Born Radomsko, November 22, 1915.
Died Monte Carlo, March 20, 2008, aged 92.
Called the Angel of Radomsko, Jerzy (George) Wuensche was honoured in 1972 as a Righteous Among the Nations at Yad Vashem for saving Polish Jews from the Holocaust.
The only child of the Catholic owner of a bentwood furniture factory with 1,200 employees and worldwide exports, he paid for doctors’ bills and medicines for needy workers. As a student, he also led them on strike.
He took over the factory on his father’s death in 1937. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, he fled to Warsaw and contacted Zosia, his Jewish girlfriend from Radomsko, to join him.
Mixed marriages were highly unusual in Poland but they married in late 1939. Their sons, Janusz (John) and Andrzej (Andrew), were born in Warsaw in 1941 and 1943. The family frequently had to move and change its identity.
Active in the underground, Jerzy placed eight Jews in a flat, bringing them food and paying weekly rent. One day he found two Gestapo officers waiting for him. While one guarded the Jewish captives, the other took Jerzy to a room for questioning.
As he turned to light a cigarette, Jerzy hit him from behind, pushed a wardrobe down on him and dived through the closed first-floor window.
He picked himself up and ran, shouting “Stop thief!”, so that chase would be given by Polish police, who had charge of criminal matters. He was released from the police station at gunpoint by two underground colleagues.
In the commotion the Jews escaped and were hidden in the lift by the block’s caretaker, who locked it, slapped on an “out of order” sign and fed them bread and water for two days until they could be moved to a safer location.
Jerzy intervened at the Hotel Polski, when the Nazis announced that Jews holding visas to foreign countries, mainly Latin America, could emigrate if they paid in hard currency or diamonds on a specified date at the hotel.
Suspecting a trap, Jerzy went in, pretending to be one of the staff. He recognised a woman from his home town, with a baby. He whispered to her to give him the baby for safekeeping. The mother handed him her little girl and he nonchalantly walked out, holding the child.
He and Zosia kept her until finding a safe family for her. She survived and lives with her own family in Israel. All the Jews at the Hotel Polski were shot.
Sent to Britain as a diplomat after the war, Jerzy decided to stay on with his family in 1949. Becoming known as George, he set up and ran a successful hotel in Earl’s Court, West London.
He sold it in the 1980s and retired to Monte Carlo. He is survived by his wife and two sons and their families.
