Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy

Germany Attacks the Soviet Union, June 1941
The eastern half of Poland had been invaded and seized by the Soviet Union in mid-September 1939, as a consequence of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact between Hitler and Stalin.⁵¹ Germany turned on its erstwhile ally and attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941. Jews fleeing from the advancing German armies found succour and refuge with a Catholic priest in the small town of Porozów or Porozowo near Wołkowysk. More than a score of Jews were sheltered by Rev. Jan Chrabąszcz. He also arranged travel permits for the refugees, who he claimed were Polish workers, enabling them to return to Białystok. (Account of Kalman Barakin, in Michał Grynberg and Maria Kotowska, comp. and eds., Życie i zagłada Żydów polskich 1939–1945: Relacje świadków [Warsaw: Oficyna Naukowa, 2003], p.386.)
The Germans entered Parasowo [Porozowo] only in the evening [of June 24, 1941]. Immediately they ordered all the men from the town to assemble in the main square. There they separated the Jews from the Catholics. The Jews were lined up in rows and counted, and every tenth one was told to leave the ranks and line up on one side. About twenty men were assembled in this way. The Germans immediately put them against a wall and shot them. My friend and I were in the square standing among the Jews, we were counted but were fortunate not to have been among the ten and thanks to that we remained alive. Then all of the men, both Jews and non-Jews, were locked up in the church. It was very tight there, and there was simply no air to breathe. We were kept in the church the entire day, and then released. The inhabitants of the town returned to their homes. We and other Jews, refugees from Białystok and other localities, about 24 persons all together, went to search out local Jews, but they did not allow us into their homes for fear of the Germans. We therefore went to the priest of Parasowo—Grabowski [Jan Chrabąszcz], who took us in and received us very cordially. There were already about 25 Poles, who worked in the airfields, in his home. A group of Germans came to Grabowski and wanted to take us away, but the priest rescued us. He told them that we were workers who worked in the airfields and the Germans left us alone. Rev. Grabowski kept us at his house for all of seven days. He gave us food and drink free of charge. He constantly excused himself that he did not receive us the way he should … He then obtained from the Wehrmacht [military authorities] a certificate allowing us to return to Białystok without obstacles. We returned to Białystok as a group of 24 persons on the first or second of July.
With the rapid flight of the Soviets, the ensuing breakdown in law and order in the latter part of June and the early part of July 1941 was seized on by criminal elements to rob and some others to settle scores with those believed to have supported the former Soviet occupiers. Jewish accounts record that priests spoke out against and intervened to curb abuses of the rabble directed at Jews in several localities to the east of Łomża. Among the most outspoken priests were Rev. Cyprian Łozowski of Jasionówka, Rev. Józef Kębliński of Jedwabne, Rev. Feliks Bryx of Knyszyn, Rev. Franciszek Łapiński of Rutki,⁵² and Rev. Hipolit Chruściel of Worniany.⁵³ When the Germans started to shoot Jews after their entry into the town of Landwarów in July 1941, some Jews turned to Rev. Kazimierz Kułak, the local pastor. Rev. Kułak sought to intervene with the German commander and almost paid with his own life as a result.⁵⁴ Rev. Aleksander Pęza of Grajewo was part of a local delegation that appealed to the German military authorities in July 1941 to put a hault to the murders and robberies.⁵⁵ According to the Grajewo memorial book, Rev. Pęza “tirelessly” called on the Christian population, at the daily masses, not to cooperate with the Germans and their anti-Semitic provocations. When word of this reached the Germans, he was shot on July 15, 1943.⁵⁶ Similar reports of clerical interventions on behalf of Jews come from Powursk near Kowel, in Volhynia,⁵⁷ and Tłuste in Eastern Galicia.⁵⁸
In the interwar years, Alexander Bronowski, a lawyer, was engaged by Bishop Marian Leon Fulman to represent the diocese of Lublin in legal matters despite vociferous protests in the nationalist press. After the war broke out Bronowski settled in Świsłocz, to the east of Białystok, in the Soviet occupation zone, where he continued to work as a lawyer. He describes his experiences there after the German entry in June 1941, and the assistance he received from several Poles, among them a priest—Rev. Albin Horba, the pastor of Świsłocz. Rev. Horba sheltered several prominent Jews. In May 1942, he was transferred to the nearby parish of Międzyrzecz Podlaski, where he continued to help Jews by providing them with false baptismal certificates. After the war he was arrested by the Soviet secret police and held in various prisons until April 1948.⁵⁹ (Alexander Bronowski, They Were Few [New York: Peter Lang, 1991], pp.7–9.)
At court I appeared in show trials, political trials, criminal cases and the like. When the accused were Poles, the local priest and the pharmacist (a Pole) frequently turned to me to defend them. …

