Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy

The Early Years of the German Occupation, 1939–1941
The Germans perpetrated atrocities against both Poles and Jews from the very first days of the subjugation of Poland. On September 4, 1939, the Germans killed several hundred Jews in Częstochowa. Hundreds more Jews and Poles were rounded up and driven into the Cathedral of the Holy Family where they were shut up without food for two days and two nights. Appeals to the German authorities were fruitless. Priests tried to comfort and help the captives as much as they could. Avraham Bomba, one of the interned Jews, recalled, in particular, the assistance provided by Rev. Bolesław Wróblewski, the pastor of the cathedral parish. Rev Wróblewski is mentioned in later accounts regarding the rescue of Jewish children. (Interview with Avraham Bomba, September 18, 1990, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.)
You come into the house. Imagine yourself. … Somebody comes in without anything, without any reason. Out from the house. Not allowed to take water, not allowed to take bread … bread, not allowed to take anything. And in the street. In the street with guns, they start running after you until … until you got to the place. … they took me into a church. The church … was the Holy Family Church. … the people they couldn’t get so fast in the back of the church. The got killed in the front going in through the door. And they killed a lot of people that way. We were there. There was no food. There was no water. There was no places, you know, for the human being … We were over there, a priest. … His name was Wróblewski. He was one of the finest gentlemen of the Catholic priest I have ever met. He said to us, “Children, never mind you’re without any church. You do whatever you can. …” He tried to bring in water for us. And really, I admired him as a gentleman. He knew that we are Jews … We’re there for three days …
In Będzin, not far from the German border, the Germans started to harass Jews as soon as they entered the city on September 4, 1939. In a public display, they forced rabbis to cut off each other’s beards. According to Jakub Sender, a witness to those events, the Catholic priests were appalled by this spectacle and expressed their sympathy to the rabbis who were subjected to this ordeal. The Germans falsely accused the Jews of firing at German soldiers. In retaliation, on the evening of September 8, they set fire to the synagogue and Jewish houses on Plebańska and nearby streets. Jews fleeing from their burning homes were fired at by the Germans. They converged on the nearby parish church of the Blessed Trinity. Their screams alarmed the pastor, Rev. Wincenty Mieczysław Zawadzki (usually referred to as Mieczysław Zawadzki), who immediately ran to open the gate to the churchyard in spote of the protests of German sentries. He led the terrified Jews to safety on Castle Hill.¹⁵ Jews were also hidden in a nearby shelter run by the Passionist Sisters, who tended to the wounded.¹⁶ The Germans then blamed the Poles for setting fire to the synagogue and Jewish houses. They arrested 42 Poles and executed them summarily that same night.¹⁷ Later during the war, Rev. Zawadzki also sheltered a Jewish family.¹⁸
In 1960, a delegation of Jews presented Rev. Zawadzki with the memorial book of the Jewish community of Będzin with the following inscription:
To the Most Reverend and Distinguished Dean Mieczysław Zawadzki. We present you with this book which embodies the soul of the Jewish community in Będzin, in gratitude and full appreciation for your humanitarian and courageous dedication in rescuing human lives from sure annihilation. The Jewish community of Będzin, living in Israel, will never forget your remarkable person, who risked his own life to tear away many of our brothers from the hands of the Nazi assassins.
In 2007, Rev. Mieczysław Zawadzki was recognized by Yad Vashem as a Righteous Gentile. Icchak Turner, who lived near the synagogue, submitted the following account to Yad Vashem (The Righteous Among The Nations, Yad Vashem, Internet: ):


In 1939, the Nazi army invaded Będzin and settled there. On the eve of September 9, the soldiers broke down the gates of the houses surrounding the synagogue, threw hand grenades and fired shots in every direction. They ordered everyone to come out, claiming that the Jews had shot at them from the synagogue windows. Once the Jews were lined up against a wall, the soldiers told them to run away. Those who did not run were shot immediately, and those who did flee were followed by haphazard shooting as well. Then the soldiers set fire to the synagogue, condemning the Jews that had taken shelter inside to a horrible death.

Several Jews, including Icchak Turner, ran desperately for the church on the hill. The soldiers sprayed machine gunfire after them, and many were wounded. A bullet went through Icchak’s arm; a friend running next to him was killed. Some of the Jews, however, managed to reach the church. The priest, Mieczysław Zawadzki, threw open the gate and told them to come inside quickly. When they were inside, he ordered several nuns to dress their wounds and administer them first aid.

Once everyone’s immediate needs had been addressed, Zawadzki spoke to the Jews and explained that if the Nazi soldiers reached the church and found out what had happened, both he and his nuns would be executed. He therefore opened the back gate of the church and led the Jews out into the graveyard, where they could spend the night without being discovered.

