Zofia Trembska, or Lila Flachs, came from a family of wealthy Lviv shopkeepers. After Lviv was occupied by the Germans, they all found themselves in the ghetto. In the great liquidation action of August 1942, in which half of the people then left alive in the Lviv ghetto were sent to Bełżec (50,000), Flachs lost her mother. She was helped by her uncle, Joachim Morgenstern, who, thanks to his American wife, held a Guatemalan passport, which facilitated his contacts with the Aryan side. Among other things, he traded with a Pole, Jan Lewiarz, the manager of a boys' hostel in Lviv. Lewiarz, a peasant by origin and a Greek-Catholic theologian by training, wanted to become a priest and be ordained in the Orthodox Church. However, he had no money to pay the appropriate fees. Therefore, Morgenstern offered Lewiarz financial assistance in exchange for hiding his niece. Two months later, the Orthodox priest, Jan Lewiarz, applied for an assignment to a small parish in the village of Ciechania on the former Slovak-Polish border. He went there with Lila Flachs, who had the real identity card of the priest's sister Zofia Lewiarz, who had died of tuberculosis. They were accompanied by Roman Hawrylak, who came from a well-known family of Ukrainian nationalists, who officially presented himself as the priest's cousin, but in reality was his lover.
Thanks to Hawrylak, the new inhabitants of the vicarage were considered to be Ukrainians. At first, the priest's sister was a little surprised by the mutilation of the Ukrainian language, but Zofia explained that she had grown up far from her family in a big city, where she only spoke Polish. Zofia did not find her way into farm work, but she did learn to bake balls of dough which the priest distributed as Holy Communion.
Zofia's father also hid in the vicarage for some time. They all participated in the local social life. Soon Zofia met Włodzimierz Bajka (or Bojka), the headmaster of a nearby school. The close relationship lasted until Zofia revealed her origins.
When there were difficulties with provisions, the inhabitants of the vicarage made contact with the Germans stationed on the border. They played games together, the priest played the accordion, Zofia danced and the Germans provided food. These contacts continued despite the change of parish to a more prosperous one, in Bartnia. Here, however, the Lewiarz family met with the unkind attention of a Greek-Catholic clergyman, who accused them of spying (implicitly: on behalf of the Soviets). Trembska and Hawrylak were taken into custody, but were bailed out by Lewiarz, probably with the financial participation of their uncle Morgenstern.
In July 1944, Zofia Trembska learnt that her father had died in Warsaw. Shortly afterwards, she quarrelled with the priest and fled from the vicarage to her former fiancé, who hid her in the house of his mother, who was very unhappy about keeping a Jewish girl. Fortunately, her stay in unfriendly surroundings was short-lived, as the Red Army entered the Lemko region and Zofia made her way to Lublin, and from there to Warsaw. After some time, when she had arranged accommodation for herself, she went to Father Lewiarz for bedding; the meeting went very friendly.
In 1956, Zofia, together with her husband and two daughters, left for Israel. Zofia stayed in touch with the priest, who at that time had risen through the ranks of the Church and, probably having been blackmailed into cooperating with the Office of Religious Affairs, remained in contact by letter until the outbreak of the Six-Day War in Israel (1967; in connection with the war, the People's Republic of Poland - which officially supported the Arab side like the entire Eastern Bloc - broke off diplomatic relations with Israel).
Based on an article by Zuzanna Schnepf-Kołacz Na ciechańskiej plebanii. Historia ocalenia Zofii Trembskiej. Studium przypadku (At the Presbytery in Ciechań. The story of the Rescue of Zofia Trembska. A Case Study), Zagłada Żydów (Holocaust) 2010 (see https://zagladazydow.pl/index.php/zz/article/view/722/682, accessed 8.10.2021; here also reproductions of some preserved photographs which remained in the family collection). The author used the following testimonies: submitted in 1961 by Zofia Trembska to Yad Vashem and in 1964 by Jan Lewiarz to the Jewish Historical Institute, as well as the transcript of an interview with Zofia Trembska conducted in 2009 by Kamila Dąbrowska (the Polish Roots in Israel oral history project, in the resources of the POLIN Museum) and the material from her own meeting with her in 2010.
Ewa Małkowska-Bieniek