Leopold & Magdalena Socha

Stefan Wrblewski and his wife

Leopold Socha lived in a poor neighborhood of Lwow and worked as a laborer for
the municipal sanitation department in maintaining the sewage system. When the
Germans occupied Lwow, Socha, horrified by the Germans atrocities against the
Jewish population, befriended Jews who had been interned in the ghetto. After he
decided to rescue at least twenty of them, he co-opted Stefan Wrblewski, a Pole
who worked with him in cleaning out sewage canals, into his plans. One night, as he
worked in the canals during the Aktion in which the ghetto was liquidated, Socha
noticed several Jews wading through the effluent. Socha allayed their fears, stopped
them from heading toward the mouth of the riverwhich was swarming with large
numbers of police and Gestapo agentsand proposed that they stay where they
were so he could assist them. The sewage canals became the Jewish refugees
hideout, and Socha, his wife, and the Wroblewskis met their needs from that day on.
At the beginning, the hiding Jews paid their benefactors, but eventually the money
ran out, and Socha and his wife continued to care for the fugitives and, together with
the Wroblewskis paid for the food out of their own pockets.
Hiding in the sewers was very difficult and both the hiding Jews and their
benefactors faced enormous challenges. Among the Jews was a woman named
Weinberg, who was in the last month of her pregnancy. When conditions in the
hideout caused her baby and her elderly grandmother to die, the rescuers went out
of their way to bury them. Several Jews, unable to endure the harsh living conditions
in the canals, perished after seeking alternative refuge. It was Socha and
Wroblewski who found their bodies and had them buried. Mrs. Socha and Mrs.
Wrblewski provided the fugitives with clothing and, in a complicated operation, did
their shopping. Socha brought the people in hiding newspapers. He also helped
them keep their Jewish traditions: he brought them a prayer book that he had found
in the ghetto area, and for Passover, he provided them with a sack of potatoes. The
Chirowski family went into the sewers with their two children, aged 4 and 7. Keeping
the children busy was not easy, and in her testimony to Yad Vashem, Paulina
Chirowski told them stories and tried to teach her daughter as much as conditions
permitted. They would spend time under the sewer grills, listening to the noises from
the streets. Paulina Chirowski remembered how her little girl was saddened when
she listened from below to the conversation between a girl and her mother, on their
way to church one Sunday morning, as they were buying flowers. All Paulina
Chirowski could do was promise her daughter that one day they too would be free,
and that she would then buy her flowers.
On the day of the German defeat in Stalingrad and on July 27, 1944, when Lwow
was liberated, the rescuers and the survivors celebrated together at the Sochas
home.
After spending thirteen months hiding in the sewage canals, ten of the twenty-one
Jewish refugees in the group survived, including Halina Zipora Wind, the Chirowski
(Chiger) family, and the Margulies family.
After the war Halina Wind, the sole survivor of her family, went back to her
hometown Turka to pull out some mementos from the house she grew up in. She
eventually emigrated to the United States where she married George Preston, who
had survived Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buchenwald. She stayed in close touch with
her rescuers until her death.
Jerzy and Paulina Chirowski settled first in Cracow, but in 1957 left Poland and
emigrated to Israel. In 1978 Pawel Chirowski, who had been 4 years old when he hid
with his family in the Lwow sewers, was killed during his military reserve duty.
On May 23, 1978, Yad Vashem recognized Leopold and Magdalena Socha as
Righteous Among the Nations. On October 26, 1981 Stefan Wrblewski, the other
sewer maintenance worker, and his wife were also recognized as Righteous Among
the Nations.