Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy

According to the German “laws”, they were not allowed to harbor or aid Jews, but the nuns risked their lives and hid them. They provided them with food, clothing and shelter for a few days. When the escapees recovered sufficiently from their harrowing experience, one nun from eastern Poland, Franciszka Narloch, helped them in their further escape. At night she led them past the Ukrainian guards to a safer place.

When the Germans kept their Jewish prisoners a whole day waiting for their execution, the nuns clandestinely provided them with food and water. Franciszka Narloch, with other nuns, also helped a Mr. Kimmelmann [Leon Kimmelman] get out of the ghetto when his stay became too dangerous. They placed his two children, who were outside the ghetto, in a more secure hiding place.
Sister Franciszka Narloch described her role in the rescue effort in similar terms.⁴⁸ Dr. Leon Kimmelman, a member of the Bund, had to leave the ghetto in Piotrków Trybunalski when the Germans started to arrest underground activists in the summer of 1941. He and his wife made their way to Warsaw. However, they were rounded up during the Great Deportation the following summer and perished in Treblinka.⁴⁹ In the diabolical conditions that the Germans created in occupied Poland, one escape from their clutches was often not enough to ensure survival.
Marta Bik-Wander and her mother from Nowy Sącz stayed with Father Ludwik, an Augustinian, in Prokocim, a suburb of Kraków, before moving on to Lwów.⁵⁰ The Augustinian monastery in Prokocim was raided by the Gestapo on September 20, 1941. Seven priests and one brother were arrested, thus putting a stop to the monastery’s activities. After interrogating them in the notorious Montelupich prison in Kraków, the clergymen were deported to Auschwitz and Dachau. Five of them perished as prisoners of German camps: Fathers Wilhelm Gaczek, Józef Gociek, Krzysztof Olszewski, and Edmund Wilucki, and Brother Wojciech Lipka. Fathers Jacek Tylżanowski, Jan Pamuła, and Bonifacy Woźny eventually returned to Prokocim.
Edith Lowy (born in 1928), her parents, and her younger brother, Erik, refugees from Czechoslovakia, hid in the cellar of a warehouse in Prokocim near Kraków in 1942. The family’s former Polish neighbours and two unidentified priests from Prokocim, likely Augustinians, were aware of their hideout and provided them with food. The priests offered to provide the family with false birth and baptismal certificates, but Edith’s parents decided to take the family to a labour camp in Prokocim, thinking it would be easier to survive there than in hiding. They did not consider returning to their hometown near Ostrava, in Czechoslovakia, where they had left their house in the care of neighbours. (Oral History Interview with Edith Lowy, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., September 13, 2010.)
The cellar, all that was in the cellar were crates, huge crates like from some machines. And the entrance to this was from the front of the building. No windows. No windows that – down to the cellar. So, we didn’t know what weather was outside, we didn’t know anything. The only people that knew that we are there, were our Polish neighbors, former Polish neighbor and I’m also forgot-got to tell you that my parents were so desperate to get [my brother] Erik and me out when there was so much fear that we’ll be deported, or whatever, that the Polish neighbors send once their son, in the early 20s to bring Erik and me to their house to hide. It was before we were hiding in the other places. … he came, and we were sitting on the train, Erik and I already, with this Polish guy, when I decided I’m not going anywhere … without my parents. So I ran out of the train, of course, Erik – behind me, and the guy behind me, and my parents were very, very distraught that here – again we are here in danger, that we didn’t go into hiding. So, the only people that knew that we are hiding there were the Polish family, and two priests from a nearby church. And once in awhile they used to bring something and hide in the shrubs, soups, coffee, you know, in the shrubs. So, my father or uncle took it out from under the shrubs at night. … The priests were wonderful, and they offered to do Aryan paper for us. And we decided maybe that would be another possibility to save ourself.