Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy
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Once every two weeks I visited my family, who were still living in Piastów. Irene used to collect me from the convent and take me home. …
The convent refectory smelled of ersatz coffee and slightly burned porridge, while little girls chased up and down the corridors laughing. The whole boarding school was absorbed in preparing a Nativity play for Shrovetide. The play was entirely written and composed by Miss Zosia Orłowska—nowadays Zofia Rostworowska, wife of Poland’s first Minister of Culture after independence was regained in 1989—who rehearsed our roles with us. The show was to be performed before an audience from the city: relatives and friends of the pupils. The little girls of Jewish origin were also eager to take part, so the good Miss Zosia came up with the idea that they would appear as couriers of the exotic Three Kings. Coloured turbans and make-up would disguise their Semitic looks. I was a Negro page and, all backed-up, I could freely show off my gymnastic skills. Nowadays the first-hand accounts that Sister Ena has collected in her book [Where Love Matured into Heroism] remind me of other, less amusing adventures. Anna Kaliska writes: One day three Volksdeutsch appeared in the parlour with a demand to hand over the little Olczak girl, whose mother was a Jew. They demanded an inspection of all the children, and had come with precise instructions. Sister Wanda [Garczyńska] locked the little girl and a few others whose origin can easily be guessed behind the enclosure on the second floor, and the rest had to file into the parlour. Then they began to inspect the house, first the ground floor, then the first floor. Sister Wanda showed them round. Her explanation that the enclosure was on the second floor and that access there was forbidden by the rules of the Order was passed over in silence, and the three Germans started to go up the stairs. We remained on the first floor. I can still hear their heavy footsteps today—I can remember the appalling fear—we knew all too well what would happen to her and the children. Some sisters were praying in the chapel as the footsteps approached the door of the enclosure. Then there was a monent’s silence, and we heard Sister Wanda calmly say: ‘I shall once again remind you that this is the enclosure.’ And again there was a silence, in which it was felt as if everything around us and inside us had died and gone still. And then footsteps coming down the stairs, as they were gone. At that point, at the nuns’ request Irena Grabowska took me away from the convent to live with Maria Jahns in Pruszków. … According to the list, my mother and grandmother spent that terrible Easter at Tworki, where they lived from March to June 1943. … The nuns had taken me back again. The girls in my class were getting ready for their First Communion, including those of Jewish origin, with their parents’ consent, if they were still alive, or that of their guardians if they had any. My secular family approved of the Catholic education that was instilled into me at the convent, besides which I had been christened before the war. Yet the nuns did not force any of the girls in their charge to change their religion. Dr. Zofia Szymańska-Rosenblum, who in September 1942 saved her little niece from the Ghetto and brought her to Kazimierzowska Street, writes in her memoirs: “With the greatest subtlelty Sister Wanda asked me if I would agree to Jasia being christened and taking Holy Communion, assuring me that it was the child’s ardent wishand would be desirable in terms of safety. ‘But if you have any objections, please rest assured that my attitude to Jasia will not be changed and that I shall save the person.’” Jasia’s mother had been deported from the Ghetto earlier, probably to Treblinka, her father fought in the Ghetto to the last moment and must have been killed there. I had no idea about my schoolfriend’s experiences. She did not talk about them, and if she cried, it was only when no one could see. We were both very excited about our First Communion. We wrote down our sins on cards, so that, God forbid, we would not forget them during confession. We spent hours at our prayers in the chapel, and now and then we ran to one of the nuns with the happy news that we felt a ‘vocation’. Two jolly, lively little girls, enjoying life, as if they hadn’t a care. On 3 June 1943 the day of our First Communion came. Some photographs of the ceremony have survived. In one of them seven little girls in white sacramental vestments are posing for the camera—it is the classic souvenir picture, taken by a professional photographer. Five of the girls in the photograph are Jewish. I am astounded by the courage, and at the same time the sensitivity, of the nuns. They heroically regarded hiding these children as their Christian duty. They treated the inevitable threat of death as a consequence of their decision. But where did they get the motherly sensibility that prompted them, amid the all-surrounding danger, to give us a little joy? Not just spiritual but also secular, the kind little girls should have—somehow they knew we had to look pretty in our white dresses, made to measure and decorated with embroidery, that we had to have little white garlands on our heads, our hair twisted into curls, and that we must have a souvenir of that memorable day. Those photographs, and I have several at home, always move me with their festivity and solemnity, absurd, it would seem, in those awful times.Or maybe the photos had some other, hidden aim? Perhaps they were supposed to save us in the event of danger, to convince the people who came for us that as ardent Catholics we did not deserve to die? If that was what the provident nuns intended, I feel even greater emotion