The next day, Icchak Turner rose at dawn, left the graveyard and went to the hospital to seek medical help. He survived the war, aided by local Poles who worked in the area, including Michał Jagiełłowicz. Several other Jews who had found shelter in the cemetery that night survived as well.

The survivors from the region established an association after the war. The association erected a plaque on the wall of the church in Będzin to commemorate the brave and noble wartime act of Mieczysław Zawadzki.
The Polish medical staff at the hospital in Będzin, among them Sister Rufina (Tekla) Świrska, the superior of a group of Sisters Servants of the Blessed Virgin Mary Immaculately Conceived employed at the hospital as nurses, came to assistance of wounded and sick Jews. Upon discovery by the Germans, they faced harsh consequences for their selfless acts of mercy. (Kosibowicz Family, The Righteous Database, Yad Vashem, Internet: .)
Tadeusz Kosibowicz was … director at the regional hospital in Będzin. During the first days of September 1939, the hospital was flooded with wounded people, including a Jewish man named Skrzypek who needed a long time to recover. However, on September 4 Będzin was occupied by the Germans, and any help offered to Jewish soldiers immediately became a capital offense. Kosibowicz decided to change the … [Show more]patient’s name to Krawczyk and give him a fictitious job at the hospital in order to keep him there longer. Together with other wounded people, several doctors flocked to the hospital, including Ryszard Nyc and Sister Rufina Świrska, who became Kosibowicz’s confidantes in his illicit attempts to save as many “outlawed” patients as possible. Two days later, the Germans set the local synagogue on fire when it was full of Jews. Anyone who tried to escape was met with a hail of machine gunfire. Still, some managed to flee with their lives. Among them was Icchak Turner, who spent the night outside, but in the morning decided to seek help at the hospital for his wounds. The doors were blocked by the Germans, but Kosibowicz, aided by a local priest called Zawadzki [Rev. Mieczysław Zawadzki], managed to smuggle in some of the wounded Jews, among them Turner and another man named Huberfeld, whose sister Sala later testified from Israel about Kosibowicz’s brave display of human kindness. In late April 1940, a young [German¹⁹] patient was admitted to the hospital, with vague complaints. She became friends with “Krawczyk” and spent much time talking to him. Later she was heard transmitting an ambiguous message via the hospital’s telephone, revealing her true identity as a spy. That same night, “Krawczyk” was taken away and killed. The next day, May 8, three Gestapo men came to arrest Tadeusz Kosibowicz. They also took his friends and helpers, Ryszard Nyc and Rufina Świrska. The three were sentenced to death for “aiding enemies of the Third Reich and Jews.” However, as they stood in front of a firing squad, the sentence was commuted to deportation. Between 1941 and 1945, Kosibowicz endured five years of various concentration and death camps: Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Majdanek and Gross-Rosen. He suffered immense personal humiliation and pain, and witnessed the deaths and suffering of countless others. However, he never abandoned his humanity, tending to sufferers officially or unofficially throughout the war. In Gross-Rosen, a wounded Jewish patient from Będzin named Zvi Landau was brought in to see Kosibowicz. He told the doctor that he had heard that a year after Kosibowicz’s deportation, a parcel of ashes was sent to his wife with claim that they were the remains of her husband. At this, Landau testified, Kosibowicz broke down in tears and said that while he couldn’t find a job for Landau at the clinic, he would send him food. He kept his promise until Landau was sent to a different camp. In 1945, after liberation, Tadeusz Kosibowicz returned to Będzin physically and psychologically exhausted.
Sister Rufina (Tekla) Świrska was arrested by the Gestapo on May 7, 1940, held in a prison in Sosnowiec for two weeks, and then sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp where she was imprisoned for six months. After her release on November 11, 1940, she had to flee to the Generalgouvernement where she stayed at various homes of the congregation under an assumed identity.²⁰
Another eyewitness from Będzin, Helen Stone recalled (Lyn Smith, ed., Forgotten Voices of the Holocaust [London: Ebury Press/Random House, 2005], p.76):
They burned our synagogue with the people inside. Opposite the synagogue was a church, and about two o’clock in the morning the priest heard that the synagogue was burning and he ran to the church, opened the door in case somebody ran out of the inferno, and quite a few people did; he saved their lives. I was moved about nine or ten times in Bedzin [Będzin] as they were making streets Judenrein—cleansed of Jews.
This was a pattern that was repeated throughout Poland. As the German army rolled through, Jews were systematically rounded up, abused and executed. Scores of synagogues were torched. The synagogue on Dekert Street in Sosnowiec was burned down on September 9, 1939. Shortly after occupying the town of Przeworsk, 35 kilometres east of Rzeszów, the Germans searched the synagogue and claimed to have found ammunition there. In retaliation, they razed the building on September 12, 1939. The Gestapo arrived from Jarosław to execute 30 Jews. “Survivor Harry Kuper testified that the Germans, soon after entering Przeworsk, ordered the Jews gathered in a church. After an elderly rabbi failed to report, the Germans selected every tenth man from among the assembled, took them away, and pretended to torture them to find out the rabbi’s whereabouts. After a man disclosed his hiding place, the rabbi was arrested and thrown into a hole for execution. Observing the scene from his window, a priest was shot for intervening. The prisoners, including the rabbi, were released.”²¹
The following eyewitness report, published in The Inter-Allied Review, no. 3 (March 1941), describes the daring but futile intervention of a priest in Szczucin, a small town near Dąbrowa Tarnowska, where the Germans burned down the synagogue on September 13, 1939.
It happened in Szczucin on the day of the Great Pardon [Day of Atonement, September 13, 1939], the most solemn of Jewish religious holidays. In spite of the German occupation, all Jews, old men, women and children, had assembled in the four or five houses of prayer. At 11 A.M., four lorries stopped before the synagogue near the Market Place and about a hundred SS. Men alighted armed with revolvers and machine guns.

