Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Polish Home Where Jews Hid Will Be Museum

A private entrepreneur plans to establish a museum in a house in southeastern Poland in which Jews hid from the Nazis.

The house, located on Tatarska Street in Przemysl, hid 13 members of the Diamant family during the Holocaust. Beginning in 1942, the orphaned Catholic sisters Stefania and Helena Podgorski, ages 16 and 9, hid the Diamant family in the attic of their home. Stefania had worked in the Diamant family’s grocery store before the Nazi invasion of Poland.

The Diamants remained in the attic for two-and-a-half years and survived the Holocaust. In 1979, the Podgorski sisters were honored as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.

The 1996 film “Hidden in Silence,” directed by Richard A. Colli, was based on their story.

The house, which is in disrepair and poor condition, was recently purchased by Polish businessman Maciej Piorkowski.

“You can call it a whim, but I wanted this historic building saved from death so I could show its history,”Piorkowski told the Virtual Shtetl portal, according to Polish Radio Rzeszow. “At this stage, I do not have of more specific plans. I would like the facility to be available for visitors, so that they can, for example, watch a movie about the history of the hiding.”

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.