On Monday, March 25, a ceremony presenting high state decorations to Poles who saved Jews during the war was held at the Presidential Palace in Warsaw. The Commander’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta was awarded posthumously to Feliks Kwarciak of Bolesławiec. His daughters accepted the decoration on his behalf: Halina Karolik and Bolesławiec resident Regina Mikulska.
“It was a moving ceremony,” Regina told istotne.pl. She was particularly struck by the speech of the President of the Republic of Poland, Andrzej Duda. The head of state spoke, among other things, about three groups of Poles at that time: blackmailers who denounced Jews; those who did not get involved at all, probably out of fear; and those who began helping Jews. As the Bolesławiec resident recounts, A. Duda stressed that the first group did not even deserve Polish citizenship, while the third group consisted of heroes.
The example for the late Feliks Kwarciak was certainly his father, Piotr, who ran away from home as a teenager to join Piłsudski’s Legions. For taking part in the defense of Lviv, Regina’s grandfather received the Cross of Valor and land in Dubno, in what was then still Polish Volhynia.
There he met the love of his life, with whom he had three sons: Alfred, Anatoliusz and Feliks.
During the interwar period, Piotr Kwarciak worked in a prison. Even then, he fed the prisoners. (The family suspects that his being a good man saved him from deportation to Siberia.)
“My great-grandfather’s life would make excellent film material,” says Bartosz Mikulski, who accompanied his mother at Monday’s ceremony.
When a ghetto was established in Dubno during the war, a Jewish family managed to escape. Piotr Kwarciak agreed to take his friend’s relatives into his home. There were supposed to be four people. Fifteen arrived.
Bartosz’s great-grandfather explained to his entire family at the time: we are helping our neighbors and friends. Their religion did not matter.
The fifteen Jews hid with the Kwarciak family for about 20 months. They all survived, including Michał Fiszer, the father of the opera singer known today throughout the world, Dudu Fisher. (Importantly, when D. Fisher was recently in Poland, he strongly emphasized—without mispronouncing the surname—that it was the Polish Kwarciak family that saved his family from annihilation.)
The family of the late Feliks Kwarciak preserves the memory of both him and his father. Regina and Bartosz emphasize their ancestors’ courage and are proud of them. “Everyone knew what it could mean. If this had been discovered, everyone would have died,” they say. “A bullet to the head. Or they would have been burned alive.”
The result could have been that neither Regina nor Bartosz would ever have been born...
Feliks Kwarciak’s grandson recalls once watching one of the Nuremberg trials on television with his grandfather. An SS man was talking about an execution in Dubno: a Jewish family about to be shot stood naked over a pit. Suddenly, a child grabbed his father’s hand and asked: what will happen to us now? The father merely pointed upward. Then shots rang out.
“That was when I saw an 80-year-old man crying,” Bartosz recalls. “When I asked what had happened, my grandfather replied: I saw it.”
This year’s decoration is not the first honor the Kwarciak family has received for its courage. In 1989, five family members were awarded the titles of Righteous Among the Nations. In 2010, Feliks Kwarciak was granted honorary Israeli citizenship posthumously.
“I deeply regret one thing,” concludes the honored Bolesławiec resident’s grandson: “Poland remembered my grandfather so late. Where were the previous governments 12 years ago, when he was still alive?”
He adds that if Feliks Kwarciak could have attended this year’s ceremony, he would certainly have come forward, bowed and said nothing. Instead, he would probably have cried like a child.