Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy

Ania stood there in silence. … It was a long time before they went back to their beds. It was the 19^th April, 1943.
After an illness which required hospitalization in December 1943, through the efforts of a priest, Father Rodak, who helped place Jewish children in convents, Hania was taken to a hostel for teenagers in Warsaw’s Old Town, run by the Sisters of Holy Family of Nazareth, where she met another Jewish girl, Joasia Ravicz (Rawicz). After the failed Warsaw Uprising of August 1944, the two Jewish girls, escorted by Sister Jadwiga, made their way to Częstochowa. They went to the Pauline monastery of Jasna Góra where they were fed and lodged temporarily in a hospice. Afterwards, the girls were accepted at a boarding school, also run by the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth, which housed about a dozen Jewish girls from Warsaw. After the war Hania was reunited with her mother. Her memoir mentions other Jewish children hidden in convents: her cousin, Halina Ajzner (Wengielek), in a convent in Maciejowice near Warsaw run by the Sisters of the Family of Mary,Halina Kszypoff, and the sisters Judy and Tosia, in a boarding school in Żoliborz run by the Sisters of the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
Michal Hefer, then Żurakowska, was born in Warsaw in 1933. Her grandfather was the president of the Rabbinical Court. After her mother and brother were seized by the Germans in the Warsaw ghetto, her father entrusted her to a Polish woman, a family friend, who kept her for about a year. When this woman sensed that it was becoming more dangerous, she placed the child with the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, who had a convent in the New Town Market Square. Michal remembers the nuns with great fondness, “For me they were saints. So much compassion.”⁷⁴ During the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, the convent was bombed by the Germans on August 31 killing 36 nuns, four priests, and about one thousand civilians, among them Jews, who had taken refuge there.
Maria Winnicka was part of a network of Poles in Warsaw who found hiding places for Jews. One of the many Jews she helped was Zygmunt Szczawiński, a high school teacher and author of mathematics textbooks. He eventually found shelter with nuns in the Wola district, but perished during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.⁷⁵
Aviva Unger was an 11-year-old Warsaw school girl when the war broke out. Growing up, she was exposed to Catholic practices by the family’s Catholic servant, whom she would sometimes accompany to church services. Aviva states that “her knowledge of it [Catholicism] was to be very useful later.” Aviva and her mother, a widow, moved to the ghetto in 1940. Shortly after, her mother had a stroke that left her partially paralyzed. Aviva had to steal food in order to survive. One day, the Germans shot her mother. With the help of a family, Aviva escaped from the ghetto in 1942 by crawling through the sewers. She was taken to a Catholic convent where she lived with nuns identified as Sacré Coeur Sisters. This information is incorrect because that order did not have a convent in Warsaw. A Jewish informer recognized Aviva as a Jew while she was riding in a streetcar and turned her over to the Gestapo. She was beaten to extract information, but she said nothing. Risking his life, a priest from the convent saved Aviva by vouching for her Catholic background. After her release, Aviva was taken to Germany as a Polish farm worker. She returned to Poland after the war, and later left for Israel.⁷⁶ (Anton Gill, The Journey Back From Hell: Conversations with Concentration Camp Survivors [London: Grafton Books, 1988], 277–78.)
‘When the war broke out I was an 11-year-old Warsaw schoolgirl. I was already an orphan, since my father died just before I was born. We were moved to the ghetto a year after Poland’s defeat. My mother had given up spiritually: if this was the conclusion of all the culture and education that had made Germany such a country to admire, then what were her own life’s beliefs worth? When we came to the ghetto, matters got worse for her, and she had a stroke which left her half-paralysed. She had lost the will to fight. As for me, I continued to go to school in the ghetto, and to the Gymnasium there.

‘Then one day they shot my mother.