My work at Swislocz [Świsłocz] was satisfying. I had social connections with both Jews and Poles. I lived comfortably. This situation prevailed until the outbreak of war between Germany and the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. It took everyone in Swislocz by surprise. The evacuation of the court and other Soviet offices to the east was hurriedly organized. The judge suggested that I leave Swislocz with the court. I declined, saying that my aim was to contact my family who were in the ghetto in Lublin; the judge understood.

On the fourth day of the war, June 26, 1941, Swislocz fell to the Germans, who began executing communists and rounding up Jews for heavy forced labor, looting their property. As I was known in the town not only as a Jewish lawyer but also as a lecturer who spoke out against the Nazi crimes, I realized that I had to find a hiding place. I left my apartment. First I went to my friend the pharmacist, and he, after hiding me for several days in his pharmacy, took me to the priest’s apartment [actually they hid in a cellar near Rev. Albin Horba’s rectory—M.P.].

A week after the capture of Swislocz a new commander arrived and the persecution of the Jews intensified. I found out that I was being sought as an enemy of the Nazis and as a Jew. I therefore decided to escape to Bialystok [Białystok], where some tens of thousands of Jews lived. Moreover, this move would bring me closer to Lublin. The pharmacist and the priest agreed with my decision.

To facilitate my flight from Swislocz, they contacted a certain Polish woman, the directress of an orphanage situated on the main road to Bialystok, and asked her to allow me to stay there. She agreed without a moment’s hesitation. It emerged that I had once defended her against a groundless charge of maltreatment of Soviet orphans. After sleeping one night at the orphanage I departed unseen at dawn, supplied with bread, which was worth its weight in gold. The directress knew that I was a Jew and that I was escaping from Swislocz. I had gone no more than thirty meters when I heard her calling out to me to stop. She ran towards me, took the chain with the cross hanging on it from her neck, and fastened it on mine. I did not remove that cross throughout the journey to Bialystok. I was surprised and moved by her concern to protect me, and could find no words to thank her.

The distance to Bialystok was about eighty kilometers. … Like me, there were other Jews from small towns walking to the large Jewish center at Bialystok.

When I left Grodek [Gródek] a Jewish lad of about fourteen fell into step with me. He too was making for Bialystok. A few dozen meters behind us were four Jews. Four kilometers outside Grodek I saw a German truck approaching, and when it reached us three German soldiers armed with rifles sprang out. They come up to me. “Jude?” they asked. I sensed danger and grew tense. Then one of them saw the cross around my neck. “Los,” he muttered. They left. A few minutes later I heard firing. The Germans had shot the Jews walking behind us.

I was shocked. Despite my blistered feet I continued walking with the boy and even accelerated my pace. By evening we reached Bialystok. I parted company with the lad …

I could not stop thinking about the Polish woman who had saved my life and the boy’s. I do not recall her name, nor do I know her whereabouts. Swislocz is now part of the Soviet Union. I have searched for her address, but to no avail.

But I do know that when she ran towards me and placed the cross on my neck she did so for humanitarian reasons: to save a human life. In my heart I retain a deep sense of gratitude to her, and to the priest and the pharmacist. I learnt subsequently that the priest had died and the pharmacist had left Swislocz.

Dr. Kac-Edelis from Łódź had taken refuge from the Germans in Soviet-occupied Eastern Poland. Fleeing Lithuanian collaborators in the summer of 1941, he made his way back from a camp near Nowa Wilejka to Warsaw. In January 1942, he recorded his testimony which attests to extensive help received from Poles, among them a priest, along the way. (Andrzej Żbikowski, ed., Archiwum Ringelbluma: Konspiracyjne Archiwum Getta Warszawy, volume 3: Relacje z Kresów [Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny IN-B, 2000], pp.471–74.)
Indeed [Polish] peasants very often helped us at no cost. We entered their cottages where they frequently refused to take anything from us when they offered us milk, bread, etc. Apart from that they showed us compassion and were indignant at everything that was happening to the Jews. …