as I gaze at our earnest little faces. We all survived. Thank God. Another Jewish rescued in the Warsaw convent of the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary was Felicia Riesel. (Gutman and Bender, The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations, volume 4: Poland, Part 1, p.99.) In 1941, immediately after the German occupation of Lwow [Lwów], Maria and Bronislaw [Bronisław] Bochenek decided to help their Jewish acquaintances who had studied at the university with Maria before the occupation. After the ghetto was sealed off, the Bocheneks took food to David Riesel, a Jewish doctor, and his family. Maria also gave her birth certificate to a Jewish woman named Susanna Glowiczower, which made it possible for her to move to Warsaw. Bronislaw, who was forced to flee because of his left-wing views, settled in Cracow [actually, Warsaw], where he was later joined by Maria. The Bocheneks continued their good work in Cracow [Warsaw], offering shelter to Riesel, his wife, Lea, and their six-year-old daughter, Felicia, who had escaped from the Lwow ghetto. Since the Bocheneks were on the Gestapo’s “Wanted” list, Felicia was transferred to a local convent [on Kazimierzowska St. belonging to the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary79], while her parents fled to Warsaw. The Bocheneks themselves also fled to Warsaw, after finding an apartment in Lwow for the three members of the Amscislawski family, who also sought refuge with them. The Bocheneks likewise sheltered Professor Jozef [Józef] Feldman, who was being hounded by the Gestapo, first in their Cracow home and later in their Warsaw home. In Warsaw, the Bocheneks helped Professor Henryk Glowiczower, Susanna’s husband, who was already in Warsaw under an assumed identity. Throughout the occupation, the Bocheneks saw to all the needs of their Jewish acquaintances who sought refuge with them. They took special care of Lea Riesel, who was in the throes of a nervous breakdown, and her daughter, Felicia, who had taken ill at the convent and required hospitalization. In undertaking these selfless acts of courage, the Bocheneks were guided by an unwavering sense of loyalty to their friends. Conditions at the boarding school on Kazimierzowska Street were described by Zuzanna Sienkiewicz, a frequent visitor, in her account in Bartoszewski and Lewin, Righteous Among Nation, at pages 360–61. In those horrible times Sister Wanda [Garczyńska] radiated love of her neighbours, be they who they may, and even the enemy was not forgotten in her ardent prayers, in her begging God for forgiveness for the crimes being committed incessantly in those times. One of those ‘operations’ of which Sister Wanda was in charge at the time was that of hiding little Jewish girls. She took them into the boarding school with false documents. Some were easily passed off as ‘Aryans’, but others had very prominent Semitic features. These poor little ones would disappear into pre-arranged hiding places whenever there was a visit by the Germans. Some ‘Aryan’ mothers reproached Sister Wanda, asking how, at a time when it was so difficult to get an education for children, a Catholic school could be filled with non-Catholic children to the detriment of Polish Catholics. Sister Wanda was convinced that she was behaving righteously but, like all people truly great in spirit, she was very humble and she decided to seek the advice of a wise priest on this matter. It was then that Father [Stanisław] Trzeciak came to Kazimierzowska St.; he had been known before the war for his stand, often very firm, against the influence of the Jewish faith on our Polish psyche. For many he was the standard-bearer whose public utterances they used to justify their anti-Semitic actions. Then, when Sister Wanda presented the entire argument and the reproaches which she had suffered for her actions, Father Trzeciak remained silent for a moment and then asked: ‘What is the danger to these little Catholic girls if you do not have room for them?’ ‘They will study in worse conditions or they may even completely lose these years of school.’ ‘And what danger would there be to the others if you were to send them away?’ ‘You know, Father, inevitable death.’ ‘Therefore, Sister, you do not have the right to hesitate and consider. Priority goes to those little ones in danger—to the little Jewesses,’ answered the priest. These are facts which I know from Sister Wanda’s own account to me and, in addition, I know that in all the Homes of the Nuns of the Order of the Immaculate Conception, in Szymanów, in Nowy Sącz, in Jarosław and other places, smaller and older Jewish girls were hidden and sheltered and in urgent cases, so were their mothers. In Kielce Voivodship I know of cases where an entire village knew that a Jew or Jewess were hiding out, disguised in peasant clothes, and no one betrayed them even though they were poor Jews who not only could not pay for their silence but had to be fed, clothed and housed.