Half of the surrounded the synagogue while the other half entered it and evicted the faithful. They tore their prayer vestments from their bodies, and stripped them naked to the belt. Then they threw out the sacred scrolls, the prayer books and the embroidered vestments which they tossed upon a pile of straw. Silver and gold vessels were placed in the lorries.

Whipped and hit with butt-ends, the Jews were compelled to dance around the pile, and the oldest among them were ordered to set fire to the straw. When the victims would not consent, they were beaten, kicked, slapped, and spat upon. The Germans pulled their beards and peyses [payes—a long beard], tore the wigs off the women, and jeered at their shaved heads. They pulled the hair of the young girls, tore off their dresses, and forced them to run naked around the Market Place. Now and then, the Nazis fired volleys into the air to scare the already panicky crowd.

At noon time, the vicar of the local Roman Catholic Church appeared on the scene in his sacerdotal vestments and implored the German officers to release the Jews and to permit them to continue their prayers. The SS. Men laughed at him and the officer told the priest that his turn would come. A few minutes later the Germans set fire to the straw pile and the synagogue which was totally destroyed within one hour …
Conditions in Gorlice, which was captured by the Germans on September 7, 1939, are described in the following accounts which note the assistance rendered by Catholic priests. (Entry for “Gorlice” in Abraham Wein and Aharon Weiss, eds., Pinkas hakehillot Polin [Encyclopedia of Jewish Communities in Poland], volume 3 [Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1984], pp.93–97; Yoel Rappoport, “This Is How We Were Taken Captive Before the Enemy,” in M. Y. Bar-On, Gorlice: The Building and Destruction of the Community, Internet: , translated from Sefer Gorlice: Ha-kehila be-vinyana u-ve-hurbana [Israel: Association of Former Residents of Gorlice and Vicinity in Israel, 1962], pp.227ff.; Testimony of Sabina Honigwachs Bruk in Michał Kalisz and Elżbieta Rączy, Dzieje społeczności żydowskiej powiatu gorlickiego podczas okupacji niemieckiej 1939–1945 [Rzeszów: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej–Komisja Ścigania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu, Oddział w Rzeszowie, 2015], pp.109–10.)
When they entered the city, the Germans took several hostages, both Poles and Jews. The Wehrmacht soldiers began taking Jews for forced labor, stealing their property and abusing them (cutting off their beards). The Jews received permission from the [new] administration to hold prayers in the synagogue on the Jewish New Year, but the local priest warned them that the Germans were planning a trap for them in the synagogue, so they didn’t go there to pray. A group of Germans did arrive at the synagogue on the holiday, but they found no Jews praying there they settled for destroying the interior of the synagogue. Around that time the Wehrmacht soldiers caught several Jews (5 or 7). Took them out of the city and murdered them.
Rabbi Moshe’ly Miller applied to the German commander of the city to permit the Jews to gather for prayers in the synagogue on the Day of Atonement. The permit was given, but the priest Swinkowski [Rev. Bronisław Świejkowski] secretly notified the Jews that they shouldn’t dare gather in the synagogue on the eve of the Day of Atonement, as he had heard from a reliable source that a trap was being prepared. In the afternoon of the eve of the Day of Atonement the first groups of the Gestapo entered Gorlice. Until then we had only dealt with the Wehrmacht (the regular army). On the night of “Kol Nidre” [the prayer beginning the evening service on the Day of Atonement] they [the Gestapo] attacked the synagogue, which was empty of Jews, according to the advice of the priest, [who was] one of the righteous gentiles. [The Gestapo] took out their anger on the wood and the stones: they broke up all the furniture, smashed the light fixtures, dirtied the walls, etc. This wasn’t enough for them, until they caught several Jews on the night of “Kol Nidre”, took them to their office in the railroad station building, and beat them murderously as their wickedness dictated, but then released them. I too was among them. An entire book would not be long enough to describe the sights of those hours.
Apart from the pastor [Rev. Kazimierz Litwin], who was favourably disposed towards Jews, there was also a prelate in Gorlice, an old man who was 83 years old at that time. The prelate’s name was [Bronisław] Świejkowski. He too tried to help Jews in those critical days. His help entailed creating an appropriate atmosphere among Polish society. He preached the principles of love of one’s neighbours and thus encouraged people to be favourably disposed towards Jews.
In the town of Rawa Mazowiecka, east of Łódź, both Protestant and Catholic clergymen showed their solidarity and support for a rabbi that was cruelly mistreated by the Germans. (Entry for “Rawa Mazowiecka” in Danuta Dabrowska and Abraham Wein, eds., Pinkas hakehillot Polin [Encyclopedia of Jewish Communities in Poland (Łódź and Its Region)], volume 1 [Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1976], pp.257–60.)
