Film Collection
Interview with Ewa Kuryluk
Transkrypcja
Karol Kuryluk – editor of magazines “Sygnały” [Signals], “Odrodzenie” [The Renaissance], director of the PWN Science Publisher, a Polish diplomat, the Righteous Among the Nations. During World War II he was active in the underground movement in Lviv. He performed radio monitoring for the People’s Army and the Home Army. He hid his two schoolmates from gymnasium – Józef and Marian Frauenglas – and their mother Peppa in his under-tenant apartment under the bed. He helped various people, including Miriam Kohany – his wife-to-be. Ewa Kuryluk, artist and writer, daughter of Karol Kuryluk "At our home there reigned absolute internationalism. My father forbade us to refer to anyone as a Jew, Pole, Chinese. He always taught us that you should say “Mr. Stanisław”. He claimed that it was discourteous to call anyone by his last name. For him, what really mattered was only what kind of person you were. Also the question of "who is a Jew" - to wonder about it was quite improper or, as my father would say, ignoble." The Frauenglas Family "One of them was a philosopher. He was of fragile health, and died before the outbreak of World War II. The other two were two or three classes lower than my father." "When you walked around my father’s room, the neighbors could hear anything. So first he had to make some noise while entering the apartment, so that the neighbors would know that he had come. He would slam the door, make some commotion. Then they could come out from their hiding place under the bed. They could stretch their legs and eat something." Miriam Miriam Kohany came from Bielsko-Biała. After the outbreak of World War II she escaped to Lviv. She survived thanks to the help of Karol Kuryluk. Her family was deported to the east, where they all died in Treblinka extermination camp. It was probably Miriam, crying on the bench after her escape from the ghetto, that Karol found in the winter of 1942 or 1943. "That it was really her I can conclude only on the basis of her attachment to benches. But, to tell you the truth, it could as well be someone else. My father rescued a lot of people, and it could be someone else. My father could not hide my mother at that time - she was then still a stranger to him, a young woman – in a small room where three other people had been already hiding. He had to take her there, as it was already dark, and there was no other place where he could hide her. So he led her there, but very soon he found another hiding place for her." Miriam kept in secret the truth about her past to the very end of her life. She thought that in this way she protected her children. For the rest of her life she was tormented by schizophrenia, the disease aggravated by her war experiences. After the death of both of her parents, Ewa Kuryluk started searching the people rescued by her father. She managed to contact the son of one of the Rescued, namely Edward Frauenglas. "I promised my mother never to talk about it or to look for any traces of the people rescued. So I started my search only after her death. It was 2002 and they both had already been dead. Edek [short for Edward] remembered that before their death, his parents had given him a small box. They asked him to deposit it at Yad Vashem. In this box there was a note describing in detail how they survived thanks to the help of Karol Kuryluk. Our first conversation on phone was very emotional. He called me when I was in Paris and his first words were as follows: "We would not be here if it had not been for your dad."