Sister Wanda had hidden her, her sisters and a sister-in-law of one of them. Found a job for Mala’s husband as a gardener in one of the monastery’s gardens. Most important of all, hid the three little girls. When the mothers came to claim them before coming to the Hotel, the children were ‘full of lice’, Esther took her eyes off the board to look at me—‘but alive and in one piece’. ‘Don’t write anything down, but here is her address. Go to her when in need and she will help you, too,’ she was saying next morning, shortly before the whole group left in an orderly fashion. And to their death, as we now know. A few hours later the Gestapo Marias came and took away everyone still in the Hotel. When the trucks came I was standing in the wide entrance gate of the Hotel. Two girls in a party of workers passing the gate on their way to register at a brick factory in the neighbourhood made room for me between them. … Outside the Hotel they let me go free … My own meeting with Sister Wanda took place late in the fall of that same year when I needed a place to stay. From a dark street up a dark staircase and into a large dimly lit room where Sisters slept all across the floor. Soon I found a mattress, too. ‘Why are you risking the lives of so many people because of me?’ I asked Sister Wanda. ‘For the love of the God we have in common’, she answered. Soon Sister Wanda had a job for me. A country estate had asked for a governess for a high-school boy. Sister Wanda had confidence in my ability to teach the required subjects except one. I was to teach the boy religion. … Here now in 1943 was a nun in her cell patiently teaching me the arcane of her religion, the catechism, the prayers, the mass, to fool her parishioners. The miracle of the mass was the fact over which I stumbled over and over again, both the fact and the significance of the fact that the transformation of the bread and of the wine was happening in front of my eyes. … At the estate, my 14-year-old student showed little enthusiasm for study, secular or religious, thus leaving me plenty of time for the ponds, the woods and air of the countryside. Then on Sunday morning it was time for church. Sister Wanda had warned me in Warsaw not to try to avoid going and I went. No one made any remarks about my behaviour either at church or later. But many eyebrows must have been raised. … Never before except for a school excursion had I been inside a church, let alone during a service in a little country church. I couldn’t have known where to stand, to sit, to get up, make the sign of the cross or to kneel. Other memoirs also attest to Jews leaving the safety of convents for Hotel Polski.84 Lilian Lampert was cared for by the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary first in their Warsaw convent and then in their convent in Szymanów outside Warsaw. (Gutman and Bender, The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations, volume 4: Poland, Part 1, pp.227–28.) Sister Wanda Garczynska [Garczyńska] was the prioress of the Chaste Sisters [Niepokalanki—Sisters of the Immaculate Conception] Nunnery in Warsaw, which served as a shelter for many Jews, especially children, during the war. One of these children was Lilian Lampert, who was admitted into the nunnery’s boarding school with the help of prewar acquaintances of her parents. “I was treated exactly like the rest of the children, which profoundly influenced the whole of my adolescence. I was still learning to play the piano,” Lilian wrote in her testimony to Yad Vashem. Lilian spent vacations in Szymanow [Szymanów], where the sisters ran a boarding school for older girls. At a certain point, the sisters decided to move her there permanently, since Szymanow was a long way from Warsaw and therefore safer. She was then able to see her mother, who had managed to procure Aryan papers. Sister Wanda also helped Roza and Josef Pytowski, who turned up in Warsaw with nowhere to stay after escaping from the Piotrkow [Piotrków] Trybunalski ghetto. Their daughter, Franciszka, asked Sister Wanda for help and she found them a place to stay with two elderly women who were in touch with the nunnery. The frightened women suspected that the Pytowskis were Jewish but Sister Wanda did her best to allay their suspicions. “She took care of my mother as if she was her own mother. She taught her how to behave naturally during services in the nunnery chapel as well as in the courtyard, where joint evening prayers were conducted every day,” wrote Rosa [sic] and Josef’s daughter Maria. “Sister Wanda never regretted having sheltered a Jewish girl and allowing her to join services.” In her Yad Vashem testimony (File 2396b), Lilian Lampert (born in 1931) wrote: The nuns knew of my identity and I retained my real name. They showed great courage by providing refuge for a Jewish child with red hair and Semitic features. … I was treated exactly the same way as any other child at school. … I even continued my piano lessons. Only my outings outside the compounds were curtailed, understandably, for my own safety. Summers and holidays were spent at the order’s affiliate in Szymanów, a village located west of Warsaw, where the nuns conducted a boarding school for high school girls. Since Szymanów was more isolated, and hence seemed more secure, it was decided to transfer Lilian there permanently. Lilian was not the only Jewish child there. I remember, sometime in 1943–44 the arrival of another red-haired girl, and the nuns’ efforts to bleach her hair, which attracted my curiosity. Her name was Jasia [Kon]. That’s all I knew at that time. She too survived the war. Later on, the convent in Szymanów was subjected to constant random inspections by the Germans. Part of the convent’s building was requisitioned to billet soldiers. In the fall of 1944, Lilian Lampert was sent to rejoin her mother, who was hiding in the village of Zaręby Kościelne, near Grójec. They remained there until the area was liberated in February 1945. Lilian still affectionately remembers some of the nuns she had contact with: Sisters Irena, Brigida, Wanda, Teresa, Deodata, Blanka, Bernarda, and also the chaplain, Rev. Franciszek Skalski. The superior of the convent in Szymanów was Sister Maria Krystyna od Krzyża (Joanna Kossecka) until 1943, and Sister Maria Assumpta od Jezusa (Maria Sapieha) from 1943 to 1945. The congregation’s general house was also located in Szymanów, and the Superior General, Sister Maria Zenona od Zbawiciela (Ludwika Dobrowolska), fully endorsed the rescue activities carried out by the order. In her memoir, I Was Only a Doctor,85 Zofia Szymańska (née Rozenblum), a renowned neurophysicist, describes how she found shelter with