Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy

Despite what Raul Hilberg has said in his book The Destruction of the European Jews, thousands of Jews escaped from the Warsaw ghetto, and thousands—not “several hundred”—were living in Warsaw. The people who escaped (Hilberg called it “evasion”) either hid with the help of Poles, or became partisans, or, like me, lived openly by using Polish identities. The latter was possible only if one did not “look Jewish”, and could blend with the Polish background, as far as language and behaviour are concerned.

This was a dangerous life; many did not make it. But living with Poles gave me an insight in the Polish way of thinking about the Jews and the Holocaust. I met all kinds of Poles; they did not know I was Jewish, nor anything of my personal background. My father founded the Zionist organization in Chmielnik; my grandfather, founder of a synagogue in Chmielnik, was a Zionist and taught his sons to follow his path.

In the scene of Shoah that I saw, a stupid-looking group of country folk was asked by Claude Lanzmann, the director of the film, why the Holocaust had happened. They replied that perhaps the Jews had their blood on their own hands, because they had killed Jesus Christ. I never heard this anti-Semitic statement during the Holocaust. The implication is that the idea comes from the Catholic Church, but in that case would the Church have helped the Jews?

I must state here positively that many Poles, and the Church too, helped the Jews, knowing that there was a death penalty for that. I do not say there was no anti-Semitism in Poland, or that there were no Polish blackmailers, or collaborators with the Gestapo, paid “per capita” for denouncing Jews. All of us passing as Poles had very painful encounters with such criminals. But how can one expect that there would be no criminals among the Poles? Is there any country in which criminals would not take advantage of the vulnerable? …

Nazi propaganda described deportations from the ghettos as “resettlement for work.” Many wanted to believe this: Jews are optimists, and the truth about deportations was difficult to believe for the Jewish victims in the ghettos, and for the West, where these facts were known. Clandestine data were brought to Chmielnik by Anielewicz, the hero of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; my mother believed him. She decided that the family had to flee, and got the necessary Polish documents. My grandfather was shot by the SS. My father was sent to Buchenwald. But four members of my family escaped in the last week before the deportation. My mother found shelter in Warsaw; it did not work out. She ran to Cracow [Kraków], to which I had gone directly from Chmielnik. A mother of my Polish friends recommended me to a woman who had a room to rent. My mother, however, had to rely on little hotels, boarding houses, and pensions, swamped by Jews escaping from the ghettos, where a witch hunt for Jews was going on. My mother went through a terrible ordeal: she stayed only a few days in each place. I kept finding new accommodations for her. She could barely survive.

But then a landlady recommended her to the Sisters of Charity, a group of Roman Catholic nuns. She found a safe haven in the Retirement Home in Szczawnica, where she survived the war with other Jewish “retirees”—as far from retirement age as she was. I met her in 1944 in Cracow [Kraków], where she was brought by the Sisters. She could not find words to thank them. They gave her not only economic but moral support, without which she could not have survived the many months of anguish about my fate, especially the two months of the Warsaw Uprising [of August 1944]. Nothing is equal to what the Sisters did for my mother.

With this tale of survival in Poland, I hope to rectify some of the unjust treatment of Poles in historical accounts of the Holocaust.
The Daughters of Mary Immaculate extended help to Jews in various localities. The following accounts pertain to the towns of Hrubieszów and Lida. (Jan Żaryn, Dzieje Kościoła katolickiego w Polsce (1944–1989) [Warsaw: Neriton and Instytut Historii PAN, 2003], pp.17–18; Jan Żaryn, “The Catholic Church Hierarchy vis-à-vis Polish-Jewish Relations Between 1945 and 1947,” in Łukasz Kamiński and Jan Żaryn, eds., Reflections on the Kielce Pogrom [Warsaw: Institute of National Remembrance, 2006], p.83.)
Sisters in Hrubieszów aided Jews especially during the liquidation of the ghetto. Sister Błażeja Bednarczyk … transported Jews and their belongings from the ghetto to the town square and she fulfilled their requests such as buying food, fruit and other items. On several occasions she thought that she would not manage to survive the ordeal, because the Gestapo had caught her red-handed [and was nearly shot].
The Sisters also sheltered an 11-year-old girl in their convent in Hrubieszów. (Kurek, Your Life is Worth Mine, pp.125–26.)
‘One day, we found on the porch [in Lida] two small children of Jewish nationality aged one-and-a-half and two-and-a-half years old. The children were horribly neglected. One of the boys suffered from trachoma and the other had an enormous furuncle on his head. It was the war—one could not get necessary medicines, and there were no separate rooms for them so they had to sleep in a common room with the healthy children. Sister Konstancja [Bolejko] worked hard during the day and watched over the children during the night. She suffered all that hardship only to save the children and spare them from death. She baptized the boys, giving them both the name of Antoni. We kept it most secret from the other children that they were Jewish. But somehow somebody must have found out about it and informed the Germans since an automobile soon arrived at the house. The Germans asked to speak to the director and they immediately asked about the whereabouts of the Jewish children. I replied that there were no Jewish children in our place and asked Sister Nela to bring the children which had recently come to us. We had previously agreed that we would show Polish children whose nationality would be easy to prove, and that we would hide the small Jews. That time we succeeded and the Germans left empty-handed.’ … One morning in the spring of 1944, two persons dressed in military uniforms and carrying rifles and rucksacks appeared and headed straight for our barn, where we hid with the children. … The said that we are looking for our children, those who had been left on the porch. … The parents were overjoyed to see their children.
An unusual rescue was that of Dr. Olga Goldfein (Goldfajn), who twice took refuge in the convent of the Missionary Sisters of the Holy Family in Prużana, in eastern Poland. Unable to remain there permanently, dressed in a nun’s habit, she made her way with Sister Dolorosa (Genowefa Czubak), to her benefactor’s family home near Łowicz, in central Poland. They were assisted by many priests along the way—in Białowieża, Łapy, Sokoły, Dąbrowa Wielka, and Małkinia. Genowefa Czubak was recognized as a Righteous Gentile by Yad Vashem. The following account was prepared in 1945, shortly after the events in question. (Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, eds., The Black Book: The Ruthless Murder of Jews by German-Fascist Invaders Throughout the Temporarily-Occupied Regions of the Soviet Union and in the Death Camps of Poland During the War of 1941–1945 [New York: Holocaust Library, 1981], pp.206–12.)