Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy
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Kutz was a young Jew of 10 in June 1941 when the German army invaded his town of Neswizh [Nieśwież] near the Polish-Soviet border. …
Then came Oct. 29. The German commandant ordered all Jews to assemble at the town square. … … Jews were then marched to different areas around the city where, the night before, Jews had been forced to dig pits that would be used as mass graves. … There, the prisoners were made to undress, to jump into the pits one-by-one, and to lie down. … The Germans threw grenades into the pits and shot at the people in them with machine-guns. Then more people were put through the same treatment. “Many people were buried in these graves alive, wounded and unable to escape,” Kutz says. “I happened to be one of the lucky ones.” Kutz wasn’t seriously wounded, although he figures he must have been hit over the head with a rifle butt. He regained consciousness at the onset of dusk. … As small as he was, he pushed a few bodies on top of each other, stood on them and looked out. Seeing no one, he climbed out of the grave and ran some two kilometres to a convent. … At the convent, he rang the hand bell outside the building’s gates. The mother superior [Idelfonsa Jaroń] answered. “She immediately took off her robe and threw it over me because I was naked,” Kutz says. Inside the convent, he was washed and dressed in the oversized clothes of the janitor. But he couldn’t stay. The religious told him that would be too dangerous. If he were caught, he would be killed. So, Kutz says, the nuns packed him a bag of food and directed him to a neighboring village. … There, Kutz went to the home of a gentile farmer, a friend of his father, who kept him through the winter. … The farmer, however, collaborated with the underground resistance movement. In the spring of 1942, he made contact with Jews in that movement who took Kutz to live in the forest. Michael Kutz expands on his story in Alvin Abram, The Light After the Dark (Scarborough, Ontario: Abbeyfield Publishers, 1997), at pages 57–60. As he ran, he looked for shelter … In the distance, he made out the outline of a large building and recognized it as a convent. Michael ran towards it, remembering that the women in black clothes were the ones who took care of the poor and sick people on the streets of Nieswiez. Desperate for the warmth of a room, he pushed himself to the front gate, hoping they would help him escape from the Germans. … When the door opened, with his last ounce of strength, Michael lunged inside and around the person blocking the door. He turned to face a woman dressed in black. She appeared ageless, small, slightly bent in posture from the years of homage and she looked fragile. Surprise swept across her face, seeing a naked boy appear out of the night. She removed her cape and covered Michael with it. With quiet dignity, her voice soft and filled with kindness, she asked, “Who are you, my child? Where did you come from?” Michael could not speak. “Why are you here?” Michael cried. “I am the Mother Superior of this convent. How can I help you?” With his tears flooding down his cheeks, Michael explained what had happened in Nieswiez and begged the Mother Superior for her help. Listening intently, she nodded her head a few times as Michael related what his tired and confused mind could remember. She led him into the inner recesses of the convent, along darkened, cold and forbidding corridors into the kitchen. In a locker by the door, she found clothes belonging to the janitor and gave them to Michael. Though much too big, he put them on, and cleaned himself by the sink, while the Mother Superior prepared hot food and administered to his cuts and bruises and doctored his head wound. After he had eaten, she sat across from him. “You cannot stay.” “Why?” “It is not safe for you here nor is it safe for those who cannot leave.” “Hide me. I will not be in anyone’s way.” “It is not that. The risk is too great. If they find you, we will all suffer. Our lives are in danger if you stay.” “I have nowhere to go.” “I can direct you to those who may help you. I can do no more.” The fear of returning to the darkness overwhelmed him, but he was given no choice. The Mother Superior prepared a bag of food, and gave him directions to a neighbouring village. Quickly the Mother Superior ushered him out the convent gate, wishing him God’s protection and locked the door after him. … … When he had almost reached his destination, Michael remembered the gentile farmer who showed his kindness when the family was in need of food. Aware he was near his farm, he decided to change directions, and seek out his help. Upon reaching the farmer’s home, Michael knocked on the door. When the surprised farmer saw Michael, he swept him into his arms crying with joy, that he had survived the massacre and was safe. He was ushered into the house … Michael related his story, and when he was finished the farmer recounted to Michael what he knew. “The Germans ordered several local farmers to the two sites days ago, he among them and had them dig the pits,” he said. “They would return each day, and make the hole bigger until finally ordered to stop and leave the site. Before they left, Ukrainian and Lithuanian soldiers arrived in trucks filled with gypsies and cripples and killed them all. Their bodies were thrown into the pit as one would dispose of a worthless carcass. The farmers were unprepared for what they saw and some screamed hysterically. Others went into shock, their minds unable to accept the barbarism of what they had witnessed. One went mad. The Ukrainian and Lithuanian soldiers had blood on their uniforms, and appeared indifferent to their act. It was a horrible sight that will haunt him for the rest of his life.”… The farmer offered to hide Michael in the stable until Spring. Since it was obvious he was not part of the family, it was imperative he not be discovered or all were doomed. Michael stayed hidden from October 1941 until April 1942, coming outside only at night when no one was around.