the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary on Kazimierzowska Street in Warsaw, after leaving the Warsaw ghetto in August 1942. That convent served as a centre for underground activities on behalf of Jews in Warsaw. Within a few weeks, Dr. Szymańska was taken to a small convent of the Ursuline Sisters of the Agonizing Heart of Jesus (Grey Ursulines) in Ożarów, outside Warsaw, where she lived until April 1945. She was accepted with the approval of that congregation’s Mother General Pia Leśniewska. In both convents, Dr. Szymańska received material care and an abundance of spiritual comfort from many nuns and priests (among them Rev. Dąbrowski, a Pallottine, who comforted her greatly in difficult moments). No one attempted to convert her. Dressed as a postulant she would walk around the village asking about the end of war. A Blue policeman, alarmed about her safety, asked the nuns to keep her hidden.86 Although news of her stay at Ożarów was widely known, no one betrayed her, not even when a German military unit was at one point quartered in the convent. Dr. Szymańska’s ten-year-old niece, Janina (“Jasia”) Kon (changed to Kaniewska), who had a very Semitic appearance, was sheltered by the Sisters of the Immaculate Virgin Mary on Kazimierzowska Street in Warsaw, and in their boarding schools in Wrzosów and Szymanów, outside Warsaw, where more than a dozen Jewish girls were hidden. All of the sisters at the boarding school in Szymanów were aware that their young charges were Jews, as were the hired help, the parents of the other students and many villagers. None of the Christian parents removed their children from the school despite the potential dangers, and in fact many of them contributed to the upkeep of the Jewish children. Dr. Szymańska wrote: “The children were under the protection of the entire convent and village. Not one traitor was to be found among them.” Throughout this time Dr. Szymańska remained under the watchful eye of Maria Stefania Górska (Sister Andrzeja), who kept in touch with Janina Kon’s parents in the Warsaw ghetto until they were deported. Dr. Szymańska’s story is also related in Margherita Marchione, Consensus and Controversy: Defending Pope Pius XII (New York and Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 2002), at pages 101–104. With the German occupation of Poland in 1939, the people of Warsaw faced a hopeless situation. Dr. Szymanska became involved in the work of helping thousands of Jewish children. While still working for Centos [the Union of Welfare Societies for Jewish Orphans] during the first winter of the war, she understood the future fate of Warsaw Jews and the lack of help from the Jewish organizations outside Poland, especially American Jews. She knew that this was the beginning of the end. With her two sisters, brother-in-law and nine-year-old niece, Jasia, she lived in the Warsaw Ghetto from October 1940. The Centos Building was bombed on the first day of the War. In 1942, the Germans closed the Centos and her permit was terminated. The program was liquidated. All two hundred residents were exterminated. When the reality of the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto became imminent, Sister Golembiowska [Gołębiowska], who was working with the Polish underground network, persuaded Dr. Szymanska to leave the ghetto with Jasia. They were moved by the network to the Institute for Boys at 97 Pulawska [Puławska] Street. Another Catholic friend, Irene [Irena] Solska, took Dr. Szymanska to Sister Wanda Garczynska [Garczyńska] of the Immaculate Conception Sisters on Kazimierzowska Street. This convent was a link in the underground network to “help those who were hiding and living in danger and misery.” Within seventeen days she was relocated with the Ursuline Sisters. Jasia, entrusted to a family friend and colleague, spoke about the bombings of the Warsaw Ghetto, accidentally disclosed her Jewish background. Immediately she was transferred to Kazimierzowska Street and instructed to approach the gate alone. She knocked and said: “I’m Jasia and I don’t have anyone.” Sister Wanda responded, “No, my child, you are not alone, you have me.” During these years of hiding, Jasia was moved many times among the villages of Wrzosowo [Wrzosów] and Szymanowo [Szymanów] and Kazimierzowska Street. The Gestapo suspected that the nuns, under the pretext of foster care for Polish orphans, were saving the lives of many Jewish children. In spite of constant danger the girls attended classes regularly in a serene atmosphere. Indeed, the heroic role of the Immaculate Conception Sisters in saving Jewish lives needs to be told. In her book, Dr. Szymanska writes: “The example of the Sisters allowed me and others not to lose faith in human beings during those years of atrocities and cruelty.” At the end of August 1942, with the approval of the Mother General Pia Lesniewska [Leśniewska], she was moved to the Ursuline Gray Nuns’ convent in the village of Ozarow [Ożarów]. There she remained for two years and eight months in a small room and was visited by Sister Urszula Gorska [Maria Stefania Górska, Sister Andrzeja], a student of classical philology at Warsaw University [before it was closed by the Germans at the beginning of the war]. From her small convent cell, she looked closely at the lives of the nuns but could not understand their obedience to suspend their obvious enjoyable work routine and their readiness to pray and contemplate. Only later was she able to understand the power of contemplative devotion to God—the sole source of their strength—which gave a sense of meaning and purpose to their lives. She frequently asked herself: Why did God allow this to happen? Why wasn’t Hitler excommunicated? [Hitler had severed his ties with the Catholic Church long before he came to power and considered the Church to be one of his chief enemies.