Szaja Chaskiel Prywes

The heir of a family whose firm was a byword in Warsaw: the fifth generation of an iron dynasty, co-owner of the trading house on Grzybowski Square, husband of Anna, resident of the most modern building in pre-war Warsaw at 7 Złota Street. It is his stone that will be set in the pavement before that house. This account runs across a hundred and twenty years — year by year, document by document. Every fact comes from a source: from the registers of the Warsaw Jewish community, from commercial registers, from the press of 1902–1938, from telephone directories, from court files and from the inscriptions on stones that still stand on Okopowa Street today. Where the sources are silent, this account is silent too.

I. A house of iron — 1825–1903

The story begins around 1825, in the Warsaw of the Congress Kingdom. Abraham Szmulowicz Prywes vel Ajzenman (1799–1855) — the family, of the Levite line HaLevi, used the two surnames interchangeably — founds an iron warehouse that will become the economic backbone of the family for five generations. The business is inherited by his son, Reb Szaja Prywes: it is from his name that the firm will be called „S. Prywes", and the name itself will return twice more in this story. In his time the family became a power: it was the registered owner of four properties right by Grzybowski Square — Graniczna 1 and 3, Grzybowska 1 and 3 — and of two neoclassical tenement houses on the north-western edge of the square, which still stand today as one of the last surviving fragments of Jewish Warsaw. From 1882 the family also owned a copper rolling mill at Głowno-Osiny near Łódź.

And it was there, on 18 April 1900 — as researchers into the works' history have established — that the young French engineer André Citroën arrived with his Warsaw brother-in-law. In the water-powered Prywes rolling mill he saw for the first time wooden gear wheels with double-helical teeth, whose patent he would later buy. The image of those chevron teeth — the double chevron — would become Citroën's trademark. In every car of that make an echo of the Prywes factory still rides today.

On 27 November 1902, a few months before his death, the aged Reb Szaja put his succession in order. The „Kurjer Warszawski" reported in its „Information" column:

In the family genealogical trees, maintained to this day by descendants scattered across the world, the faces of the couple with whom this story begins have survived:

These faces are worth remembering twice over. Reb Szaja and Szejwa are the great-grandparents not only of Szaja Chaskiel but also of Beniamin Horowitz — Mendel and Tojba Sara were siblings, and their sons first cousins. The descendants of Beniamin who will arrive from Israel for the ceremony on 21 August 2026 will therefore be looking in these portraits at their own ancestors.

Reb Szaja died on 20 March 1903, having lived seventy-eight years. His matzevah — „Yeshayahu, son of Avraham Halevi" — still stands in the family plot at the cemetery on Okopowa Street. The firm passed to his sons; at its head stood Luzer Prywes (1852–1924) — soon not only chairman of the board but also vice-president of the Board of the Jewish Community of Warsaw, the governing body of the largest Jewish community in Europe, and a delegate to the structures of the American Joint.

II. Birth — 8 February 1904

In Warsaw, Szaja Chaskiel Prywes was born — son of Mendel, the younger of Luzer's sons, and of Mariem née Gitys. The boy was given the name of the patriarch great-grandfather who had died the year before; his second name, Chaskiel (Ezekiel), distinguished him from the many namesakes in a branching family in which every branch in every generation had its Szaja. He grew up in a manufacturer's home at 18 Wielka Street — a few minutes on foot from Grzybowski Square, where the family had been weighing iron for eighty years.

III. The world of childhood — 1904–1917

The world in which Szaja grew up was a world of expansion. On 10 October 1907 the „Nowa Gazeta" announced that his grandfather and uncle were founding a factory:

By the time Szaja was thirteen, the family name was already a byword in the city — and doubly so. In the street it was said that someone played the leading role „like a nail at the Prywes's". And the satirical weekly „Mucha", having its fictional hotelier Abraham Macher look for a model of a great, world-class business, wrote:

The saying would outlive even the world that created it. In 1947, two years after the Holocaust, the surviving Warsaw Jewish journalist Dawid Flinker published in Buenos Aires the novel „A hojz ojf Gżybow" — „A House on Grzybów". The cover illustrator, wishing to evoke in a single drawing the Jewish Grzybowski Square that no longer existed, put on the corner of a tenement house a shop sign: „Sz. PRYWES".

