Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy

We lived through many instances of high drama during those long years of German occupation in Czestochowa.
Tragedy struck the convent of the Sisters of Holy Family of Nazareth in Olsztyn near Częstochowa. The parents of Janeczka Kapral, a young Jewish girl who was sheltered there, were caught by the Germans and betrayed the whereabouts of their daughter and the Polish woman, a school teacher by the name of Kita, who had brought her to the convent. The young girl was seized by the Gestapo and the teacher was also arrested and killed. The nuns dispersed to avoid arrest.⁵⁵³
Maria Miron (née Podbór), who assumed the name of Maria Klimczuk during the war, placed her daughter Danuta (born in 1931), in a convent on Czerniakowska Street in Warsaw and recovered her after the war. It is not clear from her testimony, however, whether that was with the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth or the Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, both of whom had institutions on that street.⁵⁵⁴
The Franciscan Missionary Sisters of Mary sheltered a number of Jewish children in their convents in Zamość and in nearby Łabunie, which was later evacuated to Radecznica,⁵⁵⁵ as well as some adults including Lea Reisner (later Bialowitz), an escapee from the Sobiór extermination camp who was sheltered in Radecznica.⁵⁵⁶ Zygmunt Friedrych’s daughter Elsa, who used the name Elżunia, was sheltered at the orphanage in Zamość,⁵⁵⁷ as were Judith Kachel and Tamara Blass (later Tami Lawame or Lavee, born in December 1939). The following account is found in Gutman and Bender, The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations, volume 4: Poland, Part 1, at page 480.
Blas [Chaja or Hanka Blass, then going by the name of Czarnecka⁵⁵⁸], a Jewish woman, managed to escape from the Zamosc [Zamość] ghetto in the Lublin district, carrying her two-year-old daughter in her arms. She came to the home of a Polish acquaintance, Maria Pawelec, who agreed to take the Jewish child. After someone informed the authorities, German policemen visited Pawelec’s home and, fearing the child’s identity might be discovered, she placed her in a basket, tied a small bag with a cross on it around her neck, and added a note bearing the name Wanda [actually, Maria Wanda] and stating that she had been baptized. Pawelec left the basket at the gate of the local convent, where there was also a home for orphans and foundlings. The nuns took in the baby. The nun, Zofia-Bogumila [Bogumiła] Makowska, who knew the child was Jewish, never revealed her true identity to anyone, and looked after her until the end of the war. When the staff of the Coordination Committee learned the whereabouts of the child, they moved her to a Jewish institution and she later immigrated to Israel.
Sister Zofia (Bogumiła Makowska), who was recognized by Yad Vashem as a Righteous Gentile in 1993, provided the following testimony. (Kurek, Your Life Is Worth Mine, p.161.)
During the war there was a swarm of children at our home. Anyone—policemen, neighbors—who met a child on the street or on the road brought the child to us. We had a house on Zdanowski [Żdanowska] St. in Zamosc [Zamość]. There came a time when even our hallways were overflowing with children. We had a rather large chapel in the old building we used, so finally we converted it to sleeping quarters for the children. We made the chapel so small that we had to hear Mass in the hallway. All this was not enough, and finally we occupied a school on Lukasinski [Łukasińskiego] St. Not being enough to house all the children even there, we began to give them, if possible, to Polish families.

I worked at this school on Lukasinski St. Those were very hard times. I was in charge of the infants and the infirmary. There were three groups of children. I worked day and night. No one was paid. The women who peeled the potatoes got a bowl of soup. We did not get any subsidies for the children.