arrived from Warsaw and murdered the town's entire Jewish community under the command of Hans Hoffmann, Theodor Pilich, and Kurt Kirschner.

The Germans had carried out provocations ahead of the execution by setting fire to the town center and then spreading rumors that the guilty party was the Jews who had no intention of leaving their possessions in the hands of Poles.

The Nazis had used the 1939 register of permanent residents in which the Jews’ precise addresses were recorded in order to gather them outside the town hall and in the courtyard of the middle school.

[2] On 9 or 10 November 1939, Jadwiga Długoborska, her mother and most likely her sister Wanda Wujcik, concealed 10 Jewish tenants in hidden rooms upstairs, for they knew that their home was present on the Germans’ list.

“Cis”, an employee at the German magistracy and member of the Ostrów Mazowiecka District division of the Home Army (code name “Opocznik” [“Flycatcher”]).

The secret police entered the boarding house on the night of 23 June 1944 and arrested Jadwiga Długoborska and her sister Cecylia Pachecka, the mother of adolescent children and widow of Cpt.

The informer's husband and brother-in-law were murdered on the morning of 24 June and the remaining family members were brought to the Gestapo headquarters and released several weeks later.

[1] Długoborska and Pachecka were interned in a prison which the residents of Ostrów called Czerwoniak [Red building] due to the color of its façade.

She went to Dr. Leon Surowski, a member of the Home Army who advised her to give the imprisoned Cecylia Pachecka a hot herbal tea made from tobacco.

"Cyk" shot 10 prisoners in the forest near the village of Guty-Bujno on 29 June 1944, including Jadwiga Długoborska, Cecylia Warchalska (née Kasińska, the wife of middle school professor Kazimierz Warchalski who was murdered in the Majdanek concentration camp for holding classes in secret) and Władysław Nejman, a resident of Ostrów and lessee of the town's pond.

The exhumation of Długoborska's body revealed the injuries that had been dealt: one eye ruined, fingernails missing from both hands, multiple abrasions on the arms and legs, back blackened with blood.

Using his pre-war surname, he left Poland illegally with a group of Jews from the Ihud party and spent several months outside the country, including in Vienna, where he met his brother-in-law Naftal Grabowski, and in Salzburg, where he contacted his cousins Janina and Pola Szwecer.

In order to calm the public opinion, the Security Service (SB) handed the case files over to Tomasz Chaciński, a writer registered as a Secret Associate, who wrote a two-part essay in a 1969 issue of the “Odra” magazine in which he confirmed the official version of events as a random attack.

[7] Neither Polish nor German prosecutors were ever able to pinpoint the identity of Gestapo officer "Cyk", called the "Ostrów executioner" and "the greatest murderer of Poles and Jews".

[1] Only commanders Hans Hoffmann, Theodor Pilich and Kurt Kirschner were brought before the German court in 1964 in connection with the killing of the Ostrów Mazowiecka Jews.

The members of the 91st SS Police Regiment were pronounced not guilty as the court found that they had carried out "an order concerning matters of service" and it was deemed that they had "had no freedom to make their own decisions".

[1] The family of Jadwiga Długoborska was not able to testify before and reveal the truth to the GKBZH for a very long time due to their pre-war associations with the Border Protection Corps, the General Staff, the Polish Armed Forces, the RAF, and later on the killing of Emil Ż. in 1964 and the unexplained fate of the killer which was a subject of interest for the UB/SB.

[7] Of Jadwiga's three sisters: Janina Mika, a secretary in the Warsaw branch of the Border Protection Corps, fled to Bydgoszcz; Seweryna Barbara Bohdanowicz, a telegraph operator at the General Staff in Warsaw (interned in Romania along with the Polish government), remained in Nottingham after the war with her husband Maj. Edward Bohdanowicz, a prisoner of Soviet labor camps, RAF pilot (“Ziemia Mazowiecka” and “Ziemia Wielkopolska” squadrons) and knight of the Order of Virtuti Militari; Wanda Wujcik, the wife of Lt Władysław Wujcik, a prisoner of the II-C Woldenburg POW camp and knight of the War Order of Virtuti Militari, fled to Gdynia.

“Brzostowa”, a doctor of medicine, soldier of the Home Army “Opocznik” division, prisoner in Auschwitz-Birkenau and widow of Lt Maciej Socharski, an RAF pilot who was shot down over the Netherlands by the Germans in 1941, fled UB persecution to Wrocław.

Prosecutor Jan Traczewski attempted to resolve the "Cyk" case at the beginning of the 1970s but he was required to give up the search on account of certain documents delivered to him by the SB.

The murder of Jadwiga Długoborska and the final mass extermination in Ostrów Mazowiecka was only revealed in witness testimony to the Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in the years 1980–1984.

In the end, judge Eugenia Wilkowska-Neffe did not record the reasons for Długoborska's arrest during the questioning of Wanda Wujcik, but she gave the address of the writer and regional researcher Mieczysław Bartniczak in order to “commemorate her sister”.

[4] The GKBZH judge committed a judicial falsification in her justification to discontinue the investigation, shifting the blame for the death of Długoborska and several dozen other residents of Ostrów Mazowiecka from the Gestapo to the German gendarmerie.

The first commemorations of Jadwiga Długoborska occurred on the 70th anniversary of her death on 29 June 2014, in a ceremony that was attended by the mayor of Ostrów Mazowiecka Władysław Krzyżanowski, Joanna Szczepkowska, Iwona and Bronisław Wildstein, Jan Ołdakowski, Angelika and Grzegorz Górny, the director of the Treblinka extermination camp museum Edward Kopówka, Righteous Among the Nations medal recipient Jadwiga Jóźwik from the Sadowne commune, as well as the local community and the victim's family.

[12] In 2017, the son of the survivor Emil Ż. officially addressed Yad Vashem with an appeal to posthumously bestow the title of Righteous Among the Nations on Jadwiga Długoborska.

The fate of Długoborska was the inspiration for the Pilecki Institute Called by Name project, which aims to commemorate Poles who were killed for aiding and rescuing Jews in the places where they lived.