Mother Ksieni looked sad as she explained that I could not stay for very long because both the German and the Belorussian police were searching the area for escaped Jews. If they were to catch me there, everyone would be shot. I tod them that my father was friends with a Polish-Catholic family who lived near the village of Rudawka and that if I could get there, the family would surely hide me. The nuns gave me directions for the five-kilometre trek through forest and fields. As I said goodbye, the nuns and the mother superior knelt down to give me a blessing to help me reach the Polish peasant safely. The Benedictine Sister of Wilno are remembered for their courage and devotion to their Jewish charges. A number of Jews took refuge in their convent adjacent to St. Catherine’s Church, at vatious times. The rescue activity had two distinct phases. The first chapter was initiated in September 1941, when the aged Mother Superior, Julia Milicz, agreed to take in a group of Jews. Since the convent was cloistered, she turned to Archbishop Romuald Jałbrzykowski for permission to house the Jews. At first, Julia Milicz was assisted by her own sister, Jadwiga Milicz, who was also a nun at this convent. However, since this large group of Jews occupied a room in one of the wings of the boarding school, their presence soon became known and all of the nuns assisted in the rescue operation. Among them was Sister Benedykta, or Maria Mikulska, who became prominent in the second part of this story. Mikulska refers to the Milicz sisters in her testimony as “saintly beings.” The first group of nine Jews included Jonasz (Jonas) Bak, his wife Mitia (Mita or Mitzia, later Markowsky), and their son, Samuel (born in 1933); Mitia Bak’s sister, Jetta (Yetta), and her husband, Jasza (Yasha); and two other Jewish women. Mitia Bak’s aunt, Janina Ruszkiewicz, a convert to Catholicism, was instrumental in arranging for the Baks reception at the convent. Tragedy struck at the end of March 1942, when all of the convents and monasteries in Wilno were shut down and hundreds of members of the Polish clergy were arrested. On March 23, 1943, the Gestapo and their Lithuanian collaborators raided the Benedictine convent, arrested the nuns, and imprisoned then in Łukiszki prison. Unlike the clergymen, who were sent to internment camps, the nuns were released two months later and ordered to remove their habits and disperse. Luckily, the Jewish charges were not detected by the Germans at that time and they returned to the Wilno ghetto. In the meantime, the building housing the Benedictine convent was given over to the municipal archives, and placed under the directorship of Rev. Juozas Stakauskas, who had moved to Wilno from Lithuania. The convent now housed vast amounts of documents and items looted by the Germans in the city and surrounding areas. After her release from prison, Maria Mikulska was one of the few nuns who returned to the former convent building and began to work in the archives in September 1942. Among the labourers sent to the archives was a group of Jews from the ghetto. A hiding place was constructed which eventually held twelve Jews, among them: Zofia (Sara) and Yakov Jaffe, and their daughter, Monika (Yakov Jaffe’s mother also hid there, but died); Yakov Jaffe’s sister, Esther Kantarovich; Dr. Alexander Libo, his wife, Vera, and their daughter, Luba (later Gilon); Grigori (Grisha) Jaszunski and his wife, Irena; and Miriam (Mira) Rolnik. Mitia Bak, and her son, Samuel, joined the others later on, through the intercession of Maria Mikulska. Mikulska cared for the needs of the hidden Jews. Two other nuns (Sister Łucja, Świerzawska), who also returned to the convent, were aware of the Jews’ presence and assisted Mikulska in obtaining food for them. Sister Łucja helped Mikulska smuggle Samuel Bak into the building. The Polish artist, Rydłowski, also helped with food and selling things for the upkeep of the hidden Jews. The Jews remained in the building until the liberation of Wilno in July 1944. A Pole by the name of Łucznik came across one of the Jews near the end of their stay, but did not betray them. (As luck would have it, he was killed during the bombing of the city.) Maria Mikulska (Sister Benedykta) was recognized by Yad Vashem as a Righteous Gentile, as was Rev. Juozas Stakauskas and his assistant, Vladas Žemaitis.250 The following account is from Gilbert, The Righteous, at pages 79–81. Samuel Bak was only eight years old when the German army entered Vilna [Wilno]. A child prodigy, he had the first exhibition of his drawings a year later, inside the ghetto. After his father was sent to a labor camp, he and his mother were taken in by Sister Maria [Mikulska], the Mother Superior of the Benedictine convent just outside the ghetto. ‘In time we became very good friends, Sister Maria and I,’ he later wrote. ‘I always waited impatiently for her daily visit. She supplied me with paper, coloured pencils, and old and worn children’s books, gave me lessons from the Old and New Testament, and taught me the essential Christian prayer. After several days Mother’s sister, Aunt Yetta, joined us; later her husband, Uncle Yasha, and Father, after they managed to escape the camp in which they had been long interned, were granted the same asylum.’ Only the Mother Superior and one other nun knew that there were men hiding in the convent. Eventually, as so often, the threat of discovery or denunciation loomed, and a new hiding place had to be found. [This occurred during the massive raids on Catholic convents and monasteries carried out by the Germans and Lithuanian police in March 1942, when scores of Polish priests and nuns were rounded up and interned.