Holocaust victim

The poster made Jan Kostański feel a deep sense of fear.

In 1942, German authorities in Warsaw issued a warning that any Polish person caught helping Jews who had escaped from the ghettos could be sentenced to death.

Jan was a Polish Catholic teenager at the time.

Despite the danger, he had been secretly entering the Warsaw ghetto to help his close Jewish friends, the Wierzbicki family.

With the help of his mother, Władysława, Jan soon became involved in a larger effort to smuggle food and other supplies into the ghetto.

In the summer of 1942, Jan and his mother managed to find a hiding place for Ajzyk Wierzbicki and his children, Nathan and Nacha.

Helping them was extremely dangerous.

Still, Jan and Władysława continued to hide and support the Wierzbicki family for the next two years, even though they knew they could be killed if they were discovered.

While Nacha was in hiding, she and Jan became very close and eventually fell in love.

The couple was photographed together in the Warsaw ghetto in 1941.

Both Jan and Nacha survived the war.

After the war ended, they married and built a life together.

Years later, in 1983, Jan and his mother, Władysława, were honored by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations for risking their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.

After the ceremony, Jan’s son, Andrew, told his father that he had thought a lot about what Jan had done and was not sure if he would have had the courage to do the same thing.

Jan gave him a simple answer.

He said that nobody truly knows what they would do until they are placed in that kind of situation.

For Jan, helping the Wierzbicki family had simply felt like the natural and right thing to do.

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