Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy

The above statements are based on the testimonies of the following Sisters:

1. S. Adelajda Tomasiak—Kołomyja

2. S. Adolfa Szczerbowska—Baworów, Brzeżany, Tarnopol

3. S. Aniceta Wierzbicka—Brzeżany, Siedlce

4. S. Anzelma Krupa—Skarżysko, Wołomin, Życzyn

5. S. Apolonia Leśniak—Bochnia, Kołomyja

6. S. Balbina Bielańska—Bochnia

7. S. Bernadetta Wołk—Przemyśl

8. S. Blandyna Tkaczyk—Kraków (Mother House)

9. S. Bonawentura Chrobak—Sulejów

10. S. Cypriana Mrzygłód—Drohobycz

11. S. Efrema Lis—Lwów-Zamarstynów

12. S. Emanuela Minko—Częstochowa, Mników, Siedlce, Wołomin (orphanage)

13. S. Emeryka Gaca—Tarnów (nursery)

14. S. Eleonora Janik—Przemyśl, Tarnopol

15. S. Eufrazja Wiatrowicz—Wołomin (orphanage)

16. S. Eugenia Gajewska—Brzeżany, Busko-Zdrój

17. S. Eulalia Dzidek—Siedlce, Skarżysko

18. S. Ewencja Panasiuk—Rząska

19. S. Ferdynanda Grzenkowicz—Kołomyja

20. S. Fortunata Kołodziej—Rząska

21. S. Helena Wilkołek—Kraków-Prądnik Czerwony

22. S. Hermana Bąk—Kraków (nursery)

23. S. Hugona Klimpel—Częstochowa

24. S. Ignacja Pluta—Kraków (Krakowska Street)

25. S. Józefina Latka—Śniatyń

26. S. Kaliksta Góźdź—Kielce

27. S. Katarzyna Bikowska—Drohobycz

28. S. Leokadia Sowińska—Mników

29. S. Lidwina Święs—Tarnów

30. S. Longina Konieczna—Tarnopol

31. S. Łucjana Stano—Bochnia

32. S. Magdalena Kaczmarczyk—Częstochowa

33. S. Marcelina Wędzicha—Bochnia

34. S. Maria Kotas—Baworów

35. S. Maurycja Wohnout—Brzeżany, Tarnopol

36. S. Modesta Wierzchowska—Mników

37. S. Pankracja Solarz—Opoczno

38. S. Paulina Adamczyk—Wołomin (orphanage), Siedlce

39. S. Rafaela Kupczyk—Stanisławów

40. S. Scholastyka Bogacz—Częstochowa

41. S. Serwacja Dobrotowska—Sambor

42. S. Seweryna Domaradzka—Kraków (Krakowska Street), Tarnów (Shelter for the Poor)

43. S. Stanisława Kluz—Kraków (Nursery), Tarnów (Nursery), Lwów

44. S. Suplicja Kogutowicz—Skarżysko, Kraków (educational institution)

45. S. Sykstusa Kardyś—Busko-Zdrój, Śniatyń

46. S. Taida Balanda—Drohobycz

47. S. Teresa Wilhelm—Drohobycz

48. S. Urbana Kondeja—Kraków (Krakowska Street)

49. S. Wita Pawłowska—Częstochowa

50. S. Waleriana Żuchowska—Rawa Ruska
After being separated from his mother, Zygmunt Weinreb found refuge in a shelter run by the Albertine Brothers on Krakowska Street in Kraków. The Thiel family too him under their care and he survived the war.⁵⁸⁵ (Thiel Family, The Righteous Database, Yad Vashem, Internet: .)

Zygmunt Weinreb was born in Poland in 1935. He grew up on Kraków, in a mixed Jewish-Christian neighborhood. When the war began, his father left the family and tried to escape. He was never seen again. Zygmunt’s mother managed to obtain false identification papers for herself and her young son. For a brief period of time, the Weinrebs stayed with the Puchala [Puchała] family in Niepolomice [Niepołomice] Wielickie. One day, Zygmunt’s mother went to Kraków to retrieve some property, and did not return. Józef Puchala brought back the news that she had probably been captured carrying false papers and sent to a concentration camp. Now nine-year-old Zygmunt was left without “Aryan” documents, because he had been registered on his mother’s papers.

