Biography
Alex and Mela Roslan are a Polish couple who hid three Jewish children during the German occupation of Poland. The Roslans were from a small village near Bialystok. After their marriage in 1928, they moved to Bialystok, where Alex worked as a textile merchant. The couple had two children, Jurek and Mary. Most of Alex's customers were Jewish, and his business suffered irreparably when the Jewish population was ghettoized after the German invasion. Wanting to know what was happening to his friends and customers, Roslan got a Jewish friend to smuggle him into the ghetto through a tunnel. There he saw starving children whose parents had been taken to labor camps. When he came home, he and Mela resolved that they must do something to help. They decided to move to Warsaw. There they met a friend from a nearby village who had been a chauffeur for a Jewish family named Gutgelt before the war and was now preparing to help hide the three grandchildren of his former employer. Before the arrangements were completed, however, the chauffeur was arrested and killed. Alex then offered to take in two of the children, later agreeing to take the third as well. The three boys, Jacob, Shalom and David, had been left in the care of their Aunt Janke when their father had fled to Russia in the first weeks of the war, hoping to pave the way for the family to escape to Palestine. Their mother had died before the war. The Roslans brought the children into their home shortly before the Warsaw ghetto revolt in 1943. They treated the children like their own and made every sacrifice for them, including moving apartments to insure their safety. When Jacob and Shalom came down with scarlet fever, Alexander made arrangements to have them smuggled into a hospital. Shalom died during his hospitalization. The following year during the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944, the Roslan's son was killed by a German sniper. After the evacuation of Warsaw in October 1944, Alex and Mela wandered with their charges from place to place for six months until the liberation. The family then moved to Germany in the hopes of being able to emigrate from there to the United States. In Berlin the Roslans discovered that the boys' father had indeed reached Palestine. Since the British would grant Palestine immigration certificates only to the boys, the Roslans had to part company with them in 1947. Alex, Mela and their daughter later immigrated to the US. It was not until 1963 that they saw Jacob again, and not until 1980 that they were reunited with David. The following year Alex and Mela were recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous among the Nations.
[Source: Paldiel, Mordecai. The Path of the Righteous, KTAV, Hoboken, NJ, 1993; Drucker, Malka. Rescuers: Portraits in Moral Courage in the Holocaust, Holmes & Meier, 1992]
