The Germans murdered a young Jewish couple and the woman who was hiding them, Anna Niepsuj, a mother of eight children

On April 9, 1943, the Germans murdered a young Jewish couple and the woman who was hiding them, Anna Niepsuj, a mother of eight children.

During the German occupation in Klikowa, now part of the city of Tarnów, a tragedy occurred that shocked the local community.

The origins of this crime are connected to Operation Reinhardt, a German operation launched in 1942 aimed at exterminating the Jewish population in the General Government (GG). In Tarnów, the first displacement operations, combined with mass executions, took place in June of that year. However, beforehand, Jews, on German orders, had to register and have their work cards stamped. Survivor Blanka Goldman recalled after the war: "On June 9, 1942, street announcements suddenly appeared about the gradual, planned relocation of Jews to other towns for work. It was noted that stamps were required for this purpose, and that those Jews assigned to work in Tarnów would remain there, while the rest would be resettled." It is estimated that as many as 40,000 Jews may have been living in the city at the time.

Ultimately, approximately 8,000 people were deported from Tarnów to the Bełżec extermination camp in June 1942. Meanwhile, some of those deemed unfit to travel, including the elderly, the sick, and mothers with small children (between 8,000 and 10,000 people), were murdered in the Jewish cemetery and nearby forests. Further deportation operations in the city took place in September and November 1942, and again in September 1943 – historians emphasize that these were extremely brutal.

Aunt from afar

When deportations to the extermination camps began, some Jews decided to seek refuge on the so-called Aryan side. A few tried to survive using false identities. Most tried to hide. Most likely in October 1942, two Jewish refugees from Tarnów found shelter in Klikowa, on the Niepsuj family's farm on Sadowa Street. According to Jan Niepsuj's postwar testimony, their surname was Kurz and they had previously lived on Asnyka Street. They were likely a married couple, around 20 years old. They were hidden in a planked, hay-lined hiding place in the attic of the house. At night, they would go down to the kitchen for food.

Based on available sources, we know that the Niepsuj family owned a two-hectare farm, and Jan Niepsuj was also a railway employee. They had eight children. The family lived in a traditional, tiled wooden house. One part of the building contained a barn and a shed, while the other contained living quarters: a kitchen, a room, and a hallway. Adjacent to it was a barn.

When one day one of the children asked who the young woman who had come to live with them was, Anna Niepsuj replied that she was "some aunt from far away." The lack of sources prevents us from answering a number of questions related to the Kurz family's hiding: what was the daily life like for those hiding and those being hidden? Why did the Niepsuj family provide them with shelter? One of Anna Niepsuj's daughters, Maria, testified in the 1990s that the Jews promised her parents "some compensation." The Niepsuj family must have known that by accepting Jewish refugees, they were violating the laws imposed by representatives of the German Reich. According to German regulations, hiding Jews was punishable by death.

Are there any Jews here?

On April 9, 1943, most likely around 1 or 2 p.m., a car carrying German police officers arrived at the Niepsuj farm. We know that Anna, her six-year-old daughter Maria, and the hidden Jews were in the house at the time. Jan was at work at the time. Some of the siblings were cared for by their grandparents, while the others performed various tasks related to the farm.

Postwar testimonies from Klikowa residents and immediate family members allow for a partial reconstruction of the events that took place that day on the Niepsuj farm. Particularly shocking is the account of Maria, who was at the house. She was about six years old at the time. "They entered the house and asked my mother in Polish if there were any Jews here," she testified half a century later. "My mother replied that there were none. They looked into the room, then into the closet, and went to the attic (...). A moment later, a German came down from the attic, shouting, and demanded tools (...). I remember the German taking an axe and going to the attic. While I was in the house, I heard a clattering noise coming from the attic." The officers found the Jews' hiding place. After bringing them downstairs, they shot them in the hallway. When little Maria heard the shots, she hid under the bed. However, the officers ordered her mother to come outside.

In front of the neighbors

Meanwhile, a group of neighbors gathered around the farm on Sadowa Street and witnessed the events that followed. Among them were children who usually came to the Niepsuj family to play with their peers. Romana Skórka was about ten years old at the time. Years later, she recalled that "Niepsujowa took care of me, fed me, because I had no mother." On April 9, 1943, she saw German officers take Anna out of the house and "order her to show me what she had in the barn. She said there was no one there."

She cried, begging not to be harmed, that she had children." Despite her pleas, she was shot by one of the officers in front of her neighbors. A neighbor of the Niepsuj family, Józefa Kościółek, who was at the crime scene, remembered that "when she said everything would show that there was no one left, he grabbed her and shot her. She fell. I then screamed, 'You killed the mother of so many children.' He then screamed at me, and I ran to the cellar." After some time, little Maria emerged from under the bed. She walked through the hallway, where there were traces of blood, and saw the bodies of the murdered Jews and her mother lying in the yard.

After the operation, the perpetrators ordered the bodies of the murdered to be buried, so Paweł Czwórnóg, then the village head of Klikowa, was summoned to the municipal office. He was reprimanded for not knowing, as the village head, that "Jews were hiding in the community." He was ordered to take charge of the burial of the victims. The bodies of the murdered were wrapped in sheets and then transported by horse-drawn wagon to the local cemetery. There, they were placed, without coffins, in a dug grave. According to postwar witness testimony, the Jewish woman who was shot was in an advanced stage of pregnancy.

Jan Niepsuj likely learned of his wife's murder at work from one of his sons. Witness accounts indicate he was wanted by the Germans. He never returned home and decided to go into hiding. After some time, under a false name, Stefan Kuznia, he was sent to forced labor in the German Reich. The Niepsuj children were separated. Maria was taken to Lviv by her aunt Anna Przybysz, while her older siblings, as she recalled, "went into service on local farms, to strangers." The youngest boy was supposedly cared for by his grandmother. Only after the war was Jan Niepsuj able to return to Klikowa.

Post-war investigation

Decades after the end of World War II, in 1970, the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Kraków initiated an investigation into the shooting of Anna Niepsuj by the Tarnów Gestapo in April 1943. The suspect in her murder was Gestapo officer Jerzy Kastura. In 1948, he was sentenced to death by the District Court in Tarnów for a number of crimes committed during the German occupation, and the sentence was carried out the same year.

A certain Listewnik, likely a Schutzpolizei officer, was also suspected of involvement in the operation. According to witness testimony, he was shot in the summer of 1943. Since both suspects were already dead, the investigation was discontinued. However, it cannot be ruled out that there were more than two officers involved in the crime, possibly three or four. We have witness accounts claiming that Gestapo officer Nowak also participated.

Why did German police officers arrive in Klikowa in early April 1943? Was their action prompted by a tip-off? Zbigniew Stych's book "Klikowa. History of the Village and District of Tarnów" states that the Niepsuj family was "betrayed by an informer." Because the book lacks footnotes, we don't know where the author obtained this information. However, some sources indicate that a civilian was also involved in the Klikowa operation. After arriving, he walked away from the officers' car toward nearby fields and took no further action. Could his role have been to identify the farm? Was he the informer responsible for what happened in early April 1943 on Sadowa Street in Klikowa? The circumstances surrounding the deaths of Anna Niepsuj, the two Jewish fugitives, and their unborn child remain a mystery.Continue reading