That family was called Kowalski, a common surname in Poland.

That family was called Kowalski, a common surname in Poland.

In late 1942, in the midst of ghettos liquidation in occupied Poland, and deportation of their residents to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibór and Treblinka extermination centers, as well as to a number of concentration camps, the Germans wanted to make sure that their legislation in the matter was obeyed and the Polish population did not stand in the way of the Holocaust. 

Early in the morning on 6 December, 20-odd gendarmes arrived in a Polish village of Stary Ciepielów in the Kielce region. 

They’d been tipped off about Jews sheltered by a few local families, and the legislation introduced by the General Government authorities was clear: aiding the Jews was illegal. The offenders would be punished.

The Germans split up and surrounded the houses of Jan Kowalski, Piotr Obuchowicz and Władysław Kosior. In the last one, they indeed found two Jews; in the others, they came across cleverly disguised shelters, plus traces of people hiding in them. 

As the evidence was there, the guilt was beyond doubt; what's more, the crime had clearly been intentional. Nothing happened for a few hours, and only in the early afternoon were the decisions made. 

The Kosior family – parents and six children aged 6 to 18, as well as both Jews apprehended there, were taken to the barn and shot. The building was set on fire. One of the teenage boys, only wounded, sprang out of the flames, but was caught and thrown back in alive.

After that, it became a procedure. They rounded up the other two families in one of the houses and shot them too. 

The five Kowalski children were aged 1 to 16, the four Obuchowicz kids 7 months to 6 years old. And again: gasoline was poured over the bodies (some of them not quite dead yet) and walls, a match was lit. Same result: inferno. One of the girls ran out of the building but collapsed under a hail of bullets. They threw her body into the fire. 

On that day in nearby Rekówka, similar scenes took place, and two more families, including six children, were shot and burned. Over the next five weeks, other villages in the area saw more executions which claimed dozens of lives.

Death for aiding Jews, a common fate in German-occupied Poland.