It is important to stress that I encountered exceptionally sincere warm-heartedness from Catholic peasants and Polish landlords. I was comforted and helped with money, food, and a place to sleep. My wound was dressed in manor houses. …

The area I now entered had Polish police who tended to accommodate the Jews. In one of the Belorussian towns [i.e., in a Polish-speaking area incorporated in the so-called Ostland, and earlier Soviet Belorussia], not far from the Lithuanian border, through the efforts of the mayor, priest and head of the Jewish Council, I was placed in the hospital and provided with papers [i.e., an identity document] and money for my further journey.
With the German takeover of Eastern Poland in June 1941, the Germans started to round up and execute Jews. When they entered the village of Pohost Zahorodny (or Pohost Zahorodzki) near Pińsk, in Polesie (Polesia), Jews started to flee and found shelter in the garden of a Catholic priest. That story is related in Voices from the Forest: The True Story of Abram and Julia Bobrow, as told to Stephen Edward Paper (Bloomington, Indiana: 1^st Books, 2004), at pages 30–33.
Their numbers had now swelled to over forty and included young men and children as well.

Nearing the mansion of the Polish priest, Drogomish [Rev. Hieronim Limbo], they heard the galloping of horses.

The mansion, where the priest lived with a housekeeper, was also the church where he held services for all of the Catholics in Pohost Zagorodski.

Drogomish, in his black robes and white collar, saw them from the window and rushed outside. The priest was old and bent, and known throughout the village to be a good-hearted man. … People would come from miles away to tour his gardens and catch the smell of jasmine and orange blossoms.

He had been sitting alone in his garden alcove sadly contemplating the growing turmoil in his village and apparently trying to think of some way to help. Now the disturbance had come to his front yard. He rushed out to see how he could aid the fugitives.

Urgently, he motioned the Jewish men and boys into his garden. The garden spread over two acres, but was dwarfed by the potato patch, which was a quarter-of-a-mile wide and half-a-mile long, stretching all the way to Bobric [Bobryk] Lake and filled with two-foot-high potato plants.

Quickly, the fugitives left the road, following the priest down the furrows between the plants to the edge farthest from the road. There, in the weeded dirt furrows between rows of potato plants, they lay down to hide. From this position, they could probably hear the passing of the SS riders moving into the shtetl.

Nazis from Borki now entered Pohost Zagorodski from the north, riding past the Polish school on Mieshchanska [Mieszczańska] Street. Both groups converged on the marketplace and dismounted. ….

The soldiers started moving house to house, brandishing their machine guns and whips … Accompanied by the local [Belorussian] police force, they forced all the men they found into the street. …

In the village hospital, those men who were too sick or infirm to move were shot on the spot.

Almost ninety men and young boys were rounded up and forced to the marketplace. …

In the center of the village, the Obersturmbannfuhrer called to his sergeant, “Is that all you found?”

“Yes, Herr Obersturmbannfuhrer,” the sergeant replied. “That’s it.”

This was not good enough for him. …

Twenty SS troopers mounted their horses … down Dworska Street to the church. When they reached the old mansion that now served as the Catholic Church …

As the sergeant and his men started into the garden on their horses, Drogomish ran out once more.

“What are you doing in my garden?” he yelled. “You are stomping on the plants. You’ll destroy them.”

“There are Jews hiding in the garden,” the sergeant said.

“There is nothing here except the potato plants. And you’re ruining them,” the priest said, moving in front of the horses of the sergeant and his men, trying to block their way.

“Get out of the way, Father,” the sergeant demanded.

“No,” Drogomish said, defiantly. “You have no right. This is a holy place, the grounds of the church.”

“Toss him out of the way,” the sergeant said to his men. Four soldiers dismounted and threw the frail priest to the ground.

“Jew lover,” the sergeant snarled.

The soldiers then searched the field, knocking over the plants, trampling on others and tearing up the dirt and crops. Thus they combed the field while the forty Jews lay trembling in the dirt.

Finding the men, the SS forced them to their feet, whipping and beating them with sticks as they herded them back to the marketplace.