The parent firm advertised in the best technical press as the exclusive representative of the Sheffield brand Burys & Co. Ltd — steel from England, iron from domestic mills, all at the address Graniczna 3.

IV. Luzer — president of two worlds. 1918–1924

To understand the world in which Szaja grew up, one must pause at his grandfather — for Luzer Prywes was something more than an industrialist. Born in 1852 (birth record no. 667 survives in the registers: son of Szaja and Szejna née Ejzenman), he stood at the head of the family firm from 1902 — and at the same time climbed to the very summit of the capital's Jewish public life: he became vice-president of the Board of the Jewish Community of Warsaw, the governing body of the largest Jewish community in Europe, numbering over three hundred thousand souls. His were the hardest years imaginable: the Great War, hunger, epidemics, waves of refugees, and then reconstruction in a young state. It was then too that he became the community's delegate for cooperation with the American Joint — the organisation which at that time was saving Jewish Europe from starvation. Few in the Warsaw of those days united two worlds as he did: the iron exchange in the morning, the affairs of a community of three hundred thousand souls in the afternoon.

In 1918, on the threshold of independence, a new enterprise arose in the family: the trading house „I. M. (Abr.) Prywes" at 10 Grzybowski Square — founded by Icko-Majer, Luzer's nephew. It was in this firm that Szaja, then fourteen, would one day find his path.

The crowning achievement of Luzer's presidency was the transformation of the family business into a joint-stock company. On 20 December 1921 the „Kurjer Warszawski" printed the founding announcement on its front page: the statutes of „S. Prywes Iron Warehouses in Warsaw, Joint-Stock Co." had been approved by the ministers of industry and trade and of the treasury as early as 28 September 1920, and the first organisational General Meeting of Shareholders had been held on 31 July 1921. The company — as the announcement stated — would carry on „the Iron Trading Warehouse hitherto existing in Warsaw under the firm: Main Iron Warehouse S. Prywes." Luzer became Managing Director — the only one „with the right to sign documents of every kind independently"; the other members of the board signed only jointly. It would be hard to find a clearer picture of the place he held in the firm and in the family.

On 24 March 1924 Luzer died — „after long and grievous suffering, having lived 73 years." The funeral procession set out from the family home at 10 Grzybowski Square, and the pages of „Nasz Przegląd" filled with obituary notices whose very list is a portrait of the deceased: the company board bidding farewell to its president; the health society „Brijus" and the Old People's Home bidding farewell to a benefactor; and the firm's staff — at their own expense, in two separate insertions — bidding farewell to a man:

A firm whose employees pay for their owner's obituaries themselves is a firm of true greatness. A year later, on 19 March 1925, the family unveiled a monument on Okopowa Street — and the stonemason carved on it a title that says everything: „chairman of the Jewish Community in Warsaw." That matzevah still stands in the family plot — and on 21 August 2026 the guests at the ceremony will be able to stand beside it. The company's new board after Luzer's death was a confederation of the whole family: alongside two directors from outside the family sat two sons of Reb Szaja and a son of Luzer — uncles of the then twenty-year-old Szaja Chaskiel. The grandfather left his grandsons more than a firm: he left the example that this name carried obligations to something more than the ledgers.

V. A centenary — 1925–1933

In 1925 the firm celebrated its centenary, and the trade journal „Polski Przemysł Budowlany" printed a jubilee article:

The figures in the article speak for themselves: warehouses at Graniczna 3, 10 Grzybowski Square and 65 Kolejowa Street with its own siding; a hundred wagons of iron in monthly turnover; tools „in an enormous selection" from first-class English factories; customers — „all the building societies and housing cooperatives."

In 1926 Szaja's father and uncle registered their own factory — the Warsaw Steel Tool Factory at 38 Łucka Street, with capital of 110,000 złoty:

In 1929 grandmother Cyrla, Luzer's widow, died. And on 7 October 1933 — Icko-Majer, founder of the trading house. He rests on Okopowa beside his father Abram, in the same family plot. His firm passed to a new generation.

