Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on August 31, 2014

Greg Dohler/The Gazette

This is the story of two families who were connected 70 years ago and are now reconnected, says Nira Berry of Potomac, with a photo of her mother and grandmother, who were saved from the Holocaust by a sheriff in Poland.

When Nira Berry was a girl, her mother often said Grzegorz Czyzyk was a hero, but it wasnt until she was an adult that Berry understood why.

Czyzyk saved Berrys mother and grandmother from near-certain death in a concentration camp by hiding them on his property for two years during World War II.

This month, Berry, her husband and two children, along with a group of friends and relatives, traveled to Warsaw, Poland, to honor Czyzyk, who was posthumously awarded a Righteous Among the Nations medal for helping save Jews during the war. Czyzyk was one of four Poles who received the medal Aug. 12, given by Jerusalems Yad Vashem Institute.

He who saves a life, saves the world its a famous saying from the Talmud, Berry said. It is on the medal and its true. Without this man I wouldnt be alive and my children wouldnt be alive.

Berrys mother, born Sara Peretz in 1936, was growing up in Chelm in eastern Poland when the Nazis occupied the country. Peretzs father and an uncle tried to escape, thinking that the Nazis planned to kill only Jewish men, not all Jews. When they learned the truth, they tried to return to Chelm. They were shot and killed on the way, Berry said.

Berrys grandmother Bela Peretz was left with her young daughter in an increasingly difficult time.

Before the war, Jews made up about 50 percent of the population of Chelm, Berry said. All the people got along, but when the Nazis came, they started killing the Jews.

In 1940 all the Jews of Chelm were moved to a ghetto and, at one point in 1941 Bela Peretz was jailed for illegal trading in flour.

Read the original here:

Potomac family travels to Poland to honor a hero -- Gazette.Net

Category: Talmud
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