During the first days of WWII, Rawa was heavily bombed, and its population was severely affected. The Germans entered the town on September 8^th1939, at which time all the Jewish males were gathered in the market square, where the Germans indulged in a sadistic game. Among other things, Rabbi Rappoport [Rappaport] and the Rabbi of Oiyazed, who was staying in Rawa at that time, and many of the Jewish dignitaries, mostly aged, were made to run several kilometres in the direction of Tomaszow [Tomaszów Mazowiecki]. In a nearby wood the Germans threatened to kill them. Rabbi Rappoport asked for permission to return home to arrange for the burial of his son, who had been killed in the bombardment. The Nazis mocked him, abused him and dealt roughly with his daughter who had run after her father. She returned to the town to bury her brother. The two rabbis were held in the forest until late in the evening, flogged and only then released. On another occasion the Germans accused the Jews of killing a German soldier. They ordered all of the Jews to gather in the market square. The women were locked up in the church and abused by the Nazis. The men were ordered to lie face down and were threatened that whoever makes one move will be shot. They lay like that until evening, when they were made to stand against a wall; a number of them were shot. On that day the Germans searched the Jewish homes; some witnesses say that Polish homes were also searched. The total number of people killed on this day was estimated at 40, 23 of them Jews.

One day all the Jewish men were ordered to gather in the market square to have their beards shaved. Rabbi Rappoport, who was still in mourning for his son, was also brought. The rabbi’s daughter asked the local Protestant priest to plead with the German authorities to let her father keep his beard. The rabbi was allowed to keep his beard but was sentenced to 100 lashes and the priest was threatened with severe punishment for speaking on behalf of the rabbi. After 30 lashes the aged rabbi fainted and was taken to hospital. What is noteworthy is that the Catholic priests, and the Protestant priest who spoke up for the rabbi, came to visit him. Later the Germans searched the rabbi’s home and stole his property, including money and jewellery that Jews had given him for safekeeping. The rabbi fell ill as a result of these events and died shortly afterwards.
Often, as in the small town of Poddębice near Łódź, priests were treated on par with rabbis, so there was no question of priests being in a position to come to the defence rabbis. (Entry for “Poddebice,” in Encyclopedia of Jewish Communities in Poland, Internet: , translated from Pinkas hakehillot Polin, volume 1, pp.184–86.)
Shortly after the Nazi armies conquered the town, (on September 14, 1939, the Jewish New Year), the Germans arranged a “show.” They ordered the people to organize two procession—a group of Jews with Rabbi Rothfield in front, and Poles with the local Priest. Later, they imprisoned all those who marched for three days. Finally, they forced the Rabbi and Priest to collect with their hands the excrement which had accumulated.
Large numbers of Jews as well as Poles fled eastward before the advancing German army. Refugees, regardless of their origin, met with widespread sympathy and support on the part of Poles. As we shall see, they were well received at convents and monasteries too. A Jewish refuge from Aleksandrów wrote in 1940 (Yad Vashem Archives, file M.10/AR.1–789):
I want to raise here one more issue how the [local] population through which we passed treated us, the refugees. One must admit that regardless of our Jewishness they did whatever they could—and sometimes even more—to ease our distress. … People we didn’t even know literally dragged us to their home [saying] that they could not allow Jews to be left in the streets in those days.
Rev. Stefan Wilk, pastor of Chełmica Duża near Włocławek, issued false baptismal certificates to three Jewish families from Włocławek: Paljard, Dyszel and Milner. They lived under their assumed identities in Łochocin, north of Włocławek, before fleeing to Eastern Poland in 1941. From there, they made their way to Palestine. Rev. Wilk was arrested by the Germans on October 23, 1939. He was imprisoned in Fort VII in Poznań, Stutthof, Sachsenhausen, and Dachau, where he perished on February 9, 1943.²²
Jews often fled from their homes is search of safety and refuge in surrounding towns, as was the case for a teenage girl from Różan (nad Narwią), a small town near Pułtusk, northeast of Warsaw. Many Poles, among them priests—like the one in Maków Mazowiecki, came to their assistance. (Rachel Weiser-Nahel, “I Was Just Thirteen,” in Bejamin Halevy, ed., Sefer zikaron le-kehilat Rozan (al ha-Narew) [Tel Aviv: Rozhan Societies in Israel and the USA, 1977), p.40 (English section); translated as Rozhan Memorial Book, Internet: .)
When the war broke out we fled to the village of Bagatella [Bagatele] where we had many friends—the village-head among the rest. A few days later he told us to leave explaining that such were the orders he had received from the Germans, who had threatened to [take] revenge on anybody would contravene—and that included his family, too. It was on Sabbath-Eve. Everything was ready to receive the holy day and the table was laid. We had to leave all this behind and went back to Rozhan [Różan], where we stayed for another few weeks. Those were dark days. Jews were walking about sullenly and downcast. Everyday the men had to go out to forced labor and you could never be sure of coming home safely. …