When a hundred and thirty Jewish men and boys were finally assembled in the Rynec [Rynek] marketplace, the SS soldiers mounted their horses and formed a circle around them to prevent any escape attempts. Then they made them run down Dworska Street across the Bobric River bridge out of town. …

The SS troops took the Jews past the Bobrow lumberyard to an old Jewish cemetery. In the cemetery, the soldiers lined them up in groups of ten. …

The Jews, in their lines of ten, were marched to a row of tombstones … There they were made to kneel down with their backs towards the soldiers. The SS shot them with their machine guns.

In Dąbrowica, Volhynia, the mayor and local Catholic priest appealed to the Germans to release the Jews who were seized by the Germans when they entered the town in June 1941. Manya Auster Feldman recalled (Testimony of Manya Auster Feldman, August 11, 1988, Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive, University of Michigan at Dearborn, Internet: ):
They [the Germans] took, they took 200 Jews—males, middle-aged, not young ones. And they brought them into the center of the city. The cities had always a square where the marketplace was. They brought them and they sat on the ground and they had their machine guns pointed at them, ready to shoot. … So the women whose husbands were caught started running and to the priest, to the mayor of the city who was appalled. … There was a Polish priest and the ministers of the Ukraine churches. And they startedbegging them, “Do something for us.” So the Germans did it as a matterof fact, as a preventive to show that they will not tolerate anything that will be done against them. So they first grabbed the Jews. And then they said that this happens to be a communistic town, these are all communists and they’re going to get rid of them, of this group. So my mother and I and the women started running. And the priest and the mayor came to the Germans and said, “Yes, there were communists, but they all escaped into Russia, so these are all good Jews.” So towards the evening they released all of them except they held twenty-two. They sort of picked at random twenty-two people. And the rest of them they sent home. And the twenty-two people they kept as hostages in case during the next few days if something will happen to a German soldier, this is what they’ll do, they’ll kill them. … And after a day, they took them out into the marketplace and we heard that they are digging like a grave. So everybody was sure that this is what they are going to do, they are going to kill the Jews and that’s where they’ll bury them. But a different thing happened. … And they released the twenty-two Jews.
A Polish priest in the village of Hoduciszki, located between Postawy and Święciany, northeast of Wilno, attempted to rescue Jews when the Lithuanian authorities set out to liquidate the Jewish ghetto in September 1941. (Testimony of Michael Potashnik, Yad Vashem Archives, O.71/27/3552432 cited in David Bankier, Expulsion and Extermination: Holocaust Testimonials from Provincial Lithuania [Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2011], pp.100–101.)
That Saturday, September 27, 1941, at 10 a.m. all the Jews were driven out of the ghetto into the marketplace; they were allowed to bring along small packages. Those who didn’t leave their houses quickly enough were brutally beaten by the murderers. Five families of ‘useful Jews’ were left behind. …

At 11 a.m. that same Saturday, the Jews were lined up and taken away from the marketplace in the direction of Švenčionys [Święciany], herded along by police, partisans and civilian Lithuanians from the town and countryside. The sick, the elderly and the weak were taken on wagons […]

Five women were hidden in the barn of the Polish priest. On the Saturday morning before the Jews were taken away, they left the barn and tried to go to Postawy. The assistant mayor’s son and commandant of the partisans in town, Pijus Rakovsky, spotted them and shot them behind the barn. He buried them there […] That Saturday morning the Polish priest went to the Lithuanians to beg them to let him take care of 20 children. The murderers refused.

All the Jews from the towns of Old Švenčionys district were assembled in Poligon [i.e., former Polish army barracks] near Švenčioneliai [Švenčionėliai or Nowe Święciany] and were kept there for 12 days under terrible conditions. On Wednesday October 8, 1941, the shootings began. In the course of three days about 8,000 Jews were shot. Their corpses were thrown into a long mass grave in a sandy forest about three kilometers from Švenčioneliai.
A priest is credited with saving a Jewish family when the Jews of Mołodeczno were being rounded up by the Germans in October 1941 for execution. Chana Szafran (née Pozner), her sister Luba and her father Mordechai, who were outside the town at the time, were arrested by the local police on their return but released thanks to the intervention of a local priest who knew Mordechai Pozner. From there they reached the ghetto in Wilejka where they remained until April 1943. Chana Szafran describes the circumstances of her rescue in her account published in Moshe Kalchheim, Be-komah zakufah, 1939–1945: Perakim be-toldot ha-lehimah ha-partizanit be-ya’arot Narots’ (Tel Aviv: Irgun ha-patizanim, lohame ha-mahtarot u-morder ha-geta’ot be-Yi’sra’el, 1991), translated as “At the Onset of the War in Molodecno,” Internet: .
On Saturday, the 25th of October 1941, very early in the morning, our wish neighbor came in panic to the house and said that, once again, the Germans had surrounded the town. She suggested to my mother that we should all flee together. My mother said that first my little sister Liuba, who was eleven years old and I, should run to our father and tell him to hide. She assumed that just as before, the Nazis were only looking for men. So both of us ran as fast as we could and told Father about what had occurred in town. I never saw my mother again. Later on, when I was in the police station, I found out from that neighbor that Mother was killed while she tried to escape from the house. The Germans had shot at her as she tried to flee. …

