Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy

My guide took me to a small three-room apartment on the first floor. Mr. and Mrs. Chumatovsky, with whom I was to stay, worked in the [armament] factory. …

In a tiny room in the apartment I found Zille, [Zalman] Friedrych’s wife, and their five-year-old daughter, Elsa. Friedrych himself lived elsewhere….

Five-year-old Elsa was a pretty, active blond child who blue eyes radiated life and spirit. She could not understand why we had to remain constantly cooped up in our small room, not even going for a walk in the courtyard. In other ways, however, she was sometimes frightened by here awareness of the dangerous situation.

Sometimes I would forgetfully lapse into Yiddish. The child would become almost hysterical. “Stop speaking that language. Don’t you realize it means our lives?” she would hiss sharply in Polish.

Elsa would sit at the window, watching other children at play in the yard. Often she would cry. Fearful of attracting attention, her mother would try to quiet the girl. Sometimes the only way was to stuff a handkerchief into the little mouth. The child’s crying made our landlady very nervous. The neighbors knew that she had no children. She was afraid that we would be discovered. She had heard terrible tales of how the Germans stamped out the lives of little Jewish children with their boots, and then shot the mothers and their Gentile hosts as well. …

The nervous anxiety soon began to tell on our hosts. Our landlady was often in tears. Her hysteria multiplied our own fears. Together with our hosts we began to cast about for a way in which little Elsa might be removed to safety. Our landlord had a sister who was Mother Superior in a convent near Cracow [Kraków]. We decided to send the child to her.

Mrs. Chumatovsky went there first to discuss the project and to make the necessary arrangements. When she returned with a favourable answer, we prepared the girl for the trip. She was told that she was going to an aunt’s where there were other children with whom she could play outdoors and have lots of fun. For several days our landlady taught the child how to say prayers in preparation for her new life and new name under the crucifix. The child slowly accustomed herself to the new role. Her intuitive understanding of the danger which hung over her and her mother drove her to do her best. She seemed to know instinctively that all this was necessary to avert a terrible catastrophe.

With a heavy heart, her lips pressed tightly together to restrain her sobs, Zille packed Elsa’s things and sent her away.

Mrs. Chumatovsky stayed with the child at the convent for several days. Elsa would not let her leave. She wept and pleaded not to be left alone. When the child was somewhat calmer Mrs. Chumatovsky was able to return.

Exactly where the convent was, the Chumatovsky, of course, refused to say. In case of arrest the parents might not be able to endure the torture and might give the information to the Germans, bringing tragedy to the convent and all its inmates. Besides, the parents, in their anxiety, might attempt to communicate with the child and unwittingly betray the secret. The Chumatovskys obtained a Catholic birth certificate in the girl’s new name and assumed legal guardianship over her.
Just before the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944:
We also managed to take little Elsa Friedrych out of the convent near Cracow [Kraków] where she had been hidden. The child of our heroic Zalman Friedrych was now completely alone; her father had perished in a gun fight with the Gestapo, her mother had been killed in Maidanek [Majdanek]. She was later brought to the United States and adopted by American comrades.
In actual fact, Zygmunt Friedrych’s daughter, who used the name Elżunia, was sheltered at the orphanage of the Franciscan Missionary Sisters of Mary in Zamość, whose activities are described later on. Marek Edelman, one of the leaders of the ghetto revolt, is said to have collected the child after the liberation.⁷⁸
Whether or not a Jewish child should be christened also proved to be a contentious matter that was not always easy to resolve. In order to blend in, a Jewish child in a Catholic institution or passing as a Christian in a Catholic milieu needed to receive the sacraments together with the other children. To do so without incurring sacrilege required that the child be baptized. This often posed a dilemma for nuns and priests, as well as for the parents of the Jewish child. (Goldstein, The Stars Bear Witness, pp.224–25.)
I am reminded of an incident—one of hundreds—which occurred in the family of Shierachek, the former Jewish policeman, my fellow tenant on Grzibovska [Grzybowska Street in Warsaw]. His sister was a servant in a Christian home in Waver [Wawer, a suburb of Warsaw]. Naturally she had to act the part of a Catholic. Regularly each Sunday she attended church and participated in the religious ceremonies with her neighbors. Her thirteen-year-old daughter lived with her, under the protection of her employers’ daughter, a schoolteacher. Supposedly, the little girl’s parents had been arrested by the Nazis, and she had been placed in the custody of the teacher. The girl was raised as a Christian.

