On 26 September 1944, Kazimierz Szkop was guillotined after being sentenced by a German court in Königsberg for helping and hiding two Jews on his mother’s farm.

In 1942, Kazimierz Szkop lived with his mother, Zofia, and six younger siblings in a wooden house in Kolonia Nacpolsk. The Szkops were not a wealthy family. On the night of 11 November 1942, Moszek Kuperman and Josek Lewin, two Jews who had escaped from the Czerwińsk ghetto, asked for shelter on their farm.

Genowefa Domańska (née Szkop), daughter of Zofia, testified years later:

I spent the period of the German occupation in Kolonia Nacpolsk (now called Nacpolsk Nowy) together with my parents and siblings. My father Bolesław died in 1939. After his death, the farm we owned was managed by my mother. In the autumn of 1942 – I can’t give the exact date – two Jews came to our house. I found out one was named Kuperman and the other Lewin. Both were from Wyszogród. They begged my mother and my brother Kazimierz, who was the oldest of the children, to shelter them from persecution by the Nazis. Mother was full of anxiety and fear for her own fate as well as ours, but eventually agreed to take the Jews in. My brother Kazimierz also insisted (1).

At first, Kuperman and Lewin hid in a shed. However, the makeshift shelter was easy to detect, so on the night of 26 November 1942, Kazimierz Szkop suggested that the Jews dig and prepare a bunker together. It was created next to the cowshed, with a hidden entrance. The first construction turned out to be too small, so they proceeded to expand it. Moszek Kuperman testified: Together with Lewin and Szkop we expanded it […]. We supported the walls and ceiling with boards and beams. After the work was completed, we carefully filled in the hole on the side of the yard, and made a special entrance hole inside the barn. […] We made a bunk and a table in the bunker so we could lie down comfortably. We covered ourselves with a quilt when we slept […]. In order for us to be able to illuminate the bunker at least a little, Mrs. Szkop gave us an oil lamp (2). The Szkop family provided food at the bunker. Sometimes Kuperman and Lewin also came to the house, and Kazimierz and his siblings visited them in their hiding place. The Jews often went out at night to get fresh air. They stayed at the farm for a year and a half. For their stay and food, they gave Zofia around 1,800 marks and a few pieces of clothing.

In late January 1944, Moszek Kuperman decided to visit his friends in Wyszogród. However, he was captured by officers of the local gendarmerie while on the road near the village of Mała Wieś. Taken to Gestapo headquarters, he was subjected to a brutal interrogation and revealed the location of his hiding place. On 2 March, Gestapo officers arrested Zofia Szkop and Josek Lewin, who was hiding in the bunker. They also searched the farm. However, they failed to arrest Kazimierz Szkop, who was absent from home at the time. The Gestapo did not apprehend him until 24 March 1944, when they once again came to Kolonia Nacpolsk to gather photographic documentation of the bunker.

In July 1944, the trial of Zofia Szkop and her son Kazimierz took place in Płock. The German prosecutor accused them of hiding and feeding Jews, as well as illegally slaughtering animals, and requested the death penalty for both. The harshest punishment was applied to Kazimierz. In addition, he was fined 5,000 marks, which was changed for 50 days in a prison camp. On 5 August 1944, he was transported from Płock prison to the Investigative Penitentiary in Königsberg. Even there, Kazimierz tried to save his own life; he wrote a request for clemency to the provincial president of East Prussia. Unfortunately, on 12 September, a decision upholding the sentence was delivered. At 3:05 p.m. on 26 September 1944, two officers led Kazimierz to his execution at the prison at 2/4 Berneckerstrasse. He was murdered on a guillotine. His corpse was placed in a previously prepared coffin and handed over to an official from the anatomy institute. The execution protocol states: “From the leading of the condemned to the handing over to the executioner, 3 seconds elapsed, from that moment to the execution of the death penalty – 3 seconds” (3).

Kazimierz Szkop was commemorated by the Pilecki Institute on the anniversary of his death, 26 September 2024, in Nacpolsk (click here for coverage of the ceremony).