At the same time another group was made to build fortifications. The murderers killed Shmuel from the oil-mill while he was working. We were bewildered and felt helpless. One of the “good” Germans advised us to try to get away: “There'll be no life for you here.” So we moved to Makov [Maków Mazowiecki], but couldn’t stay there either. The priest, one of the honest Gentiles, bribed the Nazis in order to make them let the Jews alone. They agreed on the condition that strangers who had arrived as refugees leave the town. So we had to clear out in all haste and come back to Rozhan. We stayed overnight with a Gentile woman, called Brengoshova … where we also found the Greenwalds and my aunt Rebecca and her children.
At the behest of the Jews, in September 1939, Rev. Jan Kanty Lorek, the bishop of Sandomierz, dispatched Rev. Adam Szymański, the rector of the diocesan seminary, and Rev. Jan Stępień to negotiate with the German authorities for the release of some 1,200 Jews held by the Germans in an open-air camp in Zochcin near Opatów together with some Poles. Initially, the German authorities demanded one million złoty for the release of the prisoners. The Jewish community was only able to collect 63,000 złoty. After further negotiations, the German authorities agreed to accept 100,000 złoty. Bishop Lorek agreed to pay the difference, the large sum of 27,000 złoty, from the diocesan funds. Bishop Lorek later sheltered Jews in the bell tower of the cathedral in Sandomierz. The rabbi of Ostrowiec, Yechezkel Halstock, turned down Bishop Lorek’s offer of shelter, insisting that he could not abandon his community to save himself.²³ After the war Bishop Lorek received letters of gratitude from Jews who survived with his assistance.²⁴ In his memoirs, Rev. Jan Stępień, a professor at the diocesan seminary, recalls Bishop Lorek’s and his own role in the dealings with the Germans in September 1939. (Julian Humeński, ed., Udział kapelanów wojskowych w Drugiej wojnie światowej [Warsaw: Akademia Teologii Katolickiej, 1984], p.282.)
All the men of military age, including Jews, numbering around 2,000, were taken from Sandomierz and interned in an open-air camp in Zochcinek near Opatów. With the authorization of Bishop Jan Kanty Lorek, I attended there and pleaded with the commander of the camp to release them. After lengthy negotiations he agreed to their release on the payment of 20 złotys per person. I collected contributions with Mr. Goldberg, a shoemaker from Sandomierz. After collecting half the sum we went to Zochcinek. The commander refused to release the Jews. I stated that the Jews too were citizens of the town and that I had come in the name of the town council and would not leave without our Jewish citizens. We were successful. I remember that autumn evening as long columns of men passed by me. Although it was dark, the eyes of those men glowed with sincere appreciation. Prayers in my intention, and in that of Bishop Lorek’s, took place in the Sandomierz synagogue for a week.
Jewish sources confirm the assistance extended by the Sandomierz clergy in these rescue efforts. (Eva Feldenkreiz-Grinbal, ed., Eth Ezkera—Whenever I Remember: Memorial Book of the Jewish Community in Tzoymir (Sandomierz) (Tel Aviv: Irgun yots’e Tsoizmir be-Yisra’l: Moreshet, bet iedut ‘a. sh. Mordekhai Anilevits’, 1993), pp.565–66.)
After our release, we heard that Nuske Kleinman and Leibl Goldberg, who had miraculously evaded the march to Zochcin, asked the Polish priest, professor Szymanski [Rev. Adam Szymański, the rector of the diocesan seminary], who was known as a friend of Jews, to intervene with the Germans on our behalf. He immediately got in touch with the German authorities in town. We also heard that the Sandomierz Bishop, Jan Lorek, intervened with the authorities on our behalf.
Rev. Jan Stępień’s later efforts on behalf of Jews—he did all all in his power to persuade the Germans to exclude from labour duties Jews who were old and disabled—are described in Marian S. Mazgaj, In the Polish Secret War: Memoir of a World War II Freedom Fighter (Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland, 2009), at pages 36–37.
In organizing Jewish work brigades in Sandomierz, the Nazis requested that Father Jan Stepien [Stępień] serve as an intermediary between themselves and the Jewish community. As a professor of biblical studies in the diocesan seminary of Sandomierz, Father Stepien knew the Hebrew language and spoke German. He did all in his power to persuade the Nazis to exclude from the work brigades Jews who were old and disabled. At times, he was successful in his persuasions. The Jews of Sandomierz respected him.

