On 4 December 1942, dramatic events took place in the small villages of Pantalowice and Hadle Szklarskie in the Podkarpacie region. Acting on the basis of Hans Frank’s 1941 decree, which imposed the death penalty for helping Jews, German gendarmes and Gestapo officers murdered nine Poles.

In the German-occupied Polish territories, there was a law in force that provided for the death penalty for helping Jews from 1941 onwards. In no other territories occupied by the Third Reich, except Serbia, was such a drastic measure introduced to discourage people from helping the Jewish population.

In the winter of 1942, the Germans applied an anti-help law, which was a de facto act of lawlessness, during an operation to routinely catch Jewish fugitives from the ghettos. At that time, nine Poles from the villages of Pantalowice and Hadle Szklarskie were killed for helping Jews. How did this happen?

The Germans managed to find, perhaps by traces in the snow, the forest dugout where the Jewish woman Małka Schönfeld was hiding. When she was captured, they promised to spare her life on condition that she revealed the names of the Poles who had helped her. When the gendarmes got the necessary information, they set off for the Polish farms. The action was commanded by the commander of the German gendarmerie from Łańcut, Anton Hachmann.

The first target of German repression was the Kuszka family in Pantalowice. After their arrest and the looting of their possessions, the Germans shifted their attention to the house of Władysław Dec, where Małka recognised in a photograph his brothers, also involved in helping Jews. Forced to leave the house without his shoes, which one of the gendarmes had taken, Władysław was arrested.

The Germans then headed to the Lewandowskis’ house, where, after looting, they executed the six Poles by shooting them in the head. The next stage of this brutal action was a visit to the forester’s lodge in Hadle Szklarskie, where Józef Dec lived with his sons: Stanisław, Bronisław and Tadeusz. All three were mercilessly murdered on the threshold of their own home.

As a tribute to the heroic attitudes of the above-mentioned Poles, in January 2010, the Polish President Lech Kaczyński posthumously awarded the Dec brothers the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Rebirth of Poland.