—M.P.] Why didn’t the American Jews organize assistance and intervene with the American Government to help the European Jews perishing in the concentration camps? The Germans began the liquidation of the ghetto in 1942. They transported whole orphanages of children to the concentration camps. After the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, only her younger sister Eliza was still alive and trapped in the Ghetto. Stella and her brother-in-law had been transported to the concentration camp. When she learned the fate of her family, she shared her thoughts of depression and suicide with Sister Gorska. Responding to her needs, one of the sisters moved to her cell to help her. Many were the conversations they had about the need for people to assume responsibility and help save lives. In this crisis, the sisters were influential and encouraged her, but never did they try to persuade her to convert to the Catholic faith. After the Russian offensive in the Spring of 1945, Dr. Szymanska spent the last Easter with the Ursuline Sisters. From documents and statements of eyewitnesses, she found out that the entire village of Ozarow knew that she and others were hiding in the convent. The sisters were aware of the consequences of hiding Jews; yet, without hesitation, they continued the dangerous task and saved many lives. She states: “No other country but Poland paid such a tremendous bloody tribute to the cause of saving Jewish lives. It is an undisputed fact that it is much easier to demonstrate and march for the cause of Jews, as happened in some Western countries, than to hide one of them for years during the German occupation of Poland.” After the war, she returned to completely devastated Warsaw and worked for the Ministry of Education, Department of Child Welfare. She inspected the care given in orphanages. She learned that under the direction of Mother [Maylda] Getter, who saved the lives of several hundred Jewish Children, the Sisters of the Family of Mary was one of the most active congregations protecting Jews during and after the war. Elżbieta Szpilfogel was sheltered by the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Wrzosów (Israel Gutman, ed., The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust: Supplementary Volumes (2000–2005), volume II [Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2010], p.543). During the German occupation of Poland, Julia Halna Dąbrowska and her mother, Gabriela Elżanowska, rescued Maria Szpilfogel (née Rozenowicz), her daughter Elżbieta, as well as her parents, Karolina (Kajla) and Eliasz Rozenowicz. Julia Dąbowska had been friends with Maria Szpilfogel and her sisters Teodora Zysman and Felicja Głowińska at school. As a young girl she would spend time at the Rozenowicz house in Pruszków near Warsaw after school and play with their daughters. Eliasz Rozenowicz, who traded in wood, treated Julia as if she were their fourth daughter. Julia continued to visit them every Saturday after she had her own daughter, Danuta Maria, born in 1933. After the German invasion, the families stayed in touch until the Rozenowiczes were forced to move to the temporary ghetto in Pruszków. At the end of January 1941, when the Germans dismantled that ghetto, they were transferred to the Warsaw ghetto. In the fall of 1942, Maria Szpielfogel [sic], her daughter Elżbieta and cousin Piotr Zysman (later Świątkowski) escaped to the “Aryan” side and hid at Julia Dąbrowska’s apartment at 65 Al. Jerozolimskie, apt. 6. Julia helped the Rozenowicz parents to escape from the ghetto as well and took care of them when they were hiding, first in the village of Wólka Korabiéwićka [sic, Korabiewicka] (between Żyrardów and Skierniewice, Warsaw District) and later on in Milanówek near Warsaw. She stayed in contact with them and visited them. When Elżbieta fell ill, Julia organized surgery for her in the Mikołaj Kopernik Hospital in Warsaw. When the stay of Maria, Elżbieta, and Piotr became too dangerous, she arranged another apartment for them. She also arranged for Elżbieta to stay in the convent in Wrzosów and helped to sell family jewels to support her wards. In order to save her friends, Julia and her mother, Elżanowska, hid them, provided them with food and false documents and even paid off blackmailers from the fall of 1942 until the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944. Julia’s husband, who belonged to the Polish underground Home Army (AK) died during the uprising. Occasionally, they also helped Teodora and Józef Zysman and Felicja and Henryk Głowiński, and their son Michał Głowiński. … Another Jewish girl sheltered by the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Szymanów was Iwona Szenwic (born in 1939), then going by the name of Stenia, the daughter of Dr. Wilhelm Szenwic, who went by the name of Sowiński. Previously, Iwona had been sheltered by Aniela Tomaszewska for eight months.87 Sister Andrzeja (Maria Stefania Górska), who was recognized as a Righteous Gentile, wrote in her statement to Yad Vashem that many Jewish children were sheltered in the children’s home operated by the Ursuline Sisters of the Agonizing Heart of Jesus in Milanówek near Warsaw. Among the charges were Stenia Jankowska, daughter of a doctor from Łódź, and the Raniszewski sisters, who moved to Paris after the war. Emanuella (Illa) Kitz (later Sherman), born in Lwów in 1936, was brought to the convent by her grandmother in 1942; she was removed by her mother after the Warsaw Uprising broke out in August 1944.88 Irena Krzysztoporski, born in 1937, was brought to the convent by her mother after they left the Warsaw ghetto.89 Piotr Ałapin, who was smuggled out of the Warsaw ghetto with his parents, was baptized and assumed the name Pietraszkiewicz before he was brought to the convent. After the war, his mother placed in