household, only the hosts’ youngest daughter, Hania, and an unknown Jewish man named Mosze, who was hiding there, managed to survive.
The narrative about the Wąsowski family was based on the publication by Damian Sitkiewicz, PhD, Pacyfikacja Cegłowa 28 czerwca 1934 [Pacification of Cegłów of 28 June 1943], Cegłów 2023.
The German police carried out the bloody pacification of Cegłów on 28 June 1943, four months before the end of the genocidal Aktion Reinhardt, in which they murdered approximately 1.9 million Polish Jews. As is known, the occupiers exterminated approximately 6 million Polish citizens during World War II, half of them of Jewish origin. The other half of the victims were mostly ethnic Poles.
Apart from providing shelter to Jews, according to the documents of the National Armed Forces, the Germans committed the massacre in Cegłów also because of the people’s cooperation with the partisans, providing shelter to escaped Soviet prisoners of war and because local communists killed a German soldier. The victims of the pacification included Aleksandra and Jan Wąsowski, their son Mieczysław and the Jewish siblings Estera, Jojne and Mendel Goldstein who were hiding with them. The owners’ youngest daughter, Hania, managed to survive and an unknown Jew, Moshe, escaped to the forest.
The late Władysław Bartoszewski, a prisoner of KL Auschwitz during World War II and a member of the Council to Aid Jews “Żegota”, and in 1995 and 2000-2001 the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland commented that the scale of aid provided to Jews in Poland is a phenomenon that I do not know of in any other country of occupied Europe. However, since the main part of the tragedy of the Jewish population has played out on our territory, these actions may affect thousands of people, but not millions. And they are falling into the shadow of the tragedy of millions. Yet, I still recall that, according to the Old Testament, ten people were missing to rescue Sodom. In Poland, those Righteous were in the thousands... I believe that not only Jews who were rescued in infernal conditions are thankful to them, but all of us are as well, contemporaries and descendents (quote from: J. Żaryn, Polska wobec Zagłady [Poland in the face of the Holocaust], Oficyna Wydawnicza Volumen, Warsaw 2019, p. 243).
By the end of World War II, the Germans had exterminated approximately six million Polish citizens, the overwhelming majority of them being ethnic Jews (approx. 3 million) and ethnic Poles. Most of the thousands of Poles who helped Jews during the German occupation have never been honoured and will most likely never be publicly known. We want to commemorate them all with a series of films “Not only the Ulmas”. I invite you to watch the 17th episode of the IPN film miniatures from the “Not only the Ulmas” series, dedicated to the Wąsowski family from Cegłów near Mińsk Mazowiecki – “The Village Paid for Sheltering Jews”, which we present in Polish and English versions on the IPNtv YouTube channel and on social media.
Watch previous episodes of the series "Not only about the Ulma's".