—M.P.] This was a former convent in which the Germans had housed the looted archives of a dozen museums and institutions in Vilna and the surrounding towns: ‘Trucks loaded with confiscated riches arrived daily to be unloaded in the ancient building’s courtyard,’ Samuel Bak recalled. ‘There the nuns, dressed now in civilian poverty, met a number of Jews who were sent every day from the ghetto to carry and pile the thousands of volumes, documents, and rare books that filled its rooms and corridors. One small group of them created a hiding place for the days that they foresaw would follow the final liquidation of the ghetto. The evening Mother and I arrived was a few months after the liquidation. Three families were now living buried under the books.’ Sister Maria and Father Stakauskas, a Catholic priest and former professor of history who was employed to supervise and sort the looted material, provided the hidden Jews with food and other necessities. ‘Had the authorities discovered their selfless acts, they would have been tortured and executed,’ Bak wrote. ‘Their courage and devotion went beyond anything I have ever encountered. It was Maria who convinced the group in hiding to take in a woman and a child. She exclaimed to them our state of total despair. Sending us back would have meant our death. The nine people had a hard choice to make, and they vacillated, as clearly we would take up a part of their space as well as some of the very limited portions of available food. Moreover, a few of them were afraid our presence could increase their chance of being detected. But Maria made it clear how much she cared about us. The group could not afford to alienate her. All this came to our knowledge only later, but it provides one more link in our chain of miracles.’ Sister Maria visited every night. ‘She would knock lightly on a wooden beam, three knocks that were the sign for us to dismantle the bundles of books inserted into our tunnel. She always came with some food, some necessary medications, and, most important, with good news that the German armies were losing on all fronts and that the days of our ordeal were numbered. Her optimism and her courage nourished the energies that were vital for our survival.’ Father Stakauskas visited once or twice a week. ‘In his old black leather case that was stuffed with papers, he brought some hidden carrots, a few dried fruits, or a piece of cheese. But his main contribution to the boosting of our morale was his summary of the BBC news. A village friend allowed him to listen to a clandestine radio in the basement of his barn. The following account is from Gutman and Bender, The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations, volume 4: Poland, Part 1, at page 516. In 1942, Dr. Jozas [Juozas] Stakauskas and Vladas Zemaitis [Žemaitis] were employed sorting books, including some in Hebrew that had been brought to the Vilna [Wilno] archive. A group of 12 Jewish workers was brought from the Vilna ghetto to help sort the books in the archive and their employers treated them with kindness and respect. The Germans eventually expanded the archive, adding a building to it that had once been a monastery. Stakauskas and Zemaitis exploited the abundance of space in the building to create a hiding place for their Jewish employees, whom they had decided to save. They prepared a well-concealed room on one of the building’s floors and in September 1943 hid the 12 Jews who worked in the archive along with a four-year-old girl smuggled out of the ghetto. Maria Mikulska, a nun, was included in the secret and, disguised as an archive employee, she took responsibility for the fugitives’ care. Because Germans and Lithuanians also worked in the building, there was constant danger that the hiding place would be discovered, but this did not prevent Mikulska from continuing to care for the Jews hiding there, ignoring the very real danger to her life. Mikulska was motivated by the firm belief that she was doing the right thing and all the 13 Jews she cared for were liberated in July 1944. After the war Mikulska moved to Warsaw and most of the survivors eventually immigrated to Israel. Spontaneous assistance for Jews was frequent in Wilno. Beginning in 1941, Sister Helena Zienowicz, from the Congregation of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, with the help of her sister Janina (not a nun), cared for three Jewish children: Wilinke Fink (born in 1938), Renana Gabaj (5 years old), and her 10-month-old brother, Benjamin. The Zienowicz sisters were assisted by other nuns from that congregation and by several priests: Rev. Władysław Kisiel, who provided material and moral assistance; Rev. Romuald Świrkowski, the chaplain of the Sisters of the Visitation, who provided false baptismal certificates for these children and many others (Rev. Świrkowski was arrested by the Germans in January 1942 in a mass reprisal against the Polish Catholic clergy and executed in Ponary in May 1942); and Rev. Antoni Jagodziński and Rev. Antoni Lewosz (Leosz) of St. Teresa’s Church (adjacent to the gate known as Ostra Brama housing a revered icon of Our Lady), who taught catechism to the two older children and thereby assisted them to pass as Catholics. The Zienowicz sisters also helped other Jews.251 Helena Zienowicz and Jan and Zofia Kukolewski were awarded by Yad Vashem. (Gutman and Bender, The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations, volume 5: Poland, Part 2, pp.939–40.) Following Helena Zienowicz’s graduation from the Nazareth Nuns’ [Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazarethi] high school in Vilna [Wilno], she chose to live in the closed convent of the Wizytek [wizytki—Sisters of the Visitation] order and work as a teacher in Rabka (near Cracow [Kraków]). She left the convent when her mother became ill and returned to Vilna. In September 1941, Helena came upon three Jewish children: five-year-old Renana Gabaj, ten-month-old Benjamin Gabaj, and four-year-old Wilinke Fink (later Jozef Zienowicz), who had problems with his eyesight. Abel Gabaj, a doctor from Butrimoniai [Butrymańce] in