Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy

At Father Kolbe’s request, a second, non-Christian celebration was put on for the touched and grateful Jewish families on New Year’s Day.

Brother Mansuetus Marczewski had noticed that Father Maximilian had an especially tender love for the Jews. This love was reciprocated. Early in the new year (1940), the Poznan deportees were resettled away from the monastery. Before leaving, the Jewish leaders sought out Father Maximilian. According to Brother Juventyn, a spokesperson (Mrs. Zajac [Zając]) said:

“Tomorrow we leave Niepokalanow. We’ve been treated here with much loving concern. … We’ve always felt someone close to us was sympathetic with us. For the blessing of this all-around kindness, in the name of all the Jews present here, we want to express our warm and sincere thanks to you, Father Maximilian, and to all the Brothers. But words are inadequate for what our hearts desire to say. …”

In a loving gesture to Kolbe and his Franciscans, she concluded by asking that a Mass of thanksgiving be celebrated to thank God for his protection of the Jews and the friary. Another Polish Jew added, “If God permits us to live through this war, we will repay Niepokalanow a hundredfold. And, as for the benevolence shown here to the Jewish refugees from Poznan, we shall never forget it. We will praise it everywhere in the foreign press.”
It is interesting to note that the Jews of Poznań, Poland’s first historic capital, had largely favoured Germany over Poland, the region’s occupying power, when Poland regained its independence after World War I. Father Kolbe continued his support of the Jews until he was arrested again in February 1941, among other reasons, for the extensive and open assistance he gave to Jews at the monastery.
A woman living in the neighborhood of Niepokalanow has also left her testimony of Father Maximilian in this period [i.e., 1940–1941]. She reports how she came to the friary to ask him … whether it was “all right” to give handouts to war-impoverished Jews who were begging at her door. Patiently Father Maximilian Kolbe urged her, she reports, to help the Jews. She quotes the reason he gave her: “We must do it because every man is our brother.” (Ibid., p.104.)
Father Kolbe is nonetheless often vilified in Jewish literature as an avowed anti-Semite. But among the hundreds of testimonials of gratitude for the assistance he generously extended to everyone in Niepokalanów, there are several from the survivors of the Polish Jewish community.⁴¹
Father Kolbe was eventually deported to Auschwitz, where he died on August 14, 1941, by lethal injection, after a prolonged period of starvation. He had volunteered his life for that of a married man who happened to be a Catholic. While imprisoned in Auschwitz Father Kolbe befriended Sigmund Gerson, then a 13-year-old Jewish boy. Sigmund Gerson recalled their relationship many years later. (Treece, A Man for Others, pp.152–53.)
I was from a beautiful home where love was the key word. My parents were well-off and well-educated. But my three beautiful sisters, my mother—an attorney educated at the University of Paris—my father, grandparents—all perished. I am the sole survivor. To be a child from such a wonderful home and then suddenly find oneself utterly alone, as I did at age thirteen, in this hell, Auschwitz, has an effect on one others can hardly comprehend. Many of us youngsters lost hope, especially when the Nazis showed us pictures of what they said was the bombing of New York City. Without hope, there was no chance to survive, and many boys my age ran onto the electric fences. I was always looking for some link with my murdered parents, trying to find a friend of my father’s, a neighbor—someone in that mass of humanity who had known them so I would not feel so alone.

And this is how Kolbe found me wandering around, so to speak, looking for someone to connect with. He was like an angel to me. Like a mother hen, he took me in his arms. He used to wipe away my tears. I believe in God more since that time. Because of the deaths of my parents I had been asking, “Where is God?” and had lost faith. Kolbe gave me that faith back.

He knew I was a Jewish boy. That made no difference. His heart was bigger than persons—that is, whether they were Jewish, Catholic, or whatever. He loved everyone. He dispensed love and nothing but love. For one thing, he gave away so much of his meager rations that to me it was a miracle he could live. Now it is easy to be nice, to be charitable, to be humble, when times are good and peace prevails. For someone to be as Father Kolbe was in that time and place—I can only say the way he was is beyond words.

I am a Jew by my heritage as the son of a Jewish mother, and I am of the Jewish faith and very proud of it. And not only did I love Maximilian Kolbe very, very much in Auschwitz, where he befriended me, but I will love him until the last moments of my life.
Another Jewish survivor, Eddie Gastfriend, confirmed this same impression of Polish priests in Auschwitz, who were targeted by the Germans for particularly brutal and degrading treatment. (Ibid., p.138.)
There were many priests in Auschwitz. They wore no collars, but you knew they were priests by their manner and their attitude, especially toward Jews. They were so gentle, so loving.

Those of us Jews who came into contact with priests, such as Father Kolbe (I didn’t know him personally, but I heard stories about him), felt it was a moving time—a time when a covenant in blood was written between Christians and Jews. …

Both Jews and priests were singled out for particularly brutal and humiliating treatment in concentration camps. (Ibid., p.137.)

Right after my arrival at Auschwitz, a young priest was murdered. His body, in a cassock, was laid out on a wheelbarrow. A mock funeral was staged by the SS men, who forced several priests and a few Jews to sing funeral hymns as they followed another cassock-dressed priest. He wore a hat turned upside down, a straw rope was tied about his neck, and they made him carry a broom as his cross. We were forced to stand there looking at this mockery while the SS men jeered at us hoping to arouse fear, to subjugate us: “Your god and your ruler; that’s us, the SS and the capos and the camp commander. There is no other god!”
To some extent, Catholic priests and Jews were lumped together. The following incidents explain the connection in Nazi minds. Father Józef Kowalski was doomed because he would not step on a rosary crucifix. Father Piotr Dankowski, from Zakopane, was tortured and killed on Good Friday by a kapo who sneered, “Jesus Christ was killed today and you also will perish this day.”