NEWS FEATURE: One moment, one woman, four lives on the line

c. 1999 Religion News Service CLEVELAND _ The 16-year-old maid opened the door to two brown-shirted Gestapo agents on New Year’s Eve in 1941 in Warsaw. Behind her were three Jewish people her employer was hiding from the Nazis. One moment. One woman. Four lives on the line. Jajdwiga Jozwik slammed the door in the […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

CLEVELAND _ The 16-year-old maid opened the door to two brown-shirted Gestapo agents on New Year’s Eve in 1941 in Warsaw. Behind her were three Jewish people her employer was hiding from the Nazis.

One moment. One woman. Four lives on the line.


Jajdwiga Jozwik slammed the door in the face of the most feared enforcers of the Third Reich. She bolted the door, put her weight against it, and told Stanley and Ida Muszynski and Ida’s mother to run.

Now, nearly 60 years later, long after she was sent to a labor camp for her defiance and the Muszynskis lived to raise three children in Shaker Heights, Jozwik is being honored with the highest award Israel bestows on Gentile heroes of the Holocaust.

Acting on the appeal of Ida Muszynski, The Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Authority this month declared Jozwik righteous among the nations. A tree will be planted in her honor and a stone inscribed with her name along the Avenue of the Righteous outside Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. Inside the museum, her name will be placed on the Wall of Honors recognizing those who risked their lives to save others.

On July 2, some 30 people from the Cleveland area will travel to Warsaw to attend a ceremony in which the Israeli ambassador to Poland will present Jozwik with a medal and diploma. Among them will be Ida and Stanley Muszynski’s son, Stuart, his wife and two children.”Jadja to me is a metaphor. She is a metaphor for the goodness the people in the world can have,”said Stuart Muszynski.”At a time when many people were just looking out for their own skin … it was an individual choice to become part of the human race. Jadja made that choice.” Thirty-two-year-old Stanley Muszynski was a lawyer and 26-year-old Ida Muszynski was training to be a dentist like her mother as the Nazis’ Final Solution to annihilate the Jewish population wended its way in the fall of 1941 toward their small village of Miedzyrzec-Podlaski, about 90 miles southeast of Warsaw. With a few hours’ advance warning that his name was on a Nazi list for capture, Muszynski was able to escape. His cousin, whose name was on the same list, was shot that day in his back yard in front of his parents.

Stanley and Ida Muszynski and her mother would make their way to Warsaw, where they were hidden in the home of a Roman Catholic family from their village who had moved to the city. On that New Year’s Eve night in 1941, the Gestapo were looking for Edward Teski, the head of the Catholic family. The Nazis correctly suspected he was part of the Polish Underground.

But no one had any doubts what the Nazis would do with Jewish people discovered hiding in the apartment.”If she wouldn’t close the door for the Gestapo and yell to us, `Gestapo,’ we wouldn’t be alive,”Ida Muszynski said.

The Catholic maid’s split-second courage saved their lives. For what seemed like five minutes _ an eternity to defy the Gestapo _ Jozwik did not reopen the door. Ida Muszynski’s mother hid under a small bed folded beneath an armoire.

Ida and Stanley Muszynski ran out of the fifth-floor apartment and up the winding staircase in the building. On the ninth floor, they discovered a kitchen door opened to relieve the smell and heat of doughnuts being fried throughout the building for the New Year’s celebration.


They embraced to hide their faces. At one point, they heard Gestapo agents pause at the door, then run past them.”We stayed there two hours kissing each other. They thought it was a young couple making love,”Ida Muszynski said.

The Muszynskis were moved to another safe house and survived the war. In 1953 they emigrated to the United States. The couple moved to Shaker Heights where Stanley Muszynski would start a home improvement company and they would bring up three sons.

Jozwik was sent to a labor camp, but would escape from the train and find her way to safety.

There the story might have ended were it not for a trip Stuart Muszynski made to Poland in 1995 to meet the families of the people who helped his parents. He has since been back three times and had an opportunity to meet Jozwik, the one rescuer still alive.

With apple brandy and apple cake set before them on a table _ and the admonition no one could leave the table until both were finished _ Jozwik talked with Muszynski and members of her family about how on that night in 1941 she acted based on the upbringing she received from her mother, who was known throughout her village for helping other people.”She said there was no choice. The only choice was to be good,”Stuart Muszynski said.

With her son’s encouragement, Ida Muszynski last year applied to the Holocaust authority in Israel on behalf of Jozwik. They were notified of the ruling earlier this month.


Stuart Muszynski said it is a wonderful moral lesson in the power of religion to inspire goodness.

In that era, people faced dramatic choices to be decent and indecent. Even though many people from different religious backgrounds chose to act immorally, some made moral choices in the face of great evil, he said.”In the case of my parents … Catholicism saved them,”he said.

In his own life, Stuart Muszynski was inspired to co-found with his wife in 1994 a nonprofit organization called Project Love, which has worked with hundreds of Northeast Ohio students to train teens how to help build a culture of kindness, caring and mutual respect in their schools.

Teen-agers who wonder how they can make a difference need only look back at Jozwik, whose courage at 16 thrust her into greatness, Muszynski said.”My children are here, my two brothers are here, one of my brothers’ two children. You just look at the multiplicity of the people who were saved by one action,”Stuart Muszynski said.

(OPTIONAL TRIM – STORY MAY END HERE)

In one of the most memorable scenes of the movie”Schindler’s List,”scores of Holocaust survivors and their families are shown paying tribute in Israel to Oscar Schindler, the German manufacturer who saved more than 1,000 people from death during the Holocaust.

While her act was on a smaller scale, Jozwik will now rightfully take her place alongside Schindler on the Avenue of the Righteous at Yad Vashem, Muszynski said.”Sometimes it only takes one act to be great,”he said.”There are very few people capable of saving hundreds of lives, but we all are capable of doing one act of greatness.” DEA END BRIGGS


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