Zygmunt left the Puchalas’ home and roamed the streets alone. He met someone who advised him to go to the nearby monastery, where many Polish refugees of war were sheltered. There, the young boy met Jan and Olga Thiels, teachers at the monastery who supported him and tried to dispel the arising suspicions of his origins. When they found an apartment outside the monastery, the Thiels took Zygmunt with them, along with a friend of his, a Polish boy aged six. They sent the children to school and cared for all of their needs until liberation. After the war, the Thiels gave Zygmunt over to the Jewish community. In 1950, he moved to Israel, where he took the name Yizhar Alon and built a new life for himself, including a family of his own.
Zygmunt Weinreb’s testimony was recorded shortly after the war. (Hochberg-Mariańska and Grüss, The Children Accuse, p.114.)
I stayed at the Albertine Brothers and Mrs [Olga] Thiel, the teacher, guessed that I was Jewish, and the Brother Superior did too, and they helped me a lot. They did not say anything to me, but the Brother told me to bathe in bathing trunks like the older boys, and the teacher got angry whenever anyone called me a Jew and secretly taught me things so that no one would be able to tell I was Jewish. But then everyone began whispering about me, so the teacher took me home with her and put me in a school where the headmaster, Mr Chrzan, knew that I was Jewish and helped me a lot. …

When the Russians arrived the Brother Superior read in the newspaper that there was a Jewish Committee, and he told me to go to Długa Street to find out if my father had registered there.
Not all Jewish children returned to their families and faith after the war. Some decided to remain with their new families and faith. The following account is related in Zosia Goldberg, as told to Hilton Obenzinger, Running Through Fire: How I Survived the Holocaust (San Francisco: Mercury House, 2004), at pages 36–37.
On my mother’s side of the family there were cousins. My mother’s mother’s sister was Telca Trauman and she had two children, Lutek and Franka. Her son Lutek was married to Hela … Lutek and Hela went through the wall [of the Warsaw ghetto] to live in the Aryan section. They took their daughter Hanka and lived with his mother Telca. His sister Franka also lived there, and brought her daughter Bronia.

Telca made believe she was deaf and mute in order to hide her Jewish accent. She had blue eyes, a good face. … And they got through the war this way to die natural deaths. Bronia’s father, Adolf, was taken away one day near the Umschlaglplatz and killed, but Franka and her mother, Telca, were able to get some kind of papers and hide in the apartment in the Aryan section. Lutek Trauman was stopped one day, the Germans pulled his pants down, and when they saw that he was circumcised, they killed him on the spot.