One time, Father Stepien went to a watchmaker in the city who happened to be an elderly Jewish man and asked him to repair his watch. The watchmaker took the watch and asked the priest to pick it up the following day. When the priest came back the next day, the watch was repaired. The priest asked the watchmaker how much he owed him. “One singly zloty [złoty],” was the answer. The priest looked at the Jewish man with disbelief because one zloty represented very little monetary value. The watchmaker noticed his customer’s surprise and said, in a way of explanation, something to this effect.

A long time ago there was a very famous monarch. One of his ministers was a Jew. On the occasion of the king’s birthday, he invited his friends to his palace for a banquet. A Jewish minister was one of the invited friends. When the dinner was over, the king went around the tables and offered each guest a cigar. Men lit their cigars and began to smoke but the Jew did not. He held his cigar respectfully in his hand and waited. The king noticed this and asked as to why he did not smoke the cigar. The minister replied, “This cigar, which came from your majesty, is too valuable for me to smoke. When I return home, I will frame this cigar and inscribe underneath, This cigar was given to me by His Majesty, the King. My children and grandchildren will read it with a great respect and admiration.” You understand what I am trying to tell you, Father? I will not spend this single zloty I asked of you. I will frame it and write under it that it came from a priest who knows our sacred language and who saved me and many other Jews from the Nazi forced labor and possible death. My children and grandchildren will view it with a great reverence.
Because of his involvement in the Polish underground, Rev. Stępień had to flee Sandomierz in March 1942 when the Germans started to carry out mass arrests of the Polish intelligentsia. He moved to Warsaw where he became the chaplain for the Carmelite Sisters. The Carmelite convent in the Wola district also served as a hideout for Arie Wilner (“Jurek”), a liaison officer of the Jewish Fighting Organization outside the Warsaw ghetto, about which there is more later.²⁵
In Biłgoraj, Dawid Brener brought to the local hospital a German soldier who had been wounded in a skirmish with Polish soldiers in September 1939. In the meantime, the Germans retreated and the Soviets entered the city. After their return to Biłgoraj in October 1939, the Germans accused Brener of shooting the German soldier. Despite the pleas of the Jewish community and the intervention of Rev. Czesław Koziołkiewicz, the local pastor, Brener was executed in October 1939.²⁶
The remarkable recovery of a Torah scroll salvaged by a Polish priest from a synagogue set on fire by the German invaders in September 1939 came to light at a moving ceremony at Boston College. (Ben Birnbaum, “Journey’s End: Torah Scroll Rescued by Priest Finds Home among BC’s Jews,” Boston College Magazine, Fall 2002.)
In 1939 in Poland, shortly after Nazi troops had invaded, a Catholic priest saved a Torah scroll from a burning synagogue. The name of the priest is not known, nor the location of the synagogue. What is known is that in 1960, the priest told another Pole that he would like to entrust the Torah to an American Jew. And so he was led to the U.S. embassy in Warsaw, where he handed the Torah in its green velvet slipcover to Yale Richmond ‘43, a career foreign service officer who was the embassy’s cultural attache.

