CATH NEWS REPORT:
Kostanski was 13 years old when the war started and 19 when it ended - but he felt an old man given the events he witnessed in those six years. He remained haunted.
In 1940, the Nazis concentrated 400,000 Jews into a small area of the Polish capital, which they sealed off. Kostanski, and his mother Wladyslawa, were Catholics and good friends with their Jewish neighbours, the Wierzbickis, but they were suddenly partitioned by the ghetto wall. It ran right through their apartment house, with the Kostanskis on one side and the Wierzbickis on the other.
Instead of obeying Nazi orders to have nothing more to do with Jews, mother and son maintained contact with the Wierzbickis and began smuggling much-needed food and medicine into the impoverished ghetto. Their help soon developed into a larger-scale effort, risking imprisonment and even death.
After the Nazis changed their policy from holding Jews in ghettos to their mass murder, Kostanski and his mother managed to smuggle a few members of the Wierzbicki family out of the ghetto just before the mass deportation of Jews. The Wierzbicki grandparents, who were too old to travel, remained in the ghetto.
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