Lithuania, was the father of Renana and Benjamin. Jakub Fink, Wilinke’s father, was a friend of Dr. Gabaj’s. One day in September 1941, Dr. Gabaj learned from a friend who worked as a policeman that a pogrom against the Jews of Butrimoniai was about to be carried out, and so the doctor decided to leave for Vilna. On the way out, the entire group of two adults and three children stopped for a rest in Angleniki, at Jan and Zofia Kukolewski’s house. There they learned that the ghetto was closed, which ruled out the possibility of hiding in Vilna. The Kukolewskis agreed to let the adults stay with them and the children found shelter a few days later with Helena Zienowicz. Initially, they were only supposed to stay with her for a few days. But because no other solution could be found the children stayed under Helena’s care until the war ended, and Wilinke, stayed under her care even after the war. The older children did not speak Polish; they only spoke Yiddish and Lithuanian, thus complicating the situation further. Hiding three young children was not an easy task under the difficult conditions of the war. Helena lived in a small apartment without hot water or a toilet. She constantly had to obtain food and fuel for heat, not to mention the constant threat of discovery. Moreover, the children were often sick and they missed their parents. Helena represented the fugitives as her brother’s children, obtained Aryan papers from them, and taught them to speak and sing in Polish. She took care of their every need and brought them up as if they were her own children. Renana and Bejamin’s father, Abel Gabaj, survived the war and emigrated with his children to Israel. Another nun from Wilno, Aleksandra Drzewiecka, took in two Jewish children. She and the Burlingis couple, who helped rescue the Gitelman family, were awarded by Yad Vashem.252 (Mordecai Paldiel, Sheltering the Jews: Stories of Holocaust Rescuers [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996], pp.117–18.) Lea Gittelman gave birth to a girl in the Vilnius [Wilno] ghetto, and aptly named the child Getele (“of the ghetto”). In November, Lea’s husband was transferred to a labor camp outside the ghetto, together with his wife and little girl. This momentarily saved them. In the course of his work, David met Viktoria Burlingis [Wiktoria was a Polish woman, her husband Paweł was Lithuanian]. After surviving another killing raid in the labor camp, David contacted Burlingis, who agreed to take the child with her. Lea stayed with the child for a few days, until she became sufficiently accustomed to Burlingis. One day, while visitors were in the house, Getele, at the other end of the house, suddenly began to sing a song in Yiddish … “Viktoria and her husband came immediately to me; I started to weep, but they reassured me that no one had heard a word. Since the child spoke [only] Yiddish, however, they said they could no longer keep her. The next day, they told me they had found another hiding place for her.” It turned out to be a Polish nun by the name of Aleksandra Drzewecka [Drzewiecka]. In 1944, when Vilnius was still contested between the Germans and the Russians, with shells exploding everywhere, Lea and David managed to flee from the labor camp and reach Sister Drzewecka’s home to find Getele safe and sound. … In the postwar years, Lea lost track of the Burlingis family. But she maintained contact with Sister Drzewecka for many years, and the Gittelmans supported the kindhearted nun (who also sheltered another Jewish child) with packages, medicine, and money. Shulamit Bastacky was born in Wilno shortly after the Germans entered the city in mid–1941. She does not have any personal recollection of her rescuer, a Catholic nun, into whose care she had been entrusted by her parents. Shulamit was hidden in a cellar for almost three years. Her courageous rescuer is not identified by name. Shulamit’s parents also survived the war and reclaimed their daughter, who had been placed in an orphanage. (Anita Brostoff and Sheila Chamowitz, eds., Flares of Memory: Stories of Childhood During the Holocaust [Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001], pp.121–22.) On Yom Hashoah each year I kindle the memorial candles. I kindle them in memory not only of my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins who did not survive the Holocaust. I kindle them also for a Roman Catholic nun, a righteous gentile who risked her life to save mine. These memorials stir in me the image of a little girl who huddled by herself for more than three long years in a small, dim cellar. While my family and the nun are blessedly recalled now at middle age, they do not lead to any real recollection of the quiet, frightened, curly-headed little girl. She is the figure that won’t come to mind, won’t allow herself to be a part of me now. She crouches forever in the recesses of a deeper cellar, the cellar of my mind. I was born in August 1941, in Vilna [Wilno] …, four weeks after the Germans entered the city. Our deadly game of hide and seek began that year and lasted until 1945. My mother and father who also survived the war, have had to tell me the story of my survival. They did so in the barest of terms, for any detailed narrative was too painful for them. We rarely mention the past at home, even now in America in 1996. I don’t remember the nun, either. I know that she came as often as she could and brought me enough food to survive until she came the next time. I must have been overjoyed each time she appeared to interrupt the dark flow of hours. Now, I do not see her face; I cannot hear her voice; nor do I feel the touch of her hands. But somehow, even without memory, I know that she gave me more than food—she shared herself through a kind word, a show of affection. I emerged from the cellar malnourished and sick when the Russian Army liberated Vilna [in July 1944]. The nun had placed me on the bank of a river, where I was found by a Lithuanian man who then