On April 9, 1943, the Germans murdered a young Jewish couple and the woman who was hiding them, Anna Niepsuj, a mother of eight children.

During the German occupation in Klikowa, now part of the city of Tarnów, a tragedy occurred that shocked the local community.

The origins of this crime are connected to Operation Reinhardt, a German operation launched in 1942 aimed at exterminating the Jewish population in the General Government (GG). In Tarnów, the first displacement operations, combined with mass executions, took place in June of that year. However, beforehand, Jews, on German orders, had to register and have their work cards stamped. Survivor Blanka Goldman recalled after the war: "On June 9, 1942, street announcements suddenly appeared about the gradual, planned relocation of Jews to other towns for work. It was noted that stamps were required for this purpose, and that those Jews assigned to work in Tarnów would remain there, while the rest would be resettled." It is estimated that as many as 40,000 Jews may have been living in the city at the time.

Ultimately, approximately 8,000 people were deported from Tarnów to the Bełżec extermination camp in June 1942. Meanwhile, some of those deemed unfit to travel, including the elderly, the sick, and mothers with small children (between 8,000 and 10,000 people), were murdered in the Jewish cemetery and nearby forests. Further deportation operations in the city took place in September and November 1942, and again in September 1943 – historians emphasize that these were extremely brutal.

Aunt from afar

When deportations to the extermination camps began, some Jews decided to seek refuge on the so-called Aryan side. A few tried to survive using false identities. Most tried to hide. Most likely in October 1942, two Jewish refugees from Tarnów found shelter in Klikowa, on the Niepsuj family's farm on Sadowa Street. According to Jan Niepsuj's postwar testimony, their surname was Kurz and they had previously lived on Asnyka Street. They were likely a married couple, around 20 years old. They were hidden in a planked, hay-lined hiding place in the attic of the house. At night, they would go down to the kitchen for food.

Based on available sources, we know that the Niepsuj family owned a two-hectare farm, and Jan Niepsuj was also a railway employee. They had eight children. The family lived in a traditional, tiled wooden house. One part of the building contained a barn and a shed, while the other contained living quarters: a kitchen, a room, and a hallway. Adjacent to it was a barn.

When one day one of the children asked who the young woman who had come to live with them was, Anna Niepsuj replied that she was "some aunt from far away." The lack of sources prevents us from answering a number of questions related to the Kurz family's hiding: what was the daily life like for those hiding and those being hidden? Why did the Niepsuj family provide them with shelter? One of Anna Niepsuj's daughters, Maria, testified in the 1990s that the Jews promised her parents "some compensation." The Niepsuj family must have known that by accepting Jewish refugees, they were violating the laws imposed by representatives of the German Reich. According to German regulations, hiding Jews was punishable by death.

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