In January four years passed since Ewa's father went to be with the Lord, so we decided to share his story with our friends for your and our encouragement and God's glory.
Wladyslaw grew up in Warsaw. Their family was Catholic but his mother felt there was more to God than what the Catholic Church was saying. She read the Bible. Catholics were told that the Bible was only for the priests to read and then explain to the people. She became a Christian after the Second World War when her son came home from the concentration camp.
Wladyslaw did not have an interest as a young boy in the Bible. At the age of 18 during the war, he built fake walls and hiding rooms in many homes including the one where he lived with his friend in Warsaw. These places were for hiding the Jews from the German troops. He became special friends with one family who lived in a hiding place for about three to four years that included a Jewish girl, Janka, a few years younger than he. She was going crazy from being cooped up in such a small space for so long. She asked if she could go out and take a walk around Warsaw. She was very Jewish looking so it was very dangerous, but he took her out a few times and the Germans never caught on. She believed that it saved her life.
Janka and others survived in these hiding places until the 63 day long uprising organized by the Polish Underground Army on August 1, 1944 in Warsaw. She was one of the people who made their way through the sewers (many died in the ordeal which could take four hours) to the forests where the underground army moved them to other countries and eventually to Israel.
Often the Germans would organize an action where they would seal off a part of Warsaw and take all of the people (men, women and children) to the tracks to take them to the concentration camps. Wladyslaw was caught in one of these actions and sent to the concentration camp.
When the people were brought to the camps, they were selected for different fates. Good looking young women were taken to the German soldiers to be used for their pleasure. The old, sick, and many young children were taken directly to the crematoria and killed. Some young children with blonde or red hair who looked like they were German were taken to Germany to be adopted by German families. Many were used for experiments. Young healthy men were used to work in their areas of specialty or for hard labor. Wladyslaw spent about six months in three different camps in Germany: Grossrosen and Flossenburg on the eastern part of Germany and at the end, in Dachau, which was further west. As the Soviet Union moved in on Germany, the Germans moved the prisoners further west, trying to hide the evidence of the holocaust.
In the first camp he was assigned to a factory for making plans for airplanes. Before the war he studied at a technical school for drawing the plans. The Germans had the lists of the people and their skills so that is why he was sent to this place. The Germans were very organized and planned to kill all the Polish people, but first they wanted to get all their skills from them before they died. When he was drawing the plans, he was losing his eyesight because of the poor nutrition and living conditions, and started making mistakes. The Germans threatened to send him to the stone mines if he made any more mistakes. It didn’t matter if they sent prisoners to the stone mines or the crematoria because people never lasted very long in the stone mines. There they beat the miners and the work was very heavy labour and they died very quickly.
That night, for the first time in his life, he prayed to God. He prayed, “If you really exist like my mother told me, then help me.” He had a vision that he was told by God that he would survive the war. The next morning at 6 a.m. on his way to the normal alert or roll call, he found some glasses on the ground that were good for him to see at that time so he could continue drawing accurate plans. He knew that God had answered his prayer. The glasses worked for him for a while, but because his eye sight was deteriorating, eventually he made more mistakes and was sent to the stone mine. He survived the stone mine only because he was sent to another concentration camp as the Germans were moving the prisoners further west when the Allies and the Russians were advancing from the east.
In the second camp he was in the hospital because he was ill with diarrhoea from the bad food. One night a German doctor came into his room and secretly warned him to leave to go into the hall and hide. He hid in a storage room while the Germans did a “cleansing” where they came into the hospital, took everyone to the crematoria, and killed them. He had escaped death again. He eventually was moved to his third camp – Dachau.
The Germans tried to destroy the evidence of what they had done in the camps before the Allies arrived so they were preparing explosives to blow up all of the camp and the people in it. However, the Germans miscalculated the time that it would take for the Americans to reach Dachau and had not destroyed the camp and the prisoners. Wladyslaw was still living when the Americans arrived. When they came, the Americans gave the prisoners food which they ate very quickly. Wladyslaw watched as his comrades ate, their stomachs exploded, and they died. He was feeling the pains in his stomach from the food and realized what would happen to him. Very quickly he grabbed a bottle of Vodka from an American soldier and drank it so he could throw up his food and save his life. Because of the quick action, he survived. The Americans took the food away from the surviving prisoners so that no more would die.
Before the war he weighed about 70 kg but by the end of the war, he was only 35 kg – like the weight of a 10 year old child. Because of his poor health, he contracted tuberculosis after the war and was sent to an American hospital in Germany where he stayed for two years. The doctor did not think he would survive the tuberculosis. But because of Wladyslaw’s vision from the Lord, he knew he would survive. It was at this time that he realized that God’s thinking is different from human thinking.
He thought that the way that God would keep his promise and help him survive would be to help him escape or be released from the camp. He realized later that the promise involved more of a succession of surviving times when he should have died. It was like Moses and the people of Israel. It was not easy for them to leave Egypt, and there were many plagues, but in the end, God fulfilled His Promise and they left Egypt. It wasn’t in their timing or the way they thought it should happen. It was the same for Wladyslaw; he had many terrible trials in the time that he was in the concentration camps, it kept getting worse, and he didn’t see how the Lord was keeping his promise, but in the end he survived.
Throughout all this time he was beginning to see God’s faithfulness and care. After the war he found a Bible believing church. There he gave his life to Christ. Later he met Krystyna and married her in 1952. They had 3 children; Malgorzata, Ewa, and Tomasz. Krystyna died in 1975 and he remarried in 1985 to Helena.
Forty years after the war the Jewish woman, Janka, heard that he had survived and came to Poland to find him. She thought that he had died in the concentration camp. She wanted to thank him for saving her life and risking his life for hers. He was surprised that she was so thankful and wanted to honour him because what he did was just normal for him. He shared his faith in Jesus with her. She said the war took away her faith. He said the war helped him find his faith. She lives in Tel Aviv and felt it would be safe from attack there. He told her that the Bible says that it would not be safe in the end. After a big attack in Tel Aviv, she became more receptive to listening to the Truth. He continued to pray for her until he passed away in January 2003 at the age of 83. Now Ewa has continued praying for Janka to accept Christ. Please pray for her and her family.
Before he died, Wladyslaw was honoured for his heroic deed in Israel. An olive tree (a symbol of peace) was planted in his honour in Jerusalem at the Yad Vashem garden on spot # 480 near the Commemoration Hall museum. He also received a medal which his wife Helena still has in Warsaw. The medal says something like “amongst the righteous” which is the same that all the people who helped the Jews have on their medals. The title of this text is "Story of Ewa's father" but we know, that it is rather God's story of His Grace and provision in our family life.
My future is in your hands... Psalm 31:15