Soon after they got to the Aryan side Bronia was put in a Catholic convent. She was five years old, and she was told by a priest, “You are a Jewish girl, but now you are a Christian, and never say anything. After the war you can be Jewish again.” But Bronia after the war did not want to be Jewish anymore and she remained Catholic. After all the suffering, her mother, Franka, was driven out of her mind because her daughter remained a Christian. Bronia is still in Poland, while Hela and her daughter Hanka moved to Israel.
Jews in concentration and slave labour camps encountered members of the Polish clergy and many other Polish prosoners who were willing to extend a hand to their fellow prisoners when the opportunity arose. Dr. E. Szor, an inmate of Auschwitz, confirmed the helpfulness of fellow prisoner, Jan Kledzik, who was a hospital attendant at that camp: “He displayed a father’s devotion to his fellow sufferers, irrespective of race and nationality.” Jan Kledzik, in turn, acknowledged the helpfulness of other Poles who collaborated with him. (Bartoszewski and Lewin, Righteous Among Nations, pp.478–79.)
As a former inmate of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, I wish to state how Poles saved and helped the Jews in the camp. Jews were hidden in hospitals; food that other prisoners received in parcels were shared with them. This was how the people working with me in the hospital gave help. They were: Andrzej Białecki, Stach Bukowski, Tadeusz Radomski, Marian Czerwiński, Bogdan Kolasiński. And in this way, thanks to our help, the following people regained their liberty: Doctors Knocht, Szor, Gabej, August, Dizerej, and Fastman [Ludwik Fastmann], the pharmacist Gotlieb, Zukier, Zieliński. The last two had already been selected for the gas chamber and, thanks, to Zygmunt, the Schreiber [clerk], they were taken from the hospital to the workers’ camp. They all survived. When I was in the workers’ lager before I started to work in the hospital, Father [Wawrzyniec] Wnuk from Gniezno and I saved Jews, who were so exhausted during roll call, that they collapsed and lay in the mud. Their co-religionists could not save them since they were afraid of the Nazis, but we Poles carried them on our shoulders to the block. There the Poles washed and fed them.
Rev. Wnuk was imprisoned in Auschwitz from August 1943 until June 1944, when he was transferred to Buchenwald, and then to Dachau.
Michel (Mendel) Mielnicki, a young Jew from Wasilków near Białystok, described the kindness of a Polish priest he encountered in the slave labour camp at Mittelbau-Dora near Weimar in his memoir Bialystok to Birkenau: The Holocaust Journey of Michel Mielnicki, as told to John Munro (Vancouver: Ronsdale Press and Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, 2000), at pages 202–203.
Well, very early one morning, I was awakened when my head hit the wooden sleeping shelf beneath it with a thud. I knew instantly what had happened. I was out of my bunk and onto the back of a prisoner who’d stolen my bread in a second. But not fast enough to stop him from stuffing my bread into his mouth. Possessed of a strength that in retrospect still surprises me, I quickly had him down on the floor with my hands locked on his throat, when the Polish priest, who was our Blockältester [block elder], came out of his room to see who was making all the racket.

I can’t say whether it was my intention to strangle the thief or just to stop him from swallowing my bread (and thus my ability to stay alive). Whatever the case, I was on the brink of choking the final breath out of the man, when this priest, who was tall, and heavy enough to have pulled me away with one hand, instead said, “So what will you accomplish if you kill him? He’s already eaten most of your bread, and you’ll be hanged tomorrow. Remember your Ten Commandments. Let him go, and I’ll tend to his punishment.” So I let the son of a bitch go. At which point the big priest added, “God will help you.” In Hebrew! Somehow, he had known from the outset that I was a Jew. I don’t recall that in my subsequent dealings with him, which, given his position, were considerable, he ever so much as alluded to this again. And I couldn’t be more grateful to this Christian man of the cloth if I tried. In his own way, he too saved my life.
Similar accounts attest to the selfless sacrifice of Polish priests and nuns imprisoned in other Nazi German concentration camps. Rev. Michał Piaszczyński, who maintained friendly relations with Jews in his native Łomża before the war, and even invited rabbis to the seminary where he taught, shared his meagre food ration with other prisoners of Sachsenhausen (Oranienburg), where he died of malnutrition and disease in December 1940. When a Jew in his block was denied his food ration one day, Rev. Piaszczyński gave his over to the Jew (a lawyer from Warsaw by the name of Kott); the latter turned to Rev. Piaszczyński with tears in his eyes and said: “You Catholics believe that in your churches there is a living Christ in your bread. I believe that in this bread there is a living Christ who told you to share it with me.”⁵⁸⁶
An inmate of Dachau, where “altruism is almost completely unknown,” records how Rev. Jan Tymiński of the diocese of Łomża volunteered to be transferred to one of the blocks that was ridden with the typhus epidemic in order to help his fellow prisoners who were less fortunate than he was: “He hops from one bunk to another, blesses the dying, no matter of what nationality or faith they are, consoles those who are still conscious.”⁵⁸⁷ Rev. Tadeusz Gaik, who was also interned in Dachau, struck up a deep friendship with a Jew by the name of Dawid Jakubowski from his hometown of Bochnia, and provided him with food and a sweater.⁵⁸⁸ Miroslav Grunwald, a Jewish prisoner of Dachau from Croatia, confirms the kindness of Polish prisoners, including priests. (Miroslav Grunwald’s Memories, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Internet: .)
The first impression at the entrance was misleading: there was a sign “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work Will Set You Free”) so I was determined to work very hard so as to get free as soon as possible. An hour later we learned that the reality of the camp was different. The sign meant that our possible freedom depended, first of all, on a German victory (occupying the entire Soviet Union, as well as the British Isles). We were also warned that this was not a hotel or home for convalescence; that we were really convicts.