placed me in a Catholic orphanage where I was given a Lithuanian name. My family found me in the orphanage by recognizing a birthmark on my body. After our reunion, we traveled by train to central Poland where I went to a rehabilitation center sponsored by the Joint Distribution Organization, a facility for Jewish children. There I was physically and emotionally rehabilitated. They gave me quartzlight treatments for sun deprivation and more importantly, a safe place where I could be a normal child. I often wonder why I don’t remember. The answer I give myself is that my memory is blocked as a result of being deprived of family, of nurturing, and of the most basic human needs. The feelings of a lost early childhood will remain with me the rest of my life. But my feelings of respect and gratitude for that nameless nun will remain with me, too. Fania Feldman (born in 1896) and her sister, Rebecca Feldman, were rescued by various persons in Wilno, among them the Tyryłło family (recognized by Yad Vashem for sheltering about 50 Jews), Aleksander Kreise, Tekla Dąbrowska, as well as her husband, daughter and son-in-law, Jerzy Pławiński, the Lithuanian author Jonas Ruzgys and his wife Stanislava (they sheltered other Jews as well and were awarded by Yad Vashem), and Aniela Bajewska. While staying with Bajewska, a devout Polish Catholic widow (her only surviving son, Jan Antonin Bajewski, a Franciscan priest, perished in Auschwitz in May 1941), Fania Feldman fell gravely ill and was near death. She was treated by Dr. Grabowiecka (who came to the assistance of Jewish doctors) and Professor Aleksander Januszkiewicz. Concerned about how she would dispose of the body, Bajewska turned to Rev. Leopold Chomski, the pastor of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Niepokalanego Poczęcia Najświętszej Maryi Panny) parish in the Zwierzyniec district of Wilno. Rev. Chomski comforted Bajewska and praised her for her good deeds. He assured her that he would pray for the recovery of Fania Feldman and that, if she were to die, he would provide a death certificate attesting to her Catholic religion. Since Rev. Chomski was himself sheltering Jews in the parish rectory and finding hiding places for Jews, he asked Bajewska to take in a 13-year-old boy he was sheltering, however, she was unable to oblige because she was already sheltering several Jews in addition to the Feldman sisters. The 13-year-old boy survived as did Rev. Chomski’s other Jewish charges.253 Rev. Stanisław Tyszka, vicar at the parish of Nowe Troki near Wilno, came to the assistance of Jewish prisoners in the Zatrocze labour camp near Landwarów. Later he was wanted by the Germans and had to hide during the war. (Testimony of A. Ajzen, “Moshe Lerer,” Meilech Bakalczuk-Felin, ed., Yizker-bukh Khelm [Johannesburg: Khelemer Landmanshaft, 1954], pp.313–14; translated as Commemoration Book Chelm, Internet: During the years 1941 and 1942, Lerer [Moshe Lerer was a librariarian at the YIVO Institute in Wilno] and I worked together in the Zatrocze concentration camp near Landwarow [Landwarów]. Here, I clearly sensed that inwardly he had made up his mind about everything and ultimately had made peace with death. Barely fifty and some years old, he looked like an old man who was already critically ill, with his bent body, extinguished eyes and deep, sunken cheeks. His resignation, it seems, was noticed by the rowdy element in the camp and they bullied him. Tears get stuck in my throat when I remember the heavy work that was intentionally placed on his bent shoulders. We all tried to make it easier for him and to take upon ourselves some of his duties; if this work was with peat or in unloading goods—the younger ones among us tried to make it easier for him everywhere and to take his place. He appreciated this very much and a sort of tender feeling to all of us was planted in him along with his resignation and he wanted to comfort and cheer us up. This love for us caused a series of changes in him and his character and ideology. A communist according to belief, he became tolerant of belief and took part in all religious meetings in the camp. As if by a magic wand, his former nervousness vanished and there appeared in him instead distinct signs of understanding, of fatherly devotion to his camp comrades and even hope. I still remember his enthusiasm when, due to my endeavors, Tiszka [Rev. Stanisław Tyszka], the Troker[Troki] priest, (later shot by the Germans) became a friend of the camp workers, warned about the dangers that threatened us and came to us in his free moments to study Hebrew. At first he [Lerer] was afraid that here the priest was somewhat of an outsider. Later, when everyone became convinced of Tiszka’s pure, humanitarian intentions, Lerer seemed to have been revived. “There are still, it seems,” he said, “virtuous non-Jews here in the land. If this is so, everything is not yet lost!!.” In her Yad Vashem testimony (Files O.3/2565 and O.93/18946), Czesława Czertok (later Czereśnia), born in Wilno in 1924, describes how she escaped from the Wilno ghetto and made her way to Wilejka. There, she turned to Rev. Rajmund Butrymowicz, an interwar army chaplain who was now serving as a parish priest. Rev. Butrymowicz kept her for several weeks until he found a Polish family to take her in. Rev. Butrymowicz secured the cooperation of the mayor of Kurzeniec named Matros in providing Czesława with false identity documents.254 (Gutman and Bender, The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations, volume 5: Poland, Part 2, p.799.) Before the war and until 1942, Teofila and Stefan Szwajkajzer, along with their nine children, lived in the village of Zymodry [Zimodry], near Kurzeniec, in the Vilna [Wilno] district. One day in 1941, the priest of Stara Wilejka asked Teofila to shelter a young Jewish girl named Czeslawa [Czesława] Czertok (later Czerenia [Czereśnia]) from Vilna. Czeslawa, aged 17, had remained alone in occupied Vilna. All of her