The mother, although not at all religious, was deeply concerned about the child. She feared that in time the little girl would forget that she was a Jew and begin to feel truly like a Christian. She would thus be lost to the Jewish people.

Before her school examination, the little girl had to go to the priest for communion with all the other students. The teacher, a deeply religious woman, refused stubbornly to be a party to this deception. Her convictions would not permit her to send a Jewish child who had not been converted to such a holy ceremony. It would be a betrayal of her own religious faith.

The teacher consulted two other priests—the priest at the school was permitted to know nothing about it. One of them told her that his convictions would not permit him to baptize the girl under compulsion. The second, considering the desperate situation of the child, agreed to perform the ceremony.

Now the mother was assailed by doubts. She was afraid that the impressiveness of the ritual would give her child the final push toward Catholicism. In her anxiety she came to Grzibovska to consult with her brother, Marek Edelman, and myself. Hard and bitter, Marek was inclined to oppose the whole idea on the ground that it was tantamount to capitulation. Child or adult, he was damned if he would recommend knuckling under to those Nazi bastards. To hell with them! But the more conservative counsel of Shierachek and myself prevailed. To save her life, the child must be baptized.
Decisions to shelter Jews in convents of nuns were often made unilaterally by the superior general of the order or by the superior of a particular convent. Sister Maria Zenona od Zbawiciela (Sister Mary Zenona of the Redeemer, or Ludwika Dobrowolska), the superior general of the Order the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Siostry Niepokalanego Poczęcia Najświętszej Maryi Panny, commonly known as Siostry Niepokalanki), was well informed of the order’s rescue activity and encouraged it wholeheartedly. In the order’s Warsaw convent on Kazimierzowska Street, the decision to shelter Jews was made collegially. The superior, Sister Wanda Garczyńska, wanting a unanimous agreement, summoned all the nuns to a meeting which began with a reading of the Gospel of St. John, chapter 15, verses 13 to 17, that begins, “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for a friend …” and ends “These things I command you, that you love one another.” Ewa Kurek-Lesik records the event, as movingly related to her by Sister Maria Ena who took part, in “The Conditions of Admittance and the Social Background of Jewish Children Saved by Women’s Religious Orders in Poland from 1939–1945,” Polin: A Journal of Polish-Jewish Studies (Oxford: Basil Blackwell for the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies, 1988), volume 3, at page 247.
It was 1942–43. The school on Kazimierzowska had been closed. The SS was based in a huge block opposite our house, where the RGO [Central Relief Council] kitchen was open and functioning almost without a break. The people, too, came in a constant stream—children, young people, adults with canisters for soup. Only for soup? For everything. Kazimierzowska pulsated with life—from the nursery to the university. Amongst the hive of activity there were also Jewesses. Real ones. With red, curly hair, freckled, with prominent ears and unusual eyes. Thoroughbreds. There could be no mistake. It was well-known that concealing a Jew meant the death sentence.

The sister knew that other orders had already been warned and searched. So she hid nothing, withheld nothing. She called us together. She began the conference by reading a fragment of the Gospel of St John. … She explained that she did not wish to jeopardise the house, the sisters, the community. She knew what could be awaiting us. There was no thought of self. She knew: you should love one another as I have loved you. How? So that He gave His Life.

I lowered my head. I did not dare look at the other sisters. We had to decide. If we said one word, openly, honestly admitted to fear for our own skins, our own lives, the lives of so many sisters, the community. … Was it prudent to risk it for a few Jewesses? It was our decision whether or not they would have to leave.