VI. The brothers M. and Sz. — 1934–1935

On 1 January 1934 „Polska Gospodarcza" published a register entry:

For a year the inherited business was managed by the elder brother, Mordechaj. Exactly a year later the succession was completed — the „Monitor Polski" of 30 January 1935 printed two entries at once: the closing of the old register and the birth of the new partnership.

From then on the thirty-one-year-old Szaja Chaskiel was co-owner of the family trading house — the fifth generation behind the same counter at 10 Grzybowski Square, at the address where his grandfather Luzer had lived and died.

VII. „Prima Warszawa". Anna. Złota 7 — 1936–1939

The Yearbook of Polish Industry and Trade describes the brothers' firm in figures that still impress today: capital of 100,000 złoty — and an annual turnover approaching a million. Sheet metal from English to boiler plate, tin, lead; accounts at the Commercial Bank and the General Credit Bank; membership of the Central Union of Merchants. And the firm's telegraphic address was short and immodest: „Prima Warszawa."

Szaja's wife was Anna — a Warsaw schoolteacher, born 1910, daughter of the merchant Hartglas family. In the telephone directories of those years Szaja appears under the number 6-82-06 — the same one the firm gives as its contact telephone: the partner's private line is the enterprise's calling card.

In 1938 the number 6-82-06 began to ring at a new address. Szaja moved — as one of the first tenants — into the newly completed building of the Italian insurance company Assicurazioni Generali at 7 Złota Street, designed by Edward Eber, with the Palladium cinema in the courtyard: the most modern address in pre-war Warsaw.

VIII. War. The ghetto. 6 September 1942

On 1 September 1939 Germany attacked Poland; Warsaw defended itself under bombs until the end of the month. In November 1940 the occupiers closed the walls of the ghetto, packing some four hundred thousand people behind them into a few per cent of the city's area; starvation rations, overcrowding and typhus killed tens of thousands before the deportations even began. The Prywes family found itself within the closed district: Szaja's father, Mendel, last lived at 13 Przejazd Street, his uncle Izaak Majer at 8 Smocza Street.

Szaja's trace in the documents breaks off exactly where his stone will stand. As late as July 1940 — a few months before the ghetto was closed — the official „Journal of Notices of the City of Warsaw", published in German and in Polish, records in its list of residents: „Prywes Szaja-Chaskiel — Złota 7." That is the last pre-war address at which the city administration recorded him — the same threshold into which, on 21 August 2026, a brass stone bearing his name will be set.

On 22 July 1942 the Great Deportation began: for two months, day after day, transports left the Umschlagplatz for the gas chambers of Treblinka — about three hundred thousand people were deported. On 6 September 1942 the Germans ordered the finale: all those still alive were to report to the rectangle of streets around Miła — the so-called cauldron — for the last great selection, for the „numbers for life."

On that very day Mendel Prywes took his own life. He had prepared for death with the same scrupulousness with which the family conducted its business: he had earlier given his nephew, Beniamin Horowitz, money „for his eventual funeral." Beniamin managed to bury his uncle on Okopowa — in the same cemetery where the family's matzevot stand. After the war he testified in court:

No death certificate was drawn up, „owing to the conditions prevailing for the Jewish population under the German occupation."

IX. The last road — 1943

From the closing of the ghetto, Warsaw Jews were forbidden to live beyond its walls; from October 1941 the penalty for doing so was death. Szaja nevertheless lived on the „Aryan" side — as Stanisław, under the Polonised first name he had used in daily life long before the war. In the middle of January 1943 the Germans carried out a wave of great round-ups in Warsaw and on the commuter routes; thousands of those seized went straight to the concentration camp at Majdanek. On the night of 15–16 January 1943 Szaja was taken in a round-up from the Częstochowa–Warsaw express train and imprisoned in Piotrków Trybunalski. Two days later the second deportation action began in the ghetto.

On 9 February 1943 he was deported to the camp at Majdanek. KL Lublin — for that is its official name — was the only great concentration camp of the Third Reich situated in full view of a large city: a concentration camp, a prisoner-of-war camp and an extermination centre with gas chambers all at once; primitive barracks, hunger, roll-calls lasting hours and epidemics killed as surely as the executions did. Some eighty thousand people would die there. For more than three months Anna kept in contact with her husband — she knew where he was. On 21 May 1943, as she established, Szaja was murdered by the camp guards. He was thirty-nine years old. He has no grave; the ashes of the victims of Majdanek lie beneath the dome of the mausoleum on the camp grounds.