‘In 1942 I was able to escape, through the kind action of a Gentile friend of my mother’s who had heard what had happened. She smuggled in 100 zlotys [złoty] with which I was able to pay a guide to take me out through the sewers. I was taken to a teaching order of nuns in Warsaw, at the Sacré Coeur convent. I became a pupil of the convent school, and stayed there until Easter 1943—about the time of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Then, coincidentally, I was recognized on a tram by a Jew who was a police spy, and betrayed to the Gestapo. I then spent four days in the Gestapo HQ where they hit and kicked me ceaselessly to get information out of me about the Jewish resistance. I wasn’t yet quite 15. They weren’t human, those Gestapo. And don’t make the mistake of differentiating between the Germans and the Nazis: all Germans were Nazis.

‘I was saved by the Polish priest attached to the convent who came to the HQ and swore that he had personally baptized me as a baby, that he had known my parents, that I came from a long line of Catholics; that I was now an orphan in the convent’s care. All this he swore on the Cross, and eventually the Gestapo let me go. But I knew it would be too hot for me to remain in Poland, so I arranged to have myself transported for war work to Germany. However, that was another problem, because a lot of Jews tried to save themselves in that way [i.e., posing as Polish Catholics and hoping not to be recognized by anyone]. On the way I was saved by a Polish prostitute who was on the same transport. We were travelling by ordinary passenger train, and two men—German sailors, I think—started looking at me. I knew they suspected I was a Jewess: two minutes earlier a couple of Jewish girls had been picked off the train and shot. This prostitute said to the sailors, “What are you gawping at my cousin like that for?” “She’s your cousin?” “Sure, and she’s a virgin. She’s no good for you; but if it’s a fuck you want, I’m your girl.” The sailors left it at that. The prostitute didn’t say a word to me directly. Only I could tell by her eyes that she knew.

Three teenaged sisters—Wanda, Helen and Teresa Neimark—managed to hide during the raid on the ghetto in Radomsko in October 1942, in which their parents were taken away by the Germans. Henryk Wróblewski, a friend of their father’s, sent a messenger from the underground to tell them that they would be taken out of the ghetto and brought to a safe house in Warsaw. Wanda was taken to Warsaw first by a young man by train. The remaining sisters were cared for by the Loszek family, who were friends of the Neimark family, for several weeks. Henryk Wróblewski came for Helena and Teresa and took them by truck to his apartment in Warsaw. The sisters were given false identity documents and Wanda and Helena found jobs and rented a room. Since Teresa had dark Semitic features, she did not venture outside. Helena approached the superior of an unidentified convent and requested her to take Teresa in, giving her a highly improbable account, namely, that her “niece” had suffered memory loss after contracting meningitis and could not remember her catechism and prayers. Although in all likelihood the superior did not believe this guise, she accepted Teresa. Teresa remained in the convent until the Warsaw Uprising broke out in August 1944. Helena removed her from the convent and the three sisters relocated to Busko-Zdrój where they worked in a German military field hospital. While at the convent, Teresa became acquainted with another Jewish girl, Krzysia, who also survived the war.⁷⁷
Often parents were not informed of the whereabouts of their children who were sheltered in convents in order to protect the security of everyone participating in these perilous undertakings. Bernard Goldstein, a Bundist leader from Warsaw, describes the following cases. (Bernard Goldstein, The Stars Bear Witness [London: Victor Gollancz, 1950], pp.157, 164–67, 239.)
In the same tenement lived Comrade Chaimovitch, formerly an official of our cooperative movement. Now he was liaison man between the Judenrat and the Tranferstelle, which supplied the ghetto food allotment. He had the right to visit the Aryan side, wearing a uniform cap with a blue ribbon and a Star of David.

I went up to visit Chaimovitch and found him and his wife greatly agitated. He had just returned from smuggling their ten-year-old daughter out pf the ghetto. A Christian friend had arranged for her admission to a children’s home run by a convent somewhere in Poland—where, he was not permitted to know for fear that he might disclose the dangerous secret.

‘The child did not want to go to the Christians,” Chaimovitch told us, weeping. “She cried and pleaded to be allowed to stay with us. If our fate is to die, she wanted to die with us. It was only with great difficulty and against her will that we were able to get her across.” He wrung his hands. “Where is my child? Will I ever see her again?” …