family had been murdered in Ponary. Czeslawa had escaped from Vilna and after numerous experiences had found herself in Stara Wilejka and was completely at a loss as to where she could turn for help. Thus she turned to the local priest, who kept her for a couple of weeks until he found shelter for her at the home of a large and devoutly Catholic family—the Szwajkajzers of Zymodry. Three of the children, Wanda, Zbigniew, and Ewa, knew about Czeslawa’s true identity. Together with their parents, they cared for her needs and safety. Zymodry, the head of the family obtained a document from the local municipality of Kurzeniec “proving” that Czeslawa was their relative. … In the fall of 1942, when the Szwajkajzers moved to Kurzeniec, Czeslawa was detained because of an informer. In an attempt to release her, Zbigniew went to the police. Before he arrived, Czeslawa was lucky to flee and reach the home of Zbigniew’s sister, Wanda. Wanda was a teacher and rented a room with a peasant family. Through Wanda, Czeslawa contacted the partisans and joined their ranks, fighting until the liberation of the area in 1944. Dwora Winokur (later Rozencwaig) was born in Widze, north of Wilno, in August 1941. After the Germans entered the area in the summer of 1941, the Winokur family were moved from one ghetto to another. Dwora’s father and older brother were shot by the Germans. Dwora’s mother, Bela, managed to escape with her daughter. After wandering with her daughter and begging for food, Bela made her way back to Widze. She placed Dwora with an acquaintance, Anna Trapsza, who together with her husband looked after her well. They called her Danusia. Anna Trapsza took a priest into her confidence, but he advised her against baptizing the child in case her family returned for her after the war. Dwora’s mother was taken in by another Polish woman, Leontyna Matejko, a widow. After the war front passed through, Bela came to collect her daughter. Danusia no longer recognized her biological mother and was reluctant to leave with her. Dwora and her mother eventually settled in Israel.255 Dawid Mogilnik and his three children took refuge on the farm of Paweł and Józefa Wojczys in the village of Mieleniszki near Widze. When Paweł Wojczys became concerned that their presence on his farm had been compromised, the Mogilniks asked him to turn to the local priest, Rev. Stanisław Szczemirski, the pastor of Widze, for guidance as to what he should do. The priest gave Wojczys some money and urged them to keep on sheltering the Jews. (Gutman, The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust: Supplementary Volumes (2000–2005), volume II, p.632.) Early in April 1943, Dawid Mogilnik and his three big children, Jakob, Sara, and Gira, fled from the Święciany ghetto (Wilno District), which was soon to be liquidated, after his wife, Asna, his son, Boris, and other members of the family had been murdered. They wandered from village to village and hid in the forests throughout that spring and during the summer seeking a permanent hiding place. Finally, they came to the village of Mieleniszki, near the town of Widze in the same district, and found a haven in a bathhouse that belonged to one of the acquaintances, Paweł Wojczys.When they came to his place, the seasons had already changed and the fall had set in, with the days getting colder. In the evenings, the Mogilniks would go into the Wojczys’ home to warm up a bit and to eat supper with them. However, when the Mogilniks asked for permission to dig a shelter in the yard before winter, the Wojczys refused at first, because they were afraid of endangering their family—Paweł and Józefa Wojczys had four children between the ages of 7 to 14. Poor, but compassionate and devout Catholics, they were moved to pity one evening when the Mogilniks came into their home. Józefa turned to her husband and said, “I cannot bear to see the Mogilniks suffering any more. Let them dig a helter in the barn and God will help us.” Paweł agreed and allowed the Mogilniks to dig a camouflaged shelter inside the barn. His son, Kazimierz, who was 12 years old at the time, was put in charge of bringing them food, and he carried out this task faithfully. During that entire period, the Wojczys’ neighbors suspected them of hiding Jews, and it made Paweł very anxious that they might inform on him. When spring came and the weather improved, he asked the Mogilniks to vacate the shelter, but they tarried. As a last resort, the Mogilniks gave Paweł a letter addressed to the community priest in Widze describing their plight and asked him to be the judge. The priest gave Paweł a sum of money and some flowers and instructed him to leave the Jews in the hideout and said he would pray for all of them, and that in the meantime the war would end. Paweł followed the priest’s instructions and left the Mogilniks in the hideout until the liberation in July 1944. Fr. Adam Sztark, a Jesuit, was the admininstrator of the parish in Żyrowice near Słonim. He also served as the chaplain of the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Słonim. He raised money to help pay the tax the Germans had imposed on the Jewish community, he brought food to the ghetto, he issued false baptismal certificates to Jews, and he urged his parishioners to extend help to them. Rev. Sztark brought abandoned Jewish children to the presbytery and then transferred them to the convent of the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, with whom he worked closely. The gardener, Józef Mikuczyn, hid a Jewish boy Rev. Sztark entrusted to him. These activities eventually cost Fr. Sztark, Bogumiła Noiszewska (Sister Maria Ewa), a medical doctor, and Kazimiera Wołowska (Sisters Maria Marta), the mother superior of the convent, their lives. They were executed on December 19, 1942, on Pietralewice Hill outside Słonim. All three of them were recognized posthumously by Yad Vashem as Righteous Gentiles. Rev. Michał Michniak, who resided in Słonim and