Jadwiga Długoborska

Jadwiga Długoborska (née Wagner; 27 July 1899 – 29 June 1944) was a Polish teacher, social and charity worker, and member of the underground Polish independence movement during the World War II, persecuted and murdered for lending aid to Jews.

Life Jadwiga Długoborska was born to Aleksander Wagner and Karolina née Leszczyńska. She has graduated from private girls’ school in Siedlce prior to the outbreak of the World War I. In 1919, she married Bolesław Długoborski, an administrator of the estate in Oblęgorek, and started work as a teacher at elementary school in Ostrów Mazowiecka. She became actively involved in charity campaigns including the local Committee for Child Nutrition.

The occupation – aiding Jews The Wagner family had been letting apartments to Polish and Jewish tenants. Both the family home and the boarding house which Długoborska managed, were located just several hundred meters from the prison being run by the German gendarmerie and Gestapo on Jatkowa Street (currently Pocztowa Street).

On 9 or 10 November 1939, Jadwiga Długoborska, her mother and most likely her sister Wanda Wujcik, concealed 10 Jewish tenants in hidden rooms upstairs, for they knew that their home was present on the Germans’ list. Those tenants were the Ryczke, Rekant, Lewartowicz, and Szumowicz families, who survived the day of the extermination and left town the following day, crossing the border into the USSR. They sent a postcard from Białystok that they were still alive. After that first successful attempt to help Jews, Jadwiga Długoborska tried again, hiding a Jewish family with two children in the fall of 1940.

Jadwiga Długoborska was aided by one of her tenants, Ludwik Tomaszewski pseud. “Cis”, an employee at the German magistracy and member of the Ostrów Mazowiecka District division of the Home Army (code name “Opocznik” [“Flycatcher”]). Following a denunciation from a caretaker working at the magistracy, Tomaszewski and 14 Polish clerks were arrested by the Gestapo on 20 March 1943 and taken to Pawiak prison. He died in the mass execution of a group of 280 men in Warsaw. He did not expose Jadwiga during the investigation. A death sentence was carried out on the informer by “Opocznik” Home Army soldiers.

Activity in the Home Army “Opocznik” division and cooperation with the local magistracy Długoborska was actively engaged in the underground independence movement and cooperated closely with the Home Army “Opocznik” division. She gave shelter to Home Army officers, among whom were Władysław Reda pseud. “Jeliński”, Maj. Eugeniusz Mieszkowski pseud. “Ostry”, Maj. Henryk Antoni Pracki pseud. “Rola”, the district's radio officer Lt Edward Nowicki pseud. “Tyczka”, and the commander of the Brok station Lt Henryk Dubois pseud. “Ryszard”.

Due to her maiden name, the occupying authorities proposed on several occasions that she sign the Volksliste, but she refused. She was forced to undergo daily inspections. She had to report to the Gestapo headquarters every day at 6 a.m. and present her boarding house's list of tenants. Many of them were not registered and took advantage of the numerous nooks and crannies in the basements of several interconnected multistory houses up for rent. The Gestapo carried out searches in the boarding house and tormented its tenants with their intrusions.

Długoborska was buried on 13 September 1944 in the first funeral following the Germans' withdrawal, drawing crowds of Ostrów Mazowiecka residents. Her coffin was covered with flowers. She was laid to rest in the parish cemetery, buried in her family grave onto which the inscription "She died a martyr's death" was engraved.

The fate of the "Ostrów executioner" Neither Polish nor German prosecutors were ever able to pinpoint the identity of Gestapo officer "Cyk", called the "Ostrów executioner" and "the greatest murderer of Poles and Jews". His crimes were documented as having been perpetrated by "Cyk" in numerous post-war testimonies from Warsaw and Ludwigsburg. He had deliberately manipulated and erased his own identity during the occupation, using a false surname, profession, and place of birth instead. He had been part of the Polish-speaking German community prior to the war and had a perfect command of both Polish and German. The residents of Ostrów Mazowiecka searched for him after the withdrawal of the German forces from the town. The "Ostrów executioner" had displayed exceptional sadism and personally murdered both adults and children. Długoborska's cousin, Halina Socharska pseud. “Brzostowa”, a doctor of medicine, soldier of the Home Army “Opocznik” division, prisoner in Auschwitz-Birkenau and widow of Lt Maciej Socharski, an RAF pilot who was shot down over the Netherlands by the Germans in 1941, fled UB persecution to Wrocław. Only Cecylia Pachecka, the widow of a Border Guard officer, remained in Ostrów. In 1947, her son Andrzej Pachecka, a medical student and witness to the arrest of Jadwiga Długoborska, was arrested in Wrocław by the UB and sentenced to 7 months in prison because a university colleague had been caught in possession of a weapon.

The identity of the criminal "Cyk" was not revealed during his lifetime. The SB was under the belief that he was someone living in the Polish People's Republic. Prosecutor Jan Traczewski attempted to resolve the "Cyk" case at the beginning of the 1970s but he was required to give up the search on account of certain documents delivered to him by the SB. The murder of Jadwiga Długoborska and the final mass extermination in Ostrów Mazowiecka was only revealed in witness testimony to the Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in the years 1980–1984. In the end, judge Eugenia Wilkowska-Neffe did not record the reasons for Długoborska's arrest during the questioning of Wanda Wujcik, but she gave the address of the writer and regional researcher Mieczysław Bartniczak in order to “commemorate her sister”. This led to the letters between Wanda Wujcik and Mieczysław Bartniczak which aided in the writing of two books on Długoborska's fragmented history: Od Andrzejewa do Pecynki [From Andrzejew to Pecynka] and Ostrów Mazowiecka i okolice [Ostrów Mazowiecka and its environs].

Commemorations Wanda Wujcik tried unsuccessfully to commemorate during the Polish People's Republic. The first commemorations of Jadwiga Długoborska occurred on the 70th anniversary of her death on 29 June 2014, in a ceremony that was attended by the mayor of Ostrów Mazowiecka Władysław Krzyżanowski, Joanna Szczepkowska, Iwona and Bronisław Wildstein, Jan Ołdakowski, Angelika and Grzegorz Górny, the director of the Treblinka extermination camp museum Edward Kopówka, Righteous Among the Nations medal recipient Jadwiga Jóźwik from the Sadowne commune, as well as the local community and the victim's family.

In 2017, the son of the survivor Emil Ż. officially addressed Yad Vashem with an appeal to posthumously bestow the title of Righteous Among the Nations on Jadwiga Długoborska.

The appeal was not presented to the designation commission as the applicant was the son and not the father who had been murdered in 1964. Neither Długoborska's death certificate, signed in 1944 by Emil Ż., nor post-war documentation, nor the prosecutor's records containing the testimony of Emil Ż.’s wife, nor the additional information the son brought forward was taken into account. The fate of Długoborska was the inspiration for the Pilecki Institute Called by Name project, which aims to commemorate Poles who were killed for aiding and rescuing Jews in the places where they lived.