him temporarily in another convent outside Łódź when her life was unsettled.90 The Jewish children usually had false identity documents and were brought there by family members or by non-Jewish family friends, as well as by Jewish organizations active in the rescue of children. They continued to be sheltered even when their sponsors could not keep up with payments for their upkeep. Fortunately, none of the Jewish children were discovered by the Germans. Mother Pia Leśniewska, the order’s Mother General, maintained close contact with an organization that assisted Jews. Sister Andrzeja, whose main responsibility was the children’s kitchen, in addition to her teaching duties (biology), was dispatched to the ghetto walls where she collected deserted children. When danger lurked, she organized the transfer of Jewish children to other locations. Sister Andrzeja recalled how she took a girl, whose head had to bandaged to disguise her marked Jewish features, from Warsaw to their children’s home in Brwinów. (Testimony of Sister Andrzeja, Yad Vashem Archives, file 7668.) In most cases we knew very well that the children were Jewish. However, even in cases where we did not know for sure, and only suspected they were Jewish, it was never mentioned and never the subject of discussion, and we took the children as they were. … We usually baptized the Jewish children were baptized in those cases where we were told that this was crucial for their survival, especially so as not to arouse suspicion that they were Jews. We wanted all the children to be present every day for confession and prayers. Some of the Jewish children became very attached to the Christian religious rites, but we made them understand that they would not be required to be committed [to accept Christianity when they grew up]. From my contact with tens of Jewish children, I noticed that they needed much empathy and expressions of love, since in the beginning they kept to themselves, which could have aroused suspicion. I decided to break down the wall between them and us and gain their confidence. … Today [1985] in our convent there are several nuns who have been with us after the Holocaust. No one ever came to ask for these Jewish girls, and when they grew up they asked to remain with us and be inseparable from us. … Most of the surviving children we returned at the end of the war or several years afterwards to their families or to representatives of the Jewish community who were armed with appropriate documentation testifying a relationship to these children. … Not one of the Jewish children who were sheltered by us, and especially in the Milanówek house, did not return to his family in a much better condition. … This human experience helped me to better understand the human soul and heart, and especially the soul of a child who suffers through an experience as terrible as the Holocaust. Additional confirmation of the rescue activities of the Ursuline Sisters of the Agonizing Heart of Jesus, who sheltered Jews in Warsaw (three institutions), Brwinów near Warsaw, Czarna Duża near Wołomin, Milanówek near Warsaw, Ołtarzew, Ożarów near Warsaw, Radość near Warsaw, Sieradz, Wilno, and Zakopane, can be found in Gutman and Bender, The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations, volumes 4 and 5: Poland, Part 1, at pages 249–50; Part 2, at page 872; and Gutman, The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust: Supplementary Volumes (2000–2005), volume II, at pages 614–15. [1] During the German occupation, Sister Maria Gorska [Andrzeja Górska], a member of the Ursuline Sisters convent [order], was an active participant in the convent’s [order’s] effort to save Jewish children. Officially, Gorska ran a soup kitchen for orphaned or abandoned children in central Warsaw. Unofficially, her job was to help Jewish children by arranging for them to be smuggled out of the ghetto and transferred to institutions belonging to the Ursuline Sisters, which had branches throughout occupied Poland. In performing these and other dangerous operations, Gorska was inspired by Christian love and a sense of obligation to save human life. Among Gorska’s tasks were obtaining Aryan papers for the Jewish children, protecting those who looked Jewish, and hiding them during German raids. Gorska was in touch with Zegota [Żegota], which supplied her with documents as necessary. Gorska saved the lives of many Jewish children who left Poland after the war. Gorska’s activities are the subject of Dr. Rozenblum-Szymanska’s book Byłam tylko lekarzem (“I Was Only a Doctor”). [2] During the war, Mieczyslaw [Mieczysław] Wionczek lived with his family in Warsaw. He was a student at the underground Warsaw University. In 1941, he met a young Jewish woman who was known during the occupation as Teresa Czarkowska [actually, Idzikowska]. In 1942, Mieczyslaw and Teresa were married. In order to remove any suspicions regarding Teresa’s origins, the wedding was held in the St. Jan [John] Cathedral. All of Mieczyslaw’s family, as well as Teresa’s family, who were then in hiding, attended the wedding. After the wedding, Mieczyslaw’s mother held a wedding reception in her home, which removed any possible doubts that the German authorities might have had. One of the people that the newlyweds Mieczyslaw and Teresa helped during the war was Krystyna Prutkowska [née Flamenbaum], then 19 years old. They offered her work as a maid … In 1943, when Teresa’s niece Antonina Dworakowska [née Perec] fell ill with polio, Mieczyslaw helped her parents find a room for her in the Sisters of Urszula [Ursuline Sisters] convent in Zakopane, where the girl received the required aid. After the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944, Mieczyslaw and the nuns in this convent also hid his wife, who was by then nine months pregnant, as well as Antonina’s