Moszek Widelec (1908-1941), son of Icek Ajzek and his wife Chawa (Paluch), was one of the two Jewish blacksmiths in the village of Poręba Kocęby (between Ostrow Mazowiecka and Wyszków) prior to WWII. Moszek had proudly served in the Polish Army and was well known as a baker of matzoh (for Passover), which was delivered by horse cart to Warsaw.
Although he continued to work as a blacksmith during the German occupation (following the invasion of the Soviet controlled part of Poland on 22 June 1941), he was prohibited from owning his own horse. Nonetheless, Moszek arranged to deliver food to the nearby Jadów Ghetto by hiring a Polish driver. The driver’s brother, Czesław Szymański, had apprenticed with Moszek in the years leading up to the war. According to Szymański, on one such trip, Moszek and his driver were stopped by a German soldier who demanded to see his papers. Upon returning to the village, the driver told the people in the small marketplace that the soldier took offense to something that Moszek had said. He told the driver to “move on” and then shot Moszek. Szymański claimed that after Moszek’s death his widow Chawa gave him Moszek’s tools.
Prior to his first visit to Poland in October 1995, Stanley Diamond of Montreal, co-founder of the historical/genealogy database JRI-Poland (see https://www.jri-poland.org/), arranged to index the Ostrów Mazowiecka Yizkor Book Necrology which included the entry “Widelec, Szmid, Poręba.” Remembering that some members of his grandmother’s Widelec family lived in Poręba Kocęby, Diamond visited the village, where they were introduced to the blacksmith Czesław Szymański. Szymański told them the story of his mentor Moszek, how he had died at the hands of a German soldier and showed them Moszek’s tools. On one of his frequent later trips to Poland, Diamond visited Szymański again, and this time, Diamond was able to tell Szymański that he had learned that Moszek was his father’s first cousin. Szymański handed Diamond Moszek’s large blacksmith tongs.
In 2008, at a meeting in Warsaw, Jerzy Halberstadt, the first director of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, offered to accept the tongs for the museum’s collection. The story of the tongs suggests a neighborly relationship between Christians and Jews in this town prior to the Holocaust.