After that speech, we were ordered to undress completely (it was thirty below zero!). In this fatal five minutes, many people just fell down and were taken to the crematoria. I managed to get away with just contracting pneumonia and a high fever. A Polish doctor (an older prisoner) saved my life in a miraculous way. We were first brought into a barricade for disinfection. This action deserves a description in detail. First came a prisoner (with a black triangle for anti-socials) to trim our hair. That was not so bad, but then he shaved all hairs from our body with an old-fashioned razor, without soap or cream, and fast, injuring almost everybody's face. Then came another prisoner with a pail of carbolic acid and with a hard barn brush, swept our bodies. An enormous burning sensation left us really suffering. Then we went into the showers: first boiling hot water, then ice cold showers!

All of us that survived the bath with a suspiciously burnt skin went to another lineup for a medical examination. An SS man presided and two Polish doctors (prisoners) examined us and proclaimed us fit for instant labor or for a couple of days “rest”.

As soon as it was my turn, I was the first to establish a third line and this third group got an instant treatment. There was a pile of paper cement bags in which tar glued together several layers of paper. The layers were separated and our bodies were covered with sticky tar paper. This was supposed to reduce the skin inflammation and reduce the body temperature.

I was warned by one of the doctors that I still had to come every Saturday to remove the tar paper and take a bath, but he whispered to me that the healing process would occur only if I could manage not to remove the tar paper for several months.

This meant I had to hide every Saturday and not go to the bathhouse with the others. This would be a punishable offense if I were caught. I managed not to get caught all through the winter months of 1943-44; always being in mortal fear of being found behind the barracks.