assisted Fr. Sztark in issuing false baptismal certificates, managed to flee and avoided arrest.256 (Gutman, The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust: Supplementary Volumes (2000–2005), volume II, pp.623–24.) Adam Sztark was 32 years old when, on the eve of the outbreak of the war, he was appointed as priest of the Catholic community in Żyrowice near Słonim (Nowogródek County, today Belarus) and rector of the Jesuit Church in Słonim. When the region was occupied by the Germans in the summer of 1941, and they began the murder of the Jews, he came out unequivocally in support of the Jews not only in his sermons from the pulpit but also in his personal activity. When the Germans demanded a “contribution” from the Jewish community of Słonim, he collected valuables and money from his congregation in order to participate in this tax and his demonstrated openly his and his flocks’ [sic] solidarity with their persecuted Jewish neighbors. He appealed to his congregation to help the Jews in their distress. He provided “Aryan” papers to Jews in hiding and sent Jewish children to hide with Christian families and in the orphanage. He personally took care to arrange for a Jewish orphan named Jerzy to hide in the home of a Polish gardener, one Józef Mikuczyn, and thanks to Adam’s efforts, the boy survived. Adam was an exemplary man who worked fearlessly out of his deep religious conviction that it was his duty to help the weak and the persecuted and to rescue people regardless of what ethnicity they were or what beliefs they adhered to. He did not differentiate between Christians and Jews, and for his attitude and work he paid with his life. In December 1942, when the last of the Jews of the Słonim ghetto were exterminated, the Germans also murdered Adam Sztark. In their study, Unequal Victims: Poles and Jews During World War II,257 Yisrael Gutman and Shmuel Krakowski record, at pages 236–37, the assistance provided by Fr. Adam Sztark and by nuns in the town of Słonim. Rafal Charlap recalls: A priest named Stark [actually, Adam Sztark], still a young man of about thirty, was doing his utmost to provide the Jews with free forged “Aryan” documents. He called upon his parishioners to extend help to the Jews, and persuaded the Poles he trusted to shelter Jewish fugitives. One of the Jews he saved was a young boy, Jureczek [now Jerry David Glickson, whom he had first hidden in the convent of the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary], for whom Stark found a hiding place with a gardener, Josef [Józef] Mikuczyn. The orphaned boy survived the war there, and was later picked up by his uncle. In the summer of 1941, the Germans exacted from the Jews of Slonim [Słonim] ghetto a “contribution” of gold. As the deadline approached, the Jews were still 1/2 kilogram short of the quota which the Germans demanded. In order to enable the Jews to fill the quota, Father Stark organized the collection of golden crosses from his parishioners. When the Germans learned of Stark’s activities, they arrested and shot him together with the Slonim Jews, in their mass execution in Petrolowicze [Petrołowicze or Pietralewice]. In the same town of Slonim, the Jews received much help from Dr. Nojszewska [actually, Bogumiła Noiszewska—Sister Maria Ewa of Providence from the above-mentioned order, who is incorrectly described as a “former nun”], the director of the municipal hospital. She sheltered the small son of her Jewish colleague, Dr. Kagan. The Germans were notified and shot her together with the child. The following account of the last days of Fr. Sztark’s like was authored by the Jesuit priest Vincent A. Lapomarda.258 (Inside the Vatican, May 2000, pp.52–53.) It was in the final phase of their “final solution” that the Gestapo broke into the convent of the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, on December 19, 1942. The convent was in the [prewar Polish] provincial area of Nowogrodek [Nowogródek], in Slonim [Słonim]. The religious community was under Mother Superior Kazimiera Wolowska [Wołowska] (1879–1942) whose religious name was Sister Maria Marta. She was assisted by Bogumila [Bogumiła] Noiszewska (1885–1942) who was known in religious life as Sister Maria Ewa. Both had been hiding and caring for orphaned Jewish children, whom Father Sztark had been rescuing and bringing to them. The children had been hidden in the attic of the convent of the nuns. Though the sisters lived in fear of a Nazi search, they were completely surprised when armed men broke into their convent. A thorough search soon located the Jewish children in the attic. Since hiding Jews was a crime punishable by death, the Gestapo tortured the sisters to extract any information they could use to continue their campaign against the Jews. When the sisters refused to betray any of those helping them in their clandestine activities, the Nazis, that very day, took both sisters out to a nearby execution site, a place called Gorki Pantalowickie [Góra Pietrołowicka]. There they forced the nuns into a pit and shot them. Within ten days of the execution of Blessed Maria Marta and Blessed Maria Ewa, the Gestapo caught up with Father Sztark. The priest’s life had been in danger for years. First during the hostile occupation by the Soviets and then by the Nazis. He never hesitated to serve as a shepherd for the defenseless, first as the pastor for parishioners in Zyrowice [Żyrowice], then for Jewish childrlen who had managed to survive the round up and slaughter of their parents. The priest repeatedly risked his life by collecting the children and concealing them in his rectory until he was able to secretly take them to the relative safety of the Immaculate Conception Convent. He fully knew that keeping these Jewish children out of the hands of the Nazis would cost him his life if he should be discovered. It is clear that he began this work and continued to carry it out in respect to to the Gospel command to “love your neighbor.” Just