parents. Some of the components of the Wionczek rescue have been collapsed in the above entry. Six-year-old Antonina Perec was first sheltered in the Ursuline Sisters’ convent at 30 Tamka Street in Warsaw, together with some other Jewish children. Her parents, Gustaw and Romualda Perec, as well as Teresa Wionczek were taken in by the nuns when the Warsaw Uprising broke out in August 1944. After the uprising, the Jewish charges accompanied the nuns to Ożarów, and then to their convent in Zakopane.91 [3] Kazimiera Sikora became acquainted with the Jewish Wojdysławski family from Łódź at the very start of the war, when they arrived as refugees in Warsaw and rented an apartment near her. From that time a friendship grew between them that continued even after the Wojdyławskis were moved to the ghetto and for a long time afterwards. In April 1943, when the ghetto was liquidated and the Jews were being sent to their deaths, Kazimiera came to the rescue of her friends. By this time, Zygmunt Wojdysławski was already on the “Aryan” side of the city, but the rest of his family—his wife, his 13-year-old twin daughters, and his sister-in-law with her two small girls, aged seven and four—were still in the ghetto. Kazimiera planned how to bring them out of the ghetto down to the smallest details. The first thing she did was to ready an apartment in which to hide them. She also took care of having forged “Aryan” documents waiting for them. Not only did she help to successfully take them out of the ghetto, but she continued to help them by instructing them on how to behave on the “Aryan” side: she taught the girls all the details of Christian customs, the prayers, conduct in church, confession before the priest, and so on. She was also their address for solving various problems that arose in living on the “Aryan” side. When the need arose to move to other apartments she would be there to help them. Kazimiera also arranged to transfer the girls, using assumed Christian identities, to a convent in Milanówek, where they remained until the end of the war. All the members of the Wojdysławski family, who were looked after by Kazimiera, survived the war, and to a great extent thanks to her resourcefulness and devotion; they remained grateful to her for all she had done for them. At the end of the war when they left Warsaw, which was in ruins, to return to their own Łódź, she joined them and went to live with them. They stayed in touch with her for years and even long after they had emigrated from Poland. A number of Jewish adults were also taken in by the Ursuline Sisters of the Agonizing Heart of Jesus. Professor Helena Radlińska (née Rajchman), professor of social pedagogy at Warsaw’s Free University (Wolna Wszechnica Oświatowa), and the Kurz sisters from Poznań were hidden in the order’s mother house on Gęsta Street (now Wiślana Street) in Warsaw.92 The Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (Bazylika Najświętszego Serca Jezusowego), located on Kawęczyńska Street in the Warsaw suburb of Praga (on the right bank of the Vistula River), was under the care of the Salesian Society. During the occupation, the basilica became a beacon of hope for endangered Jews. Fr. Michał Kubacki, the first vicar, was in charge of the parish while its pastor was himself in hiding. He was also the director of Caritas, a Catholic relief organization established on the premises of the church to help the needy. Fr. Kubacki gave shelter to Halina Engelhard (later Aszkenazy, born in 1925). Halina, then a teenager, had jumped out of a transport taking Jews from the Umschlagplatz to the Majdanek concentration camp and made her way back to Warsaw. Her mother, who was also on the train with her, told Halina to get in touch with Fr. Kubacki. Fr. Kubacki agreed to let her stay at the parish. She lived in the Caritas building, located diretly behind the church, for several months. She helped prepare meals for the local poor people and the children who attended religion classes at the church. Fr. Kubacki taught her prayers and religious practices, which were essential to pass as a Catholic, and provided her with a birth and baptismal certificate in another name. From that moment on she became Halina Ogonowska, an orphan from Płock. Halina recalled, “Living in that community without getting to know the principles and practices of the religion would have been impossible. Every day I sat with the priest who taught me religion, the key principles of the faith, and prayers. He was a noble and honest man who respected my roots and didn’t force me to do anything.” Fr. Kubacki’s housekeeper also showed her hospitality. Fr. Jan Stanek, another priest attached to this church as well as another parish in the city, cared for a Jewish girl named Zosia (Zofia), who was eight or nine years and had a Semitic appearance. Her tasks included adorning the church altar with flowers and other light household chores. Both Jewish girls were later transferred to other places, but continued to receive material assistance from the priests. Zosia was moved to a private home, whereas Halina was taken in by the Magdalene Sisters (Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy), who ran a correctional shelter for young women on Żytnia Street. Afterwards she was transferred to the convent of the Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul on Freta Street, also in Warsaw. Sister Bernarda (Julia Wilczek) of the Magdalene Sisters told Halina, “Remember, my girl, that you are Jewish. Be proud of it.” Halina soon found out that there were other Jews hiding in both of these institutions. The Salesians assisted other Jews during the occupation and provided false identity documents to Rozalia Werdinger and others. They issued ardent appeals at private religious gatherings regarding the need to help Jews: “These people are