However, God helped me two-fold during this time. First, by my hiding undiscovered and, secondly, by allowing me to return to my barrack at noon with some foodstuff in my pockets, as I usually hid where it was most dangerous; behind the barrack of Polish priests who managed to give me some dry food through the back window.
Rev. Witold Kiedrowski, from the Chełmno diocese, who was imprisoned in Majdanek, witnessed how Rev. Julian Chruścicki (Chróścicki), a priest from the Warsaw suburb of Włochy who had been arrested for helping Jews, joined with a rabbi in reciting psalms from the breviary he had managed to smuggle into the camp. In his capacity as pharmacist, Rev. Kiedrowski visited sickrooms in the camps in which he was interned, namely, Majdanek, Birkenau and Ohdruf, bringing both medical and spiritual assistance to prisoners of all nationalities, including Jews, for whom he would recite psalms. During the massacre of Jewish prisoners in Majdanek on November 3, 1943, Rev. Kiedrowski was badly beaten for trying to protect a Jewish boy.⁵⁸⁹ Sister Julia (Stanisława) Rodzińska, a Dominican nun from Wilno who was arrested in July 1943 and imprisoned in Stutthof, died there in February 1945, after contracting typhus while visiting and caring for inmates infected with typhus. A fellow Jewish inmate by the name of Eva Hoff recalled: “She helped us with her inner strength.”⁵⁹⁰
Even as the war was drawing to a close, Jews would still find themselves in need of protectors. Seven Jewish women—Sara Erenhalt (née Flaks), Genia Ekert, Tema Laufer, Tosia Zak, Stefa, and Leah Binstock and her sister —who were evacuated from Auschwitz by the Germans in the so-called death marches, managed to escape in the village of Poręba near Pszczyna, and hid in a barn that belonged to an elderly priest, Rev. Alojzy Pitlok. Sara Erenhalt recounts (Testimony of Sara Erenhalt (née Flaks), Yad Vashem Archives, file O.3/1588):
We all entered some cottage. There was an old man. We greeted him saying “Praised be Jesus Christ.”⁵⁹¹ We asked him about the night in his barn. He replied: “Poor little things, how can I let you sleep in a barn at minus eighteen degrees.” It appeared that our host was a priest, dressed at that time in secular clothing. We started talking to him and asking for shelter at his home. He agreed immediately to hide me and Genia. … We attempted to persuade him that we coild not separate from our female companions because we were together all the time in the camp, and if they went away, they surely would die.
Father Pitlok agreed to host all of the women. He brought them food and took them into his house, despite the fact that the Germans had sequestered a room there. The Jewish women remained with him for three-and-a-half weeks until the arrival of the Soviet army. Five of the Jewish women were hidden in the cellar, while the two women with a non-Jewish appearance pretended to be the priest’s Christian servants. Rev. Pitlok was also willing to offer them help after the liberation. “He said that it did not matter that we were Jews, but it was important that our guardian angel had sent us to him and that he could save us. He also stressed that if we did not manage to find our families, we could always come back to his place and find employment.”⁵⁹²
At least 16 individuals and families from Poręba were known to have sheltered prisoners who escaped during the death march that passed through that village.⁵⁹³ Morris Dach was able to escape with two other men during the third day of the death march; they were hidden by a Polish farmer.⁵⁹⁴ Henryk Mandelbaum, a native of Ząbkowice Będzińskie, was rescued by Polish farmers in Jastrzębie Zdrój after his escape.⁵⁹⁵ Poles who have been awarded by Yad Vashem for Auschwitz sheltering death march escapees in various localities include: Augustyn and Zofia Godziek, Ludwik, Maria and Henryk, Paszek, Gertruda Pustelnik, Maria and Wanda Sitko, and Teodor and Franciszka Tendera.⁵⁹⁶ Characteristically, Jews who endured the death march, like Helen Lewis, a Czech Jew who was evacuated from Auschwitz on January 27, 1944, recalled: “We were on the road to begin with for a fortnight. It was indescribably cold, and the only food we got was from villagers—the Poles gave us some, the Germans, later, none at all.”⁵⁹⁷ In other words, while marching through territory populated by Poles, Jews often received help from sympathetic Poles; however, they could not count on sympathy from the German population once they reached German lands.
Many of those forced to endure the death marches, however, were not as fortunate. The prisoners who were killed by the Germans and their bodies left by the road were buried by Poles. (“Death March of Male Auschwitz Inmates,” Internet: .)
In a Christian cemetery in the village of Książenice, Poland, about an hour and a half from Auschwitz-Birkenau, is a memorial which stands over a mass grave of 45 people, victims of the death march that left Auschwitz-Birkenau. Unlike many other victims of death marches, they received a burial. The local priest, Pawel Rys [Paweł Ryś], decided, for humanitarian reasons, to bury the victims and also to document their ‘names’—the inmate numbers tattooed on their arms. The priest instructed the grave-digger to record the numbers. The original document is stored in the Auschwitz Archive and a copy is on display in the Holocaust History Museum at Yad Vashem.

