Sepia-toned photograph showing Hilel (Hilary) Chimowicz in a Polish Army uniform, sitting on a black (?) horse that stands perpendicular to the camera. The horse's left hind leg is raised. Hilary looks into the camera, dressed in a uhlan's uniform, with a sabre hanging from the belt. In the background are low light-coloured buildings with small windows: stables, just behind the horse there is a simple low fence. Lower left corner of the photograph missing. The obverse has a white border, the right margin is wider, the edges are straight.
According to the testimony of the donor, Chimowicz's son Andrzej Bolesław, Hilel Hilary Chimowicz (1902-1975) came from a family of merchants and industrialists (manufacturers of haberdashery items), and was the son of Jechiel Hirsz and Bila née Izraelowicz. According to documents preserved at the donor's house, he was educated in mechanical engineering in Belgium, completing various stages of his studies in 1929 and 1931. It is therefore possible that the photograph, with its dedication in 1930, dates from a much earlier period. Before the war he was married to Felicia (née Taflowicz) and had a child - a son named Jechiel Hirsz. Both died in the Holocaust together with Bela Chimowicz - in the death camp to which they had been sent from Częstochowa (while initially, as inhabitants of Łódź, they were detained in Litzmannstadt). Three of Hilel Chimowicz's siblings also perished in the Holocaust: sister Karola with her children (her husband, a Frenchman, was in France at the outbreak of war because he was setting up a textile business there before the war), brother Abram Szmuel with his wife Bela née Kielonowska and 11-year-old son Jechiel Hirsz, and brother Icchak Majer, who had lived in Great Britain before the war, but when the war began, he came to Poland to take his family back from Łódź and vanished without a trace.
Hilel Chimowicz got into the Anders Army, from where, according to the donor's account, he was sent to Poland as an emissary. Captured, he was sent to Treblinka, from where he escaped. In the forests, he came into contact with partisans with whom he sabotaged trains and helped to hide Jewish children in monasteries and with Christian families. Captured and imprisoned in Buchenwald, he survived and returned to Łódź after the war. He was engaged to and eventually married in 1946 the sister of his wife Felicia, Ruta Rudla née Taflowicz (1907-1979, also a widow of a Holocaust victim, childless); they had a son, Andrzej Bolesław, born in 1948. Hilel Chimowicz was a sanitation engineer. In 1957, they emigrated to Israel. It turned out that Felicia's and Ruta Rudla's sister Bela, who had arrived there in 1951 from Germany (where she had been deported from Litzmannstadt during the war), and Hilel's brother Mojżesz Mieczysław Chimowicz (see second photo in the collection) lived there, unbeknowst to Hilel and Ruta Rudla.
compiled by Przemysław Kaniecki