Richmond held the Torah for 42 years, not quite knowing what to do with it, until the day recently when he was surfing the Web from his home in Washington, D.C., and discovered that his alma mater hosted a small but vital Jewish student group and had founded the Center for Christian-Jewish Learning to advance understanding between the two faiths. One of the center’s directors was Rabbi Ruth Langer, also a member of BC’s theology department. “I sent [Langer] an e-mail asking, ‘Would you like a Torah?’” he recalled.

And so on October 11, Boston College was the site of an ancient and traditional “Greeting of the Torah” ceremony, as about 80 people—members of BC’s Jewish community, representatives of its other religious communities, and guests and friends—gathered on a Friday afternoon to mark the completion of the scroll’s long journey. …

Richmond, 79, a bearded Boston native who also served in Germany, Austria, Laos, and the Soviet Union before retiring from the foreign service, was one of four Jews in his BC graduating class. He explained his gift of the scroll to the University by saying, “Catholic Poland sheltered its Jews for more than 500 years, a Catholic priest rescued the Torah from a synagogue torched by the Nazis in 1939 and sheltered it for 21 years, and Boston College sheltered me for four years and awarded me the degree that enabled me to make a start on a 30-year career.” …

While the provenance of the Torah—its synagogue and town—are not known, an expert’s evaluation in September determined from various stylistic touches and dedicatory inscriptions that the Torah was of Polish origin, that its creator was Rabbi Shmuel Shveber, a highly regarded scribe of his time, and that it was completed in 1919.
Yale Richmond’s sentiments about Poland are shared by historians who are well aware that Poland welcomed Jews from the 14^th century onward, when they arrived en masse fleeing expulsions and pogroms in Western Europe. The next few centuries were a period when Jews enjoyed their Golden Age. Not only did Jewish religion, culture and communal life flourish in pre-partition Poland, but as historian Barnet Litvinoff compellingly argues, “Conceivably, Poland saved Jewry from extinction.”²⁷
In September 1939, the Germans forced Jewish and Polish prisoners to march from Łomża to the town of Kolno. Upon their arrival in Kolno, the inhabitants came out into the street and threw food to the prisoners. Yehuda Chmiel, one of the Jewish prisoners, remembered “a Catholic priest, who pushed himself into the rows of captives and distributed bread and fruit among them, without discriminating between religions and races. ... After a time, we heard that the Germans had tortured and executed him.”²⁸
The public mistreatment of Jews by German soldiers raised consternation among the Polish population and caused priests to intervene. Professor Karol Estreicher, of the Jagiellonian University, witnessed the following scenes in Drohobycz, in southeastern Poland, in September 1939. In order to protect his family in Poland from retaliation by the Germans, Professor Estreicher published his memoir in 1940 under the pseudonym of Dominik Węgierski. (Dominik Wegierski, September 1939 [London: Minerva, 1940], p.151.)

The first scene which struck me as I came to the Market Square was the sight of a group of Jews loading manure on a cart with their hands. The work was supervised by a Storm Trooper with a whip in his hand. He was whistling a gay tune and now and then striking some of the Jews, or pulling their beards. Sometimes he gave one of them a well-aimed kick.

The Polish population looked on with indignation on such treatment of human beings, and many peasants or workmen expressed their disapproval. In the afternoon the Germans began a looting of the Jewish shops. … The Jews stayed at home, afraid to go out. But the Germans, using revolvers and riding-crops, forced the younger Jews to help in the loading of the robbed goods.

The Germans took a particular delight in forcing the Jews to perform revolting or filthy tasks. The Jews were told to clear away manure, dead animals and men, and every kind of dirt, without using any implements which might help them not to soil their hands. The population of Drohobycz was definitely against such methods. The local parson—who before the war did much to help the Polish co-operatives to take business out of Jewish hands²⁹—called on the commander of the garrison and protested against such public indignities. The commander made a gesture of helplessness—a well-known trick of the Germans—and listened sympathetically to the complaint, but said that the Gestapo alone were responsible for the whole business. He advised bribery.

In some areas sandwiched between the Nazi invaders from the East and Soviet invaders from the West, local Polish authorities fled or ceased functioning during the turmoil. The ensuing breakdown in law and order was seized upon by criminal elements and riff-raff to loot property often belonging to Jews. Priests spoke out to curb these abuses. Rev. Michał Jabłoński, pastor of Tarnogóra near Izbica, condemned the looters and demanded that they cease their activities.³⁰ The Soviet invaders were welcomed by the Jewish population of Grabowiec, and pro-Communist factions, for the most part Jews, formed a Red militia. Forty-two wounded Polish soldiers were executed by the Soviets on September 25, 1939, during their brief occupation of that town. The following account likely pertains to Rev. Józef Czarnecki, the local pastor. (Sh. Kanc, ed., Memorial Book of Grabowitz [Tel Aviv: Grabowiec Society in Israel, 1975], p.17.)