Together with the thousands of other inmates in the death march, they departed from Auschwitz-Birkenau on 18th January 1945. The inmates received a piece of bread, one packet of canned food between four and a blanket. They were forced to walk tens of kilometers in the freezing cold wearing rags and trudging through the snow in wooden clogs. The inmates suffered from exhaustion and dysentery, eating handfuls of snow to ease their hunger. Any inmate who became weak and dropped behind was immediately shot by the SS. After a march of approximately 59 km the inmates arrived at a train station in the city of Gliwice where 100–150 inmates were crowded into open train carriages. The inmates were transported for hours in the extreme cold of -20°C and many of them froze to death. When the train stopped, the SS guards continued to march the inmates, who had not received food for three days. On the 22nd of January the inmates neared the forest by the settlements of Mlyny [Młyny] and Rybnik. As the inmates entered the forest the guards began to shout that they were being attacked by partisans and began shooting towards the inmates. The site was filled with dead and injured. Residents of Mlyny used wagons to transport some of the corpses for burial in Książenice cemetery. Their funerals were held on the 26th of January and the 12th of February. …

Initial research in the Auschwitz Archive revealed that 26 of the buried were Jews from Germany, Czechoslovakia, France, The Netherlands, Poland and Hungary. Five of the buried were Polish political inmates and the others were of varied nationalities.
Alek Elias Kleiner, a native of Kraków, was imprisoned in several German concentration camps before he ended up in Kaufering, a subsidiary of Dachau, near Landsberg in Bavaria near the end of the war. During the evacuation of the camp in late April 1945, Kleiner and some other Jewish prisoners managed to escape and made to the Benedictine abbey in St. Ottilien, which had been taken over and converted into a military hospital for German soldiers. When they arrived there they encountered Polish nuns, who had likely been expelled from Warsaw after the failed uprising of August 1944, and told them their story. The nuns took the escaped prisoners to the cellar, took their prison clothes and burned them, and gave them new clothes and shoes. They then brought a priest, who appears to have been Fr. Moritz Schrank. He agreed to hide them in a stable with horses, pigs and cows, and brought them food every day until the arrival of the American army on May 9, 1945.⁵⁹⁸
Edith Zirer credits Pope John Paul II with saving her life in the final months of the war. (“The Pope in the Holy Land,” Catholic Insight [Toronto], May 2000, p.21.)
Liberated in January 1945, she left the Skarzysko-Kamienna [Skarżysko-Kamienna] camp totally weakened by tuberculosis and other ailments that had her virtually paralyzed. A young seminarian by the name of Karol Wojtyla [Wojtyła] found her, gave her a sandwich and a cup of tea. Then he carried her on his shoulders for almost two miles, from the concentration camp to the railway station, where the girl joined other survivors. After staying in a Krakow [Kraków] orphanage and a French sanatorium, in 1951 she emigrated to Israel where she married.
Pola Hipsz, who returned to Poland after the war from exile in Siberia, credits Karol Wojtyła, then a young priest, with helping her to locate her husband, Daniel Sztarksztejn, and reuniting with him in London, England.⁵⁹⁹ There also exist some sketchy accounts of Karol Wojtyła’s wartime rescue activities. According to historian Paul Johnson, “His name also figured on a Nazi blacklist on account of his activities on behalf of the Jewish community in Cracow [Kraków] and its neighbourhood. As recorded in the archives of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, the Jewish organization, he belonged to an underground group which took Jewish families out of the ghettos, gave them new identity papers and, if necessary, found them hiding places.”⁶⁰⁰ According to another source, “Many people have told me: he was one of the people who took risks for the Jews. We know, for example, that he made false papers for them during the war. … this young man participated in making, inside the Bishop’s palace, false papers destined for Polish members of the Resistance and Jews.”⁶⁰¹
Remarkably, the July 7, 1988 issue of The Canadian Jewish News (Toronto) carried the following Jewish Telegraphic Agency report—“Wiesel assails Pontiff for ‘offensive behavior’”:
Jewish feeling toward Pope John Paul may have been summed up by Elie Wiesel, author, human rights activist and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. Writing in the New York Post, Wiesel accused the Pope of wanting to “dejudaize the Holocaust” with his “strange and offensive behavior whenever he is confronted by the crudest event in recorded history.” ... “It is now clear: this Pope has a problem with Jews, just as Jews have a problem with him. His understanding for living Jews is as limited as his compassion for dead Jews,” wrote Wiesel, an Auschwitz survivor. ... Wiesel accused John Paul of wanting people to believe Christians suffered as much as Jews in Hitler’s concentration camps.”
Writing in response to a similar charge that appeared in The Globe and Mail (Toronto), Rudolf K. Kogler, who grew up with Karol Wojtyła in Wadowice,⁶⁰² stated in a letter to the editor (published on November 1, 1988):
John Allemang’s contention that Pope John Paul II... “plays down their sufferings in the Holocaust” is unfounded.... There could be no mistake about the Pope’s stance since he pronounced these words during his first [papal] visit to Auschwitz in June 1979: “I kneel before the inscription in Hebrew. This inscription awakens the memory of the people whose sons and daughter’s were intended for total extermination. …. The very people that received from God the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” itself experienced in a special measure what is meant by killing. It is not permissible for anyone to pass by this inscription with indifference.
Since that time, Pope John Paul II spoke of the Jewish suffering movingly on many occasions. At a meeting with foreign journalists in January 1988, he was asked: “I would like to know if we are right, we Jews, in thinking that in Your Holiness’s continual [sic] references to the Shoah there is a certain tendency to minimize, to lessen the dimensions of the Shoah.” “I am amazed. That is all I can say. I am amazed at your question,” was the Pope’s response. Could there be any other response to this kind of baseless complaint?
In 1946 Józefa and Bronisław Jachowicz turned to Rev. Karol Wojtyła, then a newly ordained priest, with a request to baptize Shachne Hiller. They had cared for the boy as their own child since 1942, when his mother had smuggled him out of the Kraków ghetto when he was just two years old. His parents perished in Auschwitz. After asking the Jachowiczes what was the wish of the boy’s parents in entrusting him to their care, they acknowledged that his parents had requested that their son be raised as a Jew. Rev. Wojtyla replied that it would be unfair to baptize the child while there was still hope that the relatives of the child might take him. Shachne Hiller was eventually reunited with family in the United States who adopted him, and he grew up as Stanley Berger.⁶⁰³
Another such example involves Chana Mandelbaum, born in 1937, who was left in the care of the Nabielski family of Wiśnicz by her mother. Known as Jańcia, the girl was hidden in that home for four years. She could not leave the house during daylight hours as her dark hair might draw the attention of others. Her mother never returned for her. After the war, Mrs. Nabielski decided to have the girl baptized and to treat her as a foster daughter. She went to Rev. Boczek, the local parish priest, regarding the matter. He agreed to do it on condition that the girl’s family could not be found. As it happened, Chana was on the Jewish Committee’s missing persons list in Kraków. It was decided to turn her over to the committee. The decision was extremely hard and painful for everyone. Chana was eventually reunited with her father, who had survived the war.⁶⁰⁴
The case of Szlama Jakubowicz of Sochaczew, who spent the war working as a farm hand for various farmers near his hometown of Sochaczew, is similar. Although he registered with the Jewish committee after the war, he found it difficult to adjust to his new surroundings and decided to return to the last farmer he worked for. Fourteen years old at the time, Szlama approached the local priest requesting to be baptized. The priest dissuaded him, suggesting that he first attend mass and catechism classes. After the boy completed his classes the following year, he told the priest that he no longer wanted to be baptized. The priest reassured him in his decision and they parted amicably. A cousin who returned from the Soviet Union found Szlama later that year and Szlama decided to rejoin the Jewish community.⁶⁰⁵
