Future picture of Shami to be put here.
Shamai was son of Yitschak and Sara (Rotstein) Kudlowicz and lived in Ostrowiec.
Among his siblings were:
Rachel (who married Yeshayahu Brandmesser)
Henia, Akiva Yaacov and Arie Leibush.
During the Nazi occupation of Ostrowiec, Yitschak his father was among the 36 murdered on April 28, 1942 (11 Iyar) .
He was saved during the war by Henryk Małkiewicz . Read the story here.
Post War
After the Holocaust, Shamai built in the Ostrowiec Cemetery a monument to "replace" the destroyed Matzeva of his father .Unfortunately even that one can't be found in the Ostrowiec cemetery today.- a picture of the monument he made is on the right.
Shamai moved to Israel and later to Brazil.
His poem "Letter to my Sister" in Yiddish that was published in the Ostrowiec Yizkor Book 1971 can be seen here.
In 1985 he wrote to Yad Vashem with a testimony about how Henryk saved him and other Jews. His testimony on his hiding can be read below:
Holocaust Testimony of Shamai:
Bless G-d
Rio, Brazil - July 19, 1985
Friday eve [before Shabbat]
Week of the Torah reading “Matos-Massei” [discussion of laws governing vows, etc., Book of Numbers], Hebrew date – year, 5745
Mr. Parv [?] from the institution Yad Vashem, Jerusalem
In response to your letter of June 7, may I say the following:
My name is as you wrote: Szamai [Shamai] Kudlowicz. And his name, for which he can be noted for his actions in those times as one of those “righteous among nations [gentiles]” is, in Polish, Henio Malkiewicz. My date of birth, according to the documents, is March 10, 1918, and his date of birth is unknown to me. He is younger than me.
My address is – Szamai Kudlowicz, Rio de Janiero, Rua Edmondo Lins 38, apt 701.
My business – pensionist [retiree].
I lived during the time of the war – Ostrowicz Kiel, Przechodnia 1, Poland.
During the time of the war until the evacuation, I was also at that address. With a family and married, thank God, with three children.
This Mr. Malkiewicz we already knew as young children, his father was an employee of my father, may his blood be avenged. He had a rented water mill 15 kilometers outside of the city Ostrowiec.
Soon after the first evacuation, we were in the ghetto, I made contact with him and he began to take an interest in me. Still being under the influence of his young years, I would tell him stories from the Chumash [books of Bible], and so on, beginning with Cain and Abel, the binding of Isaac, the sale of Joseph, the exodus from Egypt, and other events of Jewish history. Then he began to take an interest in my sister, who now lives in Tel Aviv on Sharet Street 29, and with time, he became involved, and joined our fate, and also with others of our friends, for example,
Yocheved Shif, may she live and be well, now lives with her husband Naftali, may he live a long life, and family, in Tel Aviv, and her brother Naftali Alter, may he live long, also lives in Tel Aviv with his family, and there are others who were hiding in the forests. There was a certain woman by the maiden name Wurtzman, and a friend of hers by the name of Szwartzman who today lives in Canada. It is difficult to describe his self-sacrifice, how day and night he was involved and joined in our fate.
As a young Polish patriot, he belonged to the underground movement A.K. [Armia Krajowa; dominant resistance movement in German occupied Poland]. Using his position, he got ammunition from there for us, to make our situation better, with the result that we were able to save ourselves but without using the weapons, and now each of us has a family. The conditions during that time were of all kinds, some time was spent in bunkers, some time in forests, it’s difficult to describe it all in this format of a letter. But “he” was really with us almost the entire time.
We had practically no money issues with this Mr. Malkiewicz – not us from him nor him from us.
The motives that pulled him to this, according to what I think, was that “he” started with a friendship towards me, and with time, he was pulled in with more efforts, heroism, thinking that he would be the only one who would have done things like that.
The big thing with Malkiewicz was with his life, because he was interested in creating new places, taking care of the food, arranging it for us, if we were not together.
My sister and I knew his family well even before the war, as I mentioned above.
(Underground movement) The relationship between us during the time of hiding was friendly, and after the war, we worked together [? one word] until March 20th, in 1950, when I left, and the relationship was a good one.
Of those Jews who fled the labor camps and the forests, almost all of them knew Malkiewicz, and anyone who met him at that time, “he,” with a good word and with everything possible to lighten the bad conditions at that time without any personal interest, he would do that.
In a characteristic, praiseworthy [?] incident that one of us had to collect money and a few things for a non-Jewish woman, and this woman did not have the good intention of giving back, this Malkiewicz agreed came along and presented himself as a representative of the Polish partisans 1 and then got everything back, without any interest.
After leaving Poland, contact was not particularly close, because every person lives with his own problems.
There is a disposition [possibility] of further explanations.
Signed,
Szamai Shimshon Kudlowicz
1 – He made the visit to the non-Jewish woman with a machine gun in hand. [personally witnessed]
