Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy

Przemyśl had a Jewish population of 20,000 at the start of the war. When the city was liberated in 1944, only some 250 Jews had survived the Nazi terror.

Hedy’s mother had in the meantime found work in a nearby village, under a new identity, and on occasion brought food to the orphanage for her daughter’s sake. “I was forbidden to show the slightest sign that I knew her,” relates Hedy, “for fear of the other children. I had to disregard her completely.” The fear of detection was a constant threat to the children and the orphanage as well. Various tactics were used. One was to tell the Jewish boys “that if a stranger comes to the convent and asks a boy what he wants to be when he grows up, he should say a priest,” Sister Alfonsa relates, adding, “We took the children to church along with Polish children, not because we were trying to make them Catholics but just so nobody would suspect they were Jews.”

Sister Alfonsa was committed, soul and heart, to her charges. She saw to it that the children did not lack food or clothing during those years of dearth and want for the local population. Not able to repress the severe traumatic experience which had preceded their placement in the orphanage, the Jewish children were prone to sudden bursts of hysterical weeping. “Sometimes at mealtime a child would cry and throw his food on the floor,” Sister Alfonsa recalls. Miriam Klein remembers some of the children screaming at night and wetting their beds. “Sister Alfonsa always knew how to calm us. Sleeping with us in the small room she was alert to every noise and often got up at night to place an additional blanket on the frightened children.”

Immediately upon the city’s liberation, Sister Alfonsa took the thirteen Jewish children to the newly constituted Jewish Committee in Przemyśl and promptly turned them over. “They were Jewish children and belonged with Jews,” Sister Alfonsa emphasized. In one case, a father who was a shoemaker, made a pair of new shoes for Sister Alfonsa as a sign of his appreciation.

… Recalling her stay at the orphanage, Miriam Klein remarks, “I was privileged to experience calm and mental relaxation, and there I discovered the best and most beautiful of women.”

The account of Miriam Klein (Maria Reinharz, born in 1933) is found in Elżbieta Isakiewicz, Harmonica: Jews Relate How Poles Saved Them from the Holocaust (Warsaw: Polska Agencja Informacyjna, 2001), at pages 191–98.
My father was very well liked among the Polish population, he belonged to the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), which was valued in the Polish intellectual community, and he also was on good terms with Kedyw [the diversionary command of the Polish Home Army] …

… he tried to find another place of shelter [for me]. It was a convent of the order of the Sacred Heart in Przemyśl, in Mickiewicza Street, where they also ran an orphanage. One of my father’s acquaintances dealt in cattle and knew the Mother Superior of the convent, who was a descendant of the Czartoryskis—Sister Emilia Małkowska. She herself had brought up the subject in a conversation and stated that she was going to rescue Jewish children. There were already Jewish children at the convent, but not from Przemyśl, only from Wołyń [Volhynia]. I said that I wasn’t going to any convent. Then my father took me up to the attic where there was a small window—there was an operation taking place right then. They [the Germans] were catching children and killing them. I saw how, on Mikołaja Street, they were taking these children by the legs and smashing their heads against the walls. I saw how they were burning dead bodies mixed up with living ones and layers of wood. They set fire to these heaps with petrol or something of the kind, I don’t know what, but the whole town was saturated with the smell afterwards and tew wind made the ashes fly in the air. What else did I see? People hanged with dogs. … So my father said, ‘You’re thinking about death? Look, that’s what it looks like. If you don’t go to the convent, the same will happen to you.’