All the Jews who were found that day were collected and put in the local police building. We met about fifty men, women, and children. Amongst them was also our neighbor—Paula Drutz. She was the one to tell me about the fate of my mother. While we waited in the police station, my father saw an army buddy of his who was now one of the policemen. He was sitting there nonchalantly playing his guitar. My father [Mordechai Pozner] begged him as a man who was to be shortly executed, to give note to the local priest. At first, he ignored Father’s request, but when my father pleaded, he agreed to bring the note to the priest. At midnight, the priest arrived with two policemen to the station. They took my father to one of the private rooms, and, after some time, he was returned. He explained to us the plan: one of the policemen would soon come, and take him to the bathroom. After some time, my sister Liuba and I should ask also to go to the bathroom. We would all then escape. While we were waiting for my father to go, they would call Jews one by one and then the Jews would return, beaten-up and confused. The girls were returned with torn clothes and looks of horror in their faces; it wasn’t difficult to guess what had been done to them.

In Molodecno [sic], there was at that time a large POW camp that contained Soviet prisoners. Because of this camp, the entire town was lit up by huge projectors to prevent the escape of POWs. When the policemen who escorted us took us outside of the police station, he yelled to us, “Run very quickly, kikes! If you don’t run, I’ll shoot you!” We ran as fast as we could and hid in the rubble of homes that stood on either side of the street. This was during a curfew hour when nobody was allowed to walk about in town, so we had to wait until morning in order to leave our hiding place. We then walked to the edge of the street—the place where we had originally decided to reunite with Father.

Like this, because of my father’s quick thinking, we were saved from the fate that the rest of the Jews in the police building encountered. The reason why this priest cared so much for my father was that my father, before the war, was a political representative of the community and knew the priest well. When the Soviets had invaded the area in September of 1939, they had arrested the old priest, saying that he was engaged in anti-Communist propaganda. Father had collected signatures from the local population and had collected testimony that this priest was only involved in religious matters, and, after a short time, the Soviets listened to the pleas of the town residents and released the priest. At the time when our life was in danger, he saved my father as well as the two of us.

The Jews in Eastern Poland were soon enclosed in ghettos and terrorized. Enormous ransoms were extorted from the Jewish communities. The testimony of Moshe Smolar, found in Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), at page 154, captures the response of a Catholic priest and the faithful to that tragedy in the town of Brześć on the River Bug.
The community was pressured into making a “contribution” to the Germans of two million marks (or four million rubbles), and the members of the Judenrat were arrested as hostages to ensure that the sum was paid. One of the Catholic priests organized help for the Jews and collected money for them to help pay the huge sum.
In Brasław the Germans demanded a contribution in gold from the ghetto. Unable to meet this demand the Jews turned to Rev. Mieczysław Akrejć, the dean and local pastor. Rev. Akrejć generously contributed 4,000 gold rubles. Nonetheless, a few days later, the Germans liquidated the ghetto.⁶⁰ Sources attesting to the assistance of the Catholic clergy in meeting contributions imposed on the Jews of Żółkiew and Słonim are mentioned later elsewhere.
Jacob Gerstenfeld-Maltiel described conditions in Lwów, and displays of Polish solidarity with the Jews in the early months of the German occupation, in his memoirs, My Private War: One Man’s Struggle to Survive the Soviets and the Nazis (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1993), at pages 56–57 and 62–63.
The problem of telling Jews from Poles was solved by introducing the requirement for Jews and the people of Jewish descent down to the third generation to wear on the right arm a white armband with a Star of David. … In the first days after the order was published [July 15, 1941] I saw a priest with a Star of David armband. But after some days, this sort of thing disappeared and only the accursed wore the armbands. The Polish population during the first period of this harassment displayed a certain measure of sympathy for the Jews …

… the Germans demanded a “contribution” from the Jewish population totalling 20 million rubles to be paid in ten days. Of course the Germans threatened undefined consequences if the entire sum was not delivered in cash on time.

