Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy

Three, four years went buy. To the end of the war. The girl constantly demanded we give her some chores. I laughed—she helped us in all our chores.

After the war, Father Dunajewski went with Rachela to Bialystok [Białystok]. It turned out that the child had spoken the truth. The priest at the notary took out all the documents on the girl. Today I refer to her as Rachela, though we never called her by that name—she had a different first and last name, but I don’t know if she’d want me to reveal it.
Bishop Edward Komar also provided material assistance to Helena Jabłonowska, the owner of an estate near the Pustków labour camp near Dębica, where many Jews were held in addition to Poles and French and Soviet prisoners of war. She in turn supplied food and clothing for the inmates.³⁰⁰
Rev. Dominik Litwiński, the pastor of Ostrowy Tuszowskie near Kolbuszowa, provided false documents to a Jew, thus enabling him to pass as a Pole. (Gutman and Bender, The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations, volume 4: Poland, Part 1, p.394.)
In the summer of 1941, after the Germans occupied the town of Lwow [Lwów], Samuel Blasenstein left Lwow and returned to Tuchow [Tuchów], his hometown, in the Cracow [Kraków] district, where he discovered, to his dismay, that all the Jews had been deported. Not knowing what to do, Blasenstein turned to Genowefa Koziol [Kozioł], a former school friend of his, who, with the help of the local priest [Rev. Dominik Litwiński from Tuchów³⁰¹], provided him with a birth certificate in the name of a Catholic who had passed away. Equipped with this certificate, Blasenstein moved to the village of Dobieslawice [Dobiesławice], in the Kielce district, where no one knew him. After renting a room from a Polish family, Blasenstein found work as a secretary in the village council. Blasenstein stayed in the village until January 1945, when the area was liberated.
Rev. Jan Kuźniar, the pastor of Chmielnik near Rzeszów, provided Jews with false baptismal certificates, food and clothing. He enlisted the help of his sister and housekeeper, Maria Krzywonos, to care for Elżbieta Zwick, a teenaged girl who escaped from the ghetto in Brzozów. She assumed the identity of their niece, Zofia Koźniak, and survived the war in the parish rectory. (Bogner, At the Mercy of Strangers, pp.53–54.)
In their wanderings some of the children encountered caring people who, even though they did not know them, took them in and saved them. This was how Zofia Kozniak [Koźniak] from the town of Brzozow [Brzowów] survived. Zofia was twelve when she was separated from her family during an Aktion and was left on her own. Lacking an alternative, she went to her Polish teacher, who lived in a nearby village, as she knew she liked her and would probably be prepared to help her. The teacher agreed to let her stay for the night. The next day the teacher took the girl to the home of her priest [Rev. Jan Kuźniar³⁰²] and advised her to ask him for shelter. Zofia described to the priest the ordeals she had undergone. The priest’s sister, Mrs. [Maria] Krzywonosowa, who was present, took pity on her and took her to her home. She had three children of her own, but found place for Zofia as well. But the girl longed for her parents and was desperate to know what had become of them. After learning that both her parents had perished, she decided to stay with the family that had taken her in and treated her like a daughter.
In 1940, Rev. Eugeniusz Okoń of Radomyśl nad Sanem, near Stalowa Wola, started up a local committee to assist Jews consisting of nine members of the community, three of them priests: himself, the local pastor Rev. Canon Feliks Chudy, and Rev. Janusz Geneja. Rev. Okoń came to the assistance of a number of Jews deported from nearby villages. In particular, he cared for the elderly Dr. Reich from Rozwadów and his 75-year-old sister, who eventually committed suicide in despair. Rev. Okoń also provided false baptismal certificates and identities to the family of American author Jerzy Kosinski, consisting of Jerzy (then a nine-year old boy), his father Moishe (Mieczysław) Lewinkopf, his mother Elżbieta, and Henryk, an adopted brother. He brought the Lewinkopf family, now the Kosińskis, who hailed from Łódź, from Sandomierz, where they first took refuge, to the village of Dąbrowa Rzeczycka. The Kosińskis survived the war in Dąbrowa Rzeczycka posing as Catholics, living openly among villagers who were aware of their Jewish origin. The villagers were known to help other Jews as well. Rev. Tadeusz Sebastyański, the parish priest of the nearby village of Wola Rzeczycka, was aware of their ruse and assisted the Lewinkopf/Kosiński family in maintaining it. Even though he had never converted, Jerzy was allowed to make his communion and served as an altar boy. Rev. Okoń continued to visit the Lewinkopfs until he too had to hide from the Gestapo. He urged his parishioners not to turn Jews in, as decreed by the Germans under penalty of death. For many years Jerzy Kosinski passed off his scurrilous novel The Painted Bird, which depicted a boy enduring unspeakable mistreatment at the hands of cruel and primitive peasants, as autobiographical. Eventually, the book was exposed as a hoax by Polish investigative journalist Joanna Siedlecka.³⁰³ The true story of Jerzy Kosinsi’s life was revealed to North American audiences by James Park Sloan in his book Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography (New York: Dutton/Penguin, 1996), at pages 27–35.
One night in the fall of 1942, Waclaw [Wacław] Skobel loaded the Lewinkopf family into his cart [in Sandomierz] and drove them across the Vistula … to the smaller town of Radomysl-on-San [Radomyśl nad Sanem]. …