I must mention here a courageous priest, who warned the faithful, from the pulpit, not to plunder the Jews or attack them. Such acts were against Christianity and Humanity, the priest admonished.
There is a similar account from Dąbrowa Białostocka. At the behest of the rabbi and Jewish town elders, a priest dissuaded a group of villagers from looting Jewish property after the Germans had retreated and before the Soviets took control of the area in mid-September 1939.³¹
In at least one small town, Garbatka near Radom, the Germans incited local Christians to start up a petition calling for the removal of the Jewish population. This was part of a strategy to make it appear as if the Germans were acting at the behest of or to placate the wishes of the conquered people for whom they otherwise displayed nothing but contempt. The Germans turned to the local priest to endorse the petition but he refused to put his signature on it, there torpedoing the project.³² Another form of incitement, equally unsuccessful, was to compel the local rabbi to go to the church in the town of Dąbie on the Ner River, mount the pulpit, and yell out that the Jews were responsible for the war.³³
Bishop Marian Leon Fulman of Lublin was arrested on October 17, 1939 and sentenced to death for his “anti-German” activities. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and he was sent to the Oranienburg concentration camp near Berlin. In 1940, he was transferred to Nowy Sącz, where he was imprisoned for the duration of the war. (Ronald J. Rychlak, Righteous Gentiles: How Pius XII and the Catholic Church Saved Half a Million Jews from the Nazis [Dallas: Spence, 2005], pp.152–53.)
Bishop Fulman called together the priests from his and other nearby dioceses. He told them that “the new Jewish reserve the Nazis have set up here in Lublin is a sewer. We are going to assist those people as well as our own, as well as any man, woman or child, no matter of what faith, to escape; and if we lose our lives, we will have achieved something for the Church and for God.” Bishop Fulman’s activities led to severe retaliation from the governor-general of Occupied Poland, Dr. Hans Frank. Bishop Fulman was incarcerated, and he saw many of his priests die in the concentration camp. Following one execution, Hans Frank addressed Fulman:

“We shall exterminate all enemies of the Reich, including you, Bishop, down to the lowest of your kind. When we have finished with Europe, not one of you will be left … Not one. No Pope. No priest. Nothing. Nichts.”

“God have mercy on you,” Bishop Fulman [replied].

“God better have mercy on you,” Frank mocked. “You obey the orders of the Vatican, and for that all of you will die.”

In his wartime diary, Dr. Zygmunt Klukowski recorded the following on October 22, 1939 concerning Rev. Józef Cieślicki, the pastor of Szczebrzeszyn, in Lublin voivodship. (Władysław Bartoszewski and Zofia Lewinówna, Ten jest z ojczyzny mojej, Second revised and expanded edition [Kraków: Znak, 1969], p.645.)
Eleven Jews were arrested, taken to court martial and prepared for further measures. A group of Jews went to see the canon, Rev. [Józef] Cieślicki, pleading with him to intervene with the Germans. A committee [of Poles] promptly approached the German authorities …
According to the town’s memorial book, a number of Poles came to the assistance of the Jews, icluding Rev. Cieślicki and an unnamed vicar. (Dov Shuval, ed., The Szczebrzeszyn Memorial Book [Mahwah, New Jersey: Jacob Solomon Berger, 2005], pp.149–151, 155):
26 September 1939,—In such a hiding place in an attic, Abraham Reichstein’s son-in-law, going up into the attic, wanted to take up the ladder. However, seeing an SS trooper below, out of fear, he let the ladder down on the German’s hand, and injured him.

After this incident, an order was issued immediately, that Jews were not permitted to leave their homes. All of the Jews, men and women, were pursued like animals across the town, to the city hall, heavily guarded on all sides.

The lawyer, Popracki [Henryk Paprocki, a member of the National Party] learned of this. He went off to the priest, Cieslicki [Józef Cieślicki] and both went to the burgomaster [mayor] Franczek [Jan Franczak]. All three made their way to the German commandant, and declared to him, that the incident with the ladder was just an accident, and represented that such an incident will not happen again. The commandant went out to the people with a long speech, and warned, that if this ever happened again, or there was a similar incident, that every tenth Jew would be shot. Until the commandant appeared, the Rabbi, Yekhiel Blankaman and Shlomo Maimon had been beaten, among others. …