The engineer Stanisław Świda and his wife Regina lived in Warsaw with their children Dominik and Renata. In the summer of 1943 they took in a Jewish child. The couple feared three-year-old Abraham Horowitz might be discovered by the occupying Germans. To explain why he was circumcised, they therefore passed him off as a Muslim Tatar. Stanisław Świda claimed Abraham Horowitz was the son of a Tatar friend. The chairman of the Tatar Committee issued a certificate confirming his allegedly Tatar Muslim origins.
Stanisław Świda obtained permission from the local security police for the boy to stay with the family, telling them the child’s father was a prisoner of war and his mother was dead. He claimed two German soldiers had brought him the child with his address written on a piece of paper.
Stanisław Świda was killed in fighting during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. His wife continued to take care of Abraham Horowitz until the boy’s mother collected him, having survived.
In 2011 the Israeli Holocaust memorial center Yad Vashem honored Stanisław Świda as Righteous Among the Nations.