X. Anna. A widow's road — 1943–1948

Anna survived on the „Aryan" side — on documents bearing the name Szczepanko, hiding with her mother outside Warsaw; her mother was taken by the Gestapo in 1944. After the war Anna settled in Gdańsk and from there, on 28 April 1947, applied to the Municipal Court in Warsaw for an official declaration of the deaths of her father-in-law and her husband — because after the Holocaust even death had to be proved before a court.

The case was conducted by the barrister Dr Maurycy Karniol. The principal witness was the Polish Radio editor Władysław Pawlak — the name under which Beniamin Horowitz, Mendel's nephew, lived after the war, the same man who had buried him in the ghetto. By a decision of 2 October 1947 the court declared Mendel's death.

XI. A family that endures

Beniamin Horowitz — son of Tojba Sara née Prywes, Mendel's sister — remained in Warsaw after the war as Władysław Pawlak and died here in 1986. His son Abraham, born during the war, was saved as a small child by Stanisław and Regina Świda, recognised by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations. Abraham lived until 2018 in Israel; there live his wife Batia and their children — Nadav, Yuval and Hagit — with their grandchildren. The family remains in close contact with the granddaughter of their Righteous, Małgorzata Gronek.

XII. The stone — 21 August 2026

At 9:00 a.m., in front of the house at 7 Złota Street, twelve Stones of Remembrance for the residents of the houses at Złota 7 and Złota 9 will be set in the pavement — among them the stone of Szaja Chaskiel Prywes. The ceremony will be attended by the great-grandsons of Beniamin Horowitz, come from Israel, and by the granddaughter of the Righteous. At a single stone the descendants of the victims, of the saved and of the rescuers will meet.

Szaja has no grave. He has instead three points on the map of Warsaw: the family plot on Okopowa — with the matzevot of his great-grandfather Reb Szaja and his grandfather Luzer — which survived everything; Grzybowski Square, where for a hundred years the family weighed iron; and the threshold of the house at 7 Złota Street, into which a brass stone bearing his name will be set. From then on everyone who passes along Złota Street will know that Szaja Chaskiel Prywes lived here — heir of a family whose firm was a byword in Warsaw, murdered at Majdanek at the age of thirty-nine.

Timeline

A Note on Sources

This account rests exclusively on sources: the files of the Municipal Court in Warsaw (case VII Zg. 1138/47, State Archive in Warsaw) with Anna Prywes's application, the testimony of Władysław Pawlak and the decisions of 1947–1948, together with the copy of „Obwieszczenia Publiczne" of 25 February 1948 bound into the file; the registers of the Warsaw Jewish community (among others the birth record of Luzer Prywes no. 667/1852; JRI-Poland indexes); the commercial registers of the District Court in Warsaw (1924, 1926, 1934, 1935); the press of 1902–1938: „Kurjer Warszawski" (27 Nov 1902), „Nowa Gazeta" (10 Oct 1907), „Przegląd Techniczny" (1912), „Mucha" (13 May 1917), „Polski Przemysł Budowlany" (1925), „Obwieszczenia Publiczne" (1924, 1926, 1948), „Nasz Przegląd" (obituaries 1924–1936), „Polska Gospodarcza" (1934), „Monitor Polski" (30 Jan 1935); the Yearbooks of Polish Industry and Trade 1936 and 1938; the subscriber directories of the Warsaw telephone network 1935/36–1939/40; the documentation of the Jewish cemetery on Okopowa Street (FDJC database — family plot 47); personnel files (Institute of National Remembrance, Gdańsk); research into the history of the rolling mill at Głowno-Osiny; accounts and letters of the Horowitz family (2024–2026). The historical context of the Warsaw ghetto and KL Lublin follows the findings of the scholarly literature and the memorial museums.

Opracowanie w ramach projektu upamiętnienia mieszkańców kamienicy przy ul. Złotej 7 i 9 w Warszawie — prepared as part of the project commemorating the residents of the house at 7 and 9 Złota Street in Warsaw · www.zlota7-9.com