The five-member Chucherko family took in Berish (Berek or Bernard) Feiler, a storeowner in their village of Nowa Góra near Krzeszowice, west of Kraków, and his wife Bela (Lola), who knocked on their door starving and weary in the summer of 1942. The Feilers had escaped the Aktion in Pilica. They asked if they could stay for the day and recuperate but ended up staying for two years. The Chucherkos also agreed to hide Bernard’s brother, Chaim (Henryk) Feiler, and his wife, Sala. A few days later they were joined by Yitzhak-Shaya (Icchak) Grosman, Sala’s brother, who died shortly before liberation. Stefan Chucherko and his three sons, Eugeniusz, Henryk and Leopold, built a hiding place for the Jewish refugees beneath the floor of the hayloft, in the farmyard. At first, the refugees paid for their upkeep, which was only fair given their number and their hosts’ dire situation, but even after their money ran out the Chucherkos continued to look after them. In 1943 or 1944, Bela Feiler gave birth to a baby boy while in hiding. The crying infant posed an immense danger to everyone. One night, Stefan Chucherko left the baby in a basket near the home the Noworytas, in nearby Miękinia. This childless couple took the child in, suspecting that it was born out of wedlock. They baptized the baby and raised him as their own.⁶⁰⁶ After the war, the local priest persuaded the couple to return the boy to his parents. (Sara R. Horowitz, “‘If He Knows to Make a Child…’: Memories of Birth and Baby-Killing in Deferred Jewish Testimony Narratives,” in Norman J. W. Goda, ed., Jewish Histories of the Holocaust: New Transnational Approaches [New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2014], p.145.)
After the war, the town was occupied by Soviet forces. Hearing Berek’s account, a Jewish officer offered to retrieve Berek’s son, but Berek refused to take his child by force. Instead, he sought out the priest who had baptized the boy and he identified himself as the father. The priest arranged a meeting between Berek and the man who had taken in his baby. Weeping, the adoptive father pleaded with Berek to leave the boy in their care. “You are young, and we like the child very much. Please give us the child.” Berek did not demand the return of his son. Instead, he acknowledged the bond between the boy and the adoptive father. “You are the same father as I am. You have the same rights to him like I am.” Over time, the priest persuaded the adoptive couple to give the boy back to his birth parents.
As we have seen, on occasion Jews placed Jewish children in Catholic convents after the war. Another such example is recorded in Bogner, At the Mercy of Strangers, at page 204.
Ten-year-old Joseph Sliwa was sheltered by a Polish foster family on the outskirts of Warsaw. The family received payment from the boy’s mother, who was hiding elsewhere. After the Polish uprising in Warsaw in late 1944, contact with the mother was lost—Joseph never saw her again—and the payments stopped. Nevertheless, Joseph’s benefactors continued to look after him at their expense and treated him lovingly. After liberation, the boy’s uncle, who was a soldier in the Polish army, arrived and took him. Joseph was pleased at the thought that he would be living with a relative. However, it transpired that the uncle did not yet have a home of his own and saw no other choice than to place his nephew in a convent. … It was not until a few months later, when his relatives had managed to get settled, that they moved him to a Jewish children’s home.
Emil and Maria Łoziński, an elderly and poor couple, sheltered the three-member Rozenberg family—a pharmacist, his wife and their daughter, Helena—in Żółkiew, north of Lwów. The Łozińskis looked after them devotedly, without expecting anything in return. Worn down by constant anxiety and tension, Emil Łoziński one day asked his charges to leave. However, the next day, after attending church, he retracted his request, and the Rozenbergs ended up staying for 16 months, until their liberation by the Soviet army.⁶⁰⁷ Although the Łozińskis had hoped that their charges would convert, their rescue was in no way conditional on their conversion. To placate their hosts, after liberation, the Rozenbergs went to see the priest, whom they remembered well from before the war: “He’d come to the pharmacy, we’d chat. Nothing very personal, but pleasant. A decent man. Very respectful.” (Diane Wyshogrod, Hiding Places: A Mother, a Daughter, an Uncovered Life [Albany: State University of New York Press–Excelsior Editions, 2012], pp.271–72.)
So all three of us went to the priest’s apartment to meet with him. My father mentioned to him that Łoziński saved us, and that he thinks we should convert. The priest asked, ‘Are you converting because you’re grateful to Łoziński for saving your life, or because of your convictions?’

‘Well,’ my father said, ‘I don’t feel that strongly, but I am thinking about it because of Łoziński.’