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Wikipedia Commons / xiquinhosilva
The brothers were eventually transferred to the Friedland forced labor camp near Breslau, where prisoners were forced to assemble aircraft wings for the Germans.
Widawski once recalled that when prisoners were asked about their professions, most claimed to be engineers or factory workers in hopes of improving their chances of survival.
He alone told the truth.
“I was convinced that honesty would cost me my life,” he recalled during an interview with Ynet.
Instead, something unexpected happened.
The German manager reportedly shouted: “You are all liars. There is only one honest man here. Give him a double portion of hot food.”
Widawski eventually became an informal leader among the prisoners. When the Germans increased their production quota, he devised a clever system that allowed the prisoners to hide completed aircraft wings and use them to make up for shortages, helping protect the group from punishment.
But survival came at an enormous physical cost.
Wikipedia Commons / M Z Wojalski
“Every day we walked nine kilometers each way,” Widawski recalled. “It was terrible, but we lived with the hope that we would get through it.”
That hope carried him to May 9, 1945, when Soviet forces liberated the camp.
After the war, Widawski returned to Łódź, married Dobrish Wassercug, and began rebuilding his life. Their son Avraham was born in Poland.
In 1950, the family immigrated to Israel and settled in Tel Aviv, where their daughter Leah was born.
But Widawski never forgot the people and places he had left behind.
Nearly three decades later, in 1978, he returned to Poland for the first time since the war. He had gone searching for his grandmother’s grave.
What he found would change the course of the rest of his life.
Jewish cemeteries had been devastated, neglected and forgotten. The communities that had once filled Polish cities with Jewish life had been almost completely destroyed.
Widawski began working to restore what remained.