In the fall of 1943, Czesław Brzeziński was 11 years old. He was just returning home from school when he realized that his cottage in the Gutanów village was surrounded by about 20 Germans who came here from Markuszów or Garbów. When the occupiers saw him, they asked the boy about his parents, as no one was at home. When he pointed out that Zuzanna, his mother was staying with the Pierogi neighbors, they caught her, took her to the house and shot his mother there, setting the whole house on fire. She died because she helped a Jew named Wulwa. Before the war, he was a tenant of orchards near Gutanów.
Before her death, the woman was tortured. First, she was asked about where she kept the weapons, and then about hiding the Jew and the neighbors who also helped him. In the meantime, the house was plundered in search of a Jewish fugitive. Then the Germans ordered Czesław to lead them to the attic, to the pigsty and the cowshed – “Everywhere I went first, and only then the Germans followed me, each of them with a pistol, ready to shoot”, recalled the boy.
The Germans did not find anyone in the Brzezińskis’ house. When they realized that their “visit” turned out to be in vain, they first stunned Czesław out of anger, knocking him to the ground, and then fired a few shots in his mother’s chest. “I saw the lungs out” – this is how he remembered this dramatic scene. At the same time, the Germans set fire to the house and they shot inside the cottage from the yard. It was then, in the last seconds of her life, that Zuzanna managed to turn to Czesław, quietly saying, “Son, if you can, run away, because I can’t anymore.”
Czesław, driven by the instinct of life, jumped out of the window among the smoke of a burning house, and hid behind a jasmine bush, then ran to the field boundary and fell there, losing consciousness. Seeing a fleeing child, the Germans fired several shots at him, thinking that they killed him. The bullets pierced his neck under the collarbone, and flew out under his right armpit, damaging the boy’s nerve, but didn’t kill him.
After the departure of the Germans, Czesław was found by the Pierogi family. They moved him to their home and asked his godmother to care about him for several years of upbringing and convalescence.
In fact, Zuzanna did not keep Wulwa a Jew at her place but helped him by offering food. She wasn’t the only one providing support. The entire Gutanów village helped the Jewish fugitives from the ghetto with food, who found shelter in large numbers in the nearby forest of Żary.