The Judenrat published an appeal to the Jewish population and asked for their cooperation. …

… I knew personally some members of the Polish intelligentsia, who paid appreciable sums to help with the contribution. Although the sums made little difference, the gesture of good will showed a spirit that counted and had a strong moral meaning. … These signs of sympathy from Polish society incited the Jews to even greater generosity than they had shown till then.

A number of Jewish testimonies confirm that Poles contributed considerable sums to help pay the ransoms imposed by the Germans on the Jews of Lwów, Wilno, Chełm, Włocławek, Rzeszów,⁶¹ and other towns.
When Rabbi Isaac Yaakov Kalenkovitch and other Jews arrested in Drohiczyn Poleski, in Polesie (Polesia), for failing to provide the Germans with the contribution imposed on the Jewish community, Jews turned to the local priest for assistance. (Dov B. Warshawsky, Drohiczyn: Five Hundred Years of Jewish Life; translation of Drohitchin: Finf hundert yor yidish lebn [Chicago: Book Committee Drohichyn, 1958], p.318.)
The Germans imposed a second contribution on the town. However, since there was no more money or gold, the murderers took 35 Jews and the rabbi of the town as hostages. If we didn’t give them the demanded sum of money, they would kill the rabbi and the 35 Jews. The mayor [a Pole by the name of Czapliński] of Drohitchin [Drohiczyn] interceded on behalf of the rabbi and the Jews, but it did no good. The wives of the arrested men and rabbi went to beg the priest Palevski [actually, Rev. Antoni Chmielewski, the local pastor] to save their husbands’ lives. The priest Palevski quickly went to the SS commander and convinced him to release the rabbi and the 30 hostages. Five Jews were kept as hostages until the contribution was paid.
Priests also came to the assistance of individuals who were required by the Germans to pay large ransoms for the safety of family members. A resident of Tomaszów Lubelski recalled how her mother turned to a Polish priest, who gave her a large sum of money in exchange for a gold chain, thereby allowing her grateful mother to pay the “indemnification” demanded by the Germans. (Rachel Schwartzbaum (Klarman), “During the Years of Horror,” in Joseph M. Moskop, ed., Tomaszow-Lubelski Memorial Book [Mahwah, New Jersey: Jacob Solomon Berger, 2008), p.406.)
I, and several other Tomaszow [Tomaszów] families set out to return to Tomaszow [from the Soviet occupation zone]. Arriving to my parents, they fell upon me, and wept sympathetically. …

Immediately on the morrow, my parents receive a notice that because their daughter had returned from Russia, my parents are required to pay a large sum of money on my behalf as indemnification money. A keening went up in our house, regarding how it would be possible to get such a large sum of money, however there was no answer to this. In the morning, at eight o’clock, the sum must be presented. My mother took a gold chain that we still had in our possession, and went off to sell it to the Polish priest. She told the priest everything, and the priest took the chain, paid her, and told her, ‘Go save your child.’ My mother thanked him with a full heart, and went away. On the following morning, she paid the sum on my behalf. In this manner, all of the families that returned from Rawa [Ruska] were required to pay extraordinarily large sums as an indemnification.
When the Germans occupied Słonim in June 1941, they took the highly unusual step of appointing Rev. Kazimierz Grochowski, who was the acting pastor of St. Andrew’s church and—as a native of the Poznań region—had an excellent command of the German language, the mayor of the city. He was in that position for only a few months. During that time he intervened on behalf of the Jews and provided them with false identity documents. His benelovence was noted by a Jew who stayed briefly in Słonim. (Huberband, Kiddush Hashem, p.373.)
From Jeziernica, I was off to Slonim [Słonim]. I found a half-demolished city. Half of it had been consumed in flames during the battles. When the Germans took over, they shot a small number of Jews. I came upon a long line of Jews, and was told that they were standing on line to receive work from the Germans at various labor sites. The Germans paid them with bread. The mood in the city was good. The local priest had been appointed as mayor, and he had prevailed upin the Germans not to treat the Jews as badly and as brutally as in other cities.