our brothers,” Fr. Kubacki would state. “They have a soul just like us. In the heavenly court, it is not they who will be condemned, but those who murder them today. In God’s eyes, it is man’s behaviour that counts, regardless of his religion. Be he a Buddhist, Jew or Muslim, if he believes in one God and keeps his commandments, God loves him. A good Catholic is not one who follows the religious rituals and regularly attends church to pray, but the one who obeys the commandment regarding fellow men and extends a helping hand to others in need.”93 The following account appears in Gutman and Bender, The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations, volume 4: Poland, Part 1, at page 412. In April 1943, during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the Germans discovered where Halina Aszkenazy was hiding and dispatched her on a transport leaving the city. After jumping off the train, Aszkenazy made her way, with tremendous difficulty, back to Warsaw, where she knocked on the door of Michal [Michał] Kubacki, a director of the Christian charity “Charitas” [“Caritas”] and priest of the Bazylika Church in the Praga suburb of Warsaw. Kubacki, who knew Aszkenazy’s mother and had promised in the past to help her and her daughter, welcomed Halina and immediately provided her with false birth and baptism certificates. Aszkenazy hid in a room in the church for three months, during which time she became acquainted with Christian prayers and rituals. At one point, Aszkenazy was joined by an eight-year-old Jewish girl who was later adopted, on Kubacki’s recommendation, by a Christian family. Kubacki, inspired by compassion and religious faith, also financed the upkeep of two young girls whose rescuers were unable to support them. After being provided by Kubacki with a German Kennkarte, Aszkenazy left her hiding place and after numerous ordeals was liberated. After the war, Aszkenazy immigrated to Israel, where she wrote her memoirs, including Kubacki’s role in saving her life, in a book entitled I Wanted to Live. Additional information about the rescue of Jews at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus came to light in the year 2000 when Edmund Zabrzeźniak presented the church with a votive chalice in gratitude for his rescue. Together with several other Jews, Zabrzeźniak had been sheltered in a chamber underneath the sanctuary of the church. The Germans conducted a careful search of the church premises, even using dogs to sniff out hiding places, but fortunately did not discover these hidden Jews. The entire group survived. They left their hiding place when the Soviets arrived in the area in July 1944.94 A number of Jews were accepted at the correctional shelter for young women on Żytnia Street (at the corner of Wronia Street), near the Warsaw ghetto, run by the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy or Magdalene Sisters (Siostry Matki Bożej Miłosierdzia, commonly known as Siostry Magdalenki).95 Halina Rajman (born in 1929) stayed there for only a very brief period. Since she was emotionally unstable and the Sisters feared she would give herself away, she was placed with a Polish woman.96 Inka Szapiro, then 8 or 9 years old, had previously stayed with the Sisters of Charity on Tamka Street, also in Warsaw, before moving to the Żytnia Street hospice. When the Warsaw Uprising broke out in August 1944, the younger children were transferred to the Magdalene Sisters’ summer home in Szczęśniówka near Wołomin. Inka’s mother, Klara Szapiro, also left Warsaw at that time and was was sheltered in a parish rectory outside Warsaw.97 (Gutman and Bender, The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations, volume 4: Poland, Part 1, p.184.) In the winter of 1942, Klara Szapiro fled from the Warsaw ghetto with her seven-year-old daughter, Nina. After being harassed by blackmailers, Szapiro was directed by an acquaintance to Adela Domanus, who obtained forged papers for her and her daughter and arranged for them to stay with one of her friends. When this hiding place proved unsafe, Domanus placed young Nina in a Christian orphanage [at the convent of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy on Żytnia Street, in Warsaw98] and found a job for Klara as a maid … In risking her life for persecuted Jews, Domanus was guided by sincere humanitarian beliefs, which overrode considerations of personal safety.Jews were often moved from convent to convent, or to other institutions operated by different religious orders of women, to ensure their safety. Maria Teresa Zielińska, born Dora Borensztajn in 1927, stayed in three correctional residences operated by the Magdalene Sisters, two in Warsaw and one in Częstochowa, after her escape from the Warsaw ghetto in October 1940. She was directed first to the Żytnia Street shelter by the congregation’s Mother General, Michaela Moraczewska. She remained at that shelter from December 1940 until May 1941, under the tutelage of Mother Alojza. Subsequently, she was transferred to the order’s correctional institution on Hetmańska Street, in the Grochów district of the Warsaw suburb of Praga, where she remained for more than a year. In June 1943, Mother Alojza sent her to a residence on Św. Barbary Street in Częstochowa, also run by the Magdalene Sisters. (Wiktoria Śliwowska, ed., The Last Eyewitnesses: Children of the Holocaust Speak [Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1998], pp. 148–50.) Death threatened not only me but all those who would accept me and all the tenants of their apartment building. Nonetheless, Janina Przybysz (Ninka) took me with her to 12? or 19? Zielna Street where she lived just with her mother, because her father had died recently … Yüklə 7,11 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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