Jan and Anna Puchalski

Jan and Anna Puchalski were the Polish husband and wife who lived in the village of Łosośna in north-eastern Poland on the outskirts of Grodno (now 20 km into Belarus) during the Nazi German occupation of Poland. Together, they rescued Polish Jews from the Holocaust, including escapees from the ghetto in Grodno before its brutal liquidation. Puchalskis were posthumously bestowed the titles of Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in June 1986. Their medals of honor were presented to their surviving daughters at a ceremony in Jerusalem on June 14, 1987, during which Irena Puchalski-Bagiński, Zdzisław, son of Sabina Puchalski-Kazimierczyk, Władysław Puchalski and Krystyna Puchalski-Maciejewski planted a tree in the Garden of the Righteous at Yad Vashem.

At the onset of World War II, Jan Puchalski worked at a tobacco company, where he earned a small salary. The Puchalskis resided as innkeepers in a summer cottage, in the Łosośna forest. The cottage was owned by an entrepreneurial Zandman family who leased similar cottages to city tourists before the war, with Grodno’s reputation as a retreat, confirmed by its century-old summer palace of the Polish kings. Puchalskis were very poor, having to support five children: 15-, 16-, and 17-year-old daughters and two toddlers (Władysław and Wanda) age 1 and 2. On the evening of the Nazi German murderous raid on Grodno Ghetto which took place on February 13, 1943, six Jews who escaped, showed up at Puchalskis door. Among them, much-loved Felix Zandman of the Zandman family (age 15) who used to play with their children before the war, Sender Freydowicz (his uncle) who lost his wife and two children to the Nazis, Mottel Bass and his wife Goldie, and two more Jewish fugitives. They stayed with the Puchalskis for 17 months. Meanwhile, the ghetto in Grodno was razed by the Germans with all of its 29,000 Jews deported in Holocaust trains, and exterminated in gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka.

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