Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy

Silence.

No one stirred. Not a single breath. We were ready. We would not give up the Jewish children. We would rather die, all of us. The silence was overwhelming—we did not look at each other. The sister was sitting with closed eyes, her hands folded over the Gospel. We were ready.

We got up. We did not even pray together as we normally do. We went to Chapel. We felt light and joyful, though very grave. We were ready.
More than a dozen Jewish girls found refuge at the boarding school run by the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary on Kazimierzowska Street in Warsaw, where Rev. Bronisław Ussas was the chaplain. Among them was Joanna Olczak, born in 1934 to a Polish father and a Jewish mother, Hanna (née Mortkowicz), who had converted and married in the Evangelical (Augsburg) faith. Joanna, like her mother, was considered to be a Jew under German racial laws. Joanna was brought to the school in the spring of 1942. Other students at the school were aware of Joanna Olczak’s Jewish background. (Joanna Olczak-Ronikier, In the Garden of Memory: A Family Memoir [London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004], 253–63.)
I remember Nena [i.e., Irena Grabowska, a member of the Home Army] well. It was she who took me, on the advice of the Sisters of the Order of the Immaculate Conception, from Piastów to the boarding school they ran on Kazimierzowska Street in Warsaw.

I can clearly see my first encounter with that place. I am standing on the threshold of a huge gymnasium, holding Irena’s hand tightly. The shining floor smells of fresh polish. By the wall a large group of girls are sitting cross-legged, all staring curiously at the new girl. I am dying of embarrassment and fear. For the first time in my life I must remain alone in a new place, with strange people. I want to tear away from Irena and run home crying, but I know it is not possible. There is no home, and if I ‘make a scene’ here—my grandmother’s most abusive definition of hysterical behaviour—I shall compromise myself in the eyes of these girls for ever, and that will not help me at all. So I take the first conscious decision of my entire life: I let go of Irena’s hand and, on that shining floor, in defiance of fate, I do a somersault, then a second, and a third, and keep on rolling until I end up at the other end of the room. The girls clap and the nuns laugh. I know I have won their hearts, I feel accepted, and thus safe.

That was when I found a way of coping with life by hiding my true emotions behind a jester’s mask. I put a lot of effort into pretending to be a resourceful, cheerful child and into amusing everyone around me. It was the special skill of many occupation-era children. None of the dozen or so Jewish girls hidden at the convent, some of whom already had terrible experiences behind them, ever despaired or showed their sadness or fear about the fate of their loved ones. The crying was done at night. The day went by as normally as could be, like before the war, criss-crossed with all sorts of activities. The nuns were gentle and smiling. Nowadays I cannot understand how on earth such extraordinary calm and cheerfulness prevailed in that ark sailing on the oceans of the occupation nightmare, when absolutely everything going on inside the convent carried the risk of death. They were not just hiding Jewish children, but also teaching subjects banned by the Nazis. There were secret study groups for secondary-school pupils, secret university lectures, a priesthood [chaplaincy] for Home Army soldiers, contacts with the underground, help for prisoners and people deprived of a living, and food for malnourished Jews who had escaped from the Ghetto. Courageous and composed, the nuns were only people, after all, and must sometimes have been terrified at the thought of what would happen if the Germans discovered just one of those crimes. Everyone knows how easily adults’ worries are passed on to children. How did they manage to protect us from fear? They did not hide the danger from us. Frequent alarm practices prepared the schoolchildren for surprise raids by the Germans. When an internal bell rang during lessons, we gathered the pre-war books for Polish and history from our desks double-quick and shoved them into a special storage space—a sort of cloakroom-among our shoe bags and gym kits, where we always put them away after school anyway. Sometimes the alarm was real—then the nuns hid the endangered children in the enclosure. I am told that I once sat inside the altar for a few hours during one such search, but I cannot remember. By then I was already thoroughly versed in conspiracy. I knew by heart all the new facts in each successive fake identity card. This time my mother was called Maria Olczak, née Maliszewska, and my grandmother had become her own daughter’s mother-in-law, borrowing the name Julia Olczak, née Wagner, from my father’s late mother. My grandmother’s sister Flora, alias Emilia Babicka, née Płońska, daughter of a carpenter born in Łunińsk in Byelorussia, was no longer her sister, but just a chance acquaintance. Flora’s husband Samuel was called Stanisław. Luckily he was still her husband, which made his life much easier, because his daughters, Karolina and Stefania, who had two different surnames and were not apparently related to each other or to their parents, were always making blunders and were incapable of hiding their family connections. It was all very complicated.

What did I tell my schoolmates at the boarding school about myself? I do not think anyone ever asked me any questions, which is amazing, because everyone knows how full of curiosity little girls can be. Evidently the nuns issued a strict ban on talking about personal matters. That must be why I had no idea about the situation and origin of the other pupils. How many secrets those little heads must have been hiding. How many lies they must have contained. How much information as seemingly basic as one’s first name, surname and family address they had to bury as deep as possible in their memories to avoid revealing them accidentally and causing a disaster. The challenge to ‘be yourself!’—that basic condition for mental sanity—had been replaced with the categorical order: ‘Forget who you are and become someone else!’—which was a life-saver, but later on, after the war, made life immensely complicated, because it was hard to recover one’s lost identity.