as the Gestapo came in suddenly on the sisters in the convent on December 19th, so on December 27th their command car appeared without warning in front of the priest’s house in Zyrowice. The startled priest was immediately ordered to leave without taking anything with him. He asked if he could take bread in order to say Mass. The Gestapo agent leading the Jesuit away sardonically said: “Where you are going, there’s plenty of bread!” This merciless tone of the SS man told Father Sztark that his end was near. He submitted, simply saying: “It is my martyrdom.” Father Sztark still had one more night to live, however. It was not until the following day that he was packed into a truck filled with others who had defied the laws of the Nazi occupation. They were taken to the same place, Gorki Pantalowickie, where the two Sisters of the Immaculate Conception had been killed just a few days previously, the same site which the Nazis used for their executions of the Jews in that area. When they arrived there, Father Sztark, like his fellow victims, was ordered to undress himself. He was prepared to meet his Maker, but he wanted to do so in the black robe of the Jesuit Order of which he was such a faithful member. So he told his executioners he would not undress, saying he wanted to die in his robe. For some reason his killers granted him his last wish. The Nazis forced him along with all their victims into a pit, and began riddling them with bullets. The priest, though mortally wounded, was not immediately killed. In one last great display of will and in excruciating pain he managed to stand and gasp out these final, glorious words: “All for Christ the King! Long Live Poland!” An 8-year-old Jewish boy by the name of Marat Zaltsman was taken in by the Ciechanowicz family, who lived in Wojciechowo near the village of Pietryłowicze, in the area of Naliboki forest. A priest from the parish in nearby Kamień agreed to baptize the boy and give him a Christian identity as the Ciechanowiczes’ son. Rev. Leopold Aulich, the pastor of Kamień, and his vicar, Rev. Kazimierz Rybałtowski, a Belorussian, were executed by the Germans on July 24, 1943, on suspicion of aiding Jews and partisans.259 (Israel Gutman, ed., The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust, volume 8: Europe (Part II) [Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2011], p.102.) The Polish couple Wincenty and Anna Ciechanowicz lived with their three children, 18-year-old Stanisława, 15-year-old Aleksandr [Aleksander], and Maria, the youngest, in the village of Pietryłowicze, Nowogródek Distrtict (today Pyatrovichy, Minsk District), where they owned a small plot of land. One day in 1941, when Aleksandr was wandering in the forest, he met eight-year-old Marat Zaltsman, who had escaped from the Minsk ghetto. Aleksandr brought the child, who was lightly wounded in the head, back to his parents’ home, where he was hidden on their farm. Although Zaltsman did not reveal his identity, the Ciechanowiczes soon realized that he was Jewish. In order to conceal this, they baptized him in a Catholic church in the nearby village, adopted him, and gave him their family name. Zaltsman became an integral part of their family and he worked with them on their land for the following 18 months. In spring 1943, when the Germans began to suspect the Ciechanowicz family of being involved with the partisans, their property was razed and they were sent to forced labor. Wincenty, Anna and Maria were sent to a labor camp in Minsk, and Aleksandr, Stanisława and Zaltsman were sent to Germany. Their time in Germany was fraught with danger, particularly because Zaltsman looked Jewish and the Germans suspected that he was not Aleksandr and Stanisława’s brother. However, the siblings never revealed the truth and the three of them became very close. After the war, they parted ways: Zaltsman returned to Belarus, Aleksandr and Stanisława stayed in Germany and later immigrated to Canada. Their parents and sister did not survive the war. After the war, Zaltsman was reunited with his parents who had fled east prior to the occupation of Minsk. He established a family and settled in L’viv [Lwów], Ukraine. His contact with the Ciechanowiczes was renewed in the 1980s. On November 21, 1993, Yad Vashem recognized Wincenty and Anna Ciechanowicz and their children, Aleksandr Ciechanowicz and Stanisława Weryk, as Righteous Among the Nations. The rescue efforts of Rev. Franciszek Smorczewski of Stolin in Polesie (Polesia), who has been recognized by Yad Vashem as a Righteous Gentile, are described in Gutman and Bender, The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations, volume 5: Poland, Part 2, at pages 728–29. On Rosh Hashanah 5703 (September 11, 1942), during the Aktion in the Stolin ghetto in the Polesie district, the Germans left a number of Jews and their families behind to run the local hospital. The Jews—Dr. Hersh Rotter (later Henry Reed), his wife, Ewa, and their three-year-old son, Aleksander, Dr. Marian Poznanski and his wife, Gina, Dr. Ernberg, a veterinarian, and his wife, Erna, and two Jewish nurses—were housed in the service quarters inside the hospital precinct. Since it was clear that sooner or later they would share the fate of the Jews in the ghetto, they began to plan their escape. Dr. Rotter turned to his friend Franciszek Smorczewski, the local priest, who encouraged him to escape, supplied his wife with a Christian birth certificate, and began enlisting the aid of local Poles to help the Jews in the hospital escape. The escape was planned for November 26, 1942. On the morning of that fateful day, a Polish girl warned the group that an SS detachment had arrived in Stolin. Toward evening, the Rotters escaped from the hospital to the home of a local Polish doctor, where Maria Kijowska, the wife of Wladyslaw [Władysław] Kijowski, the forester, was waiting for them in a horse-drawn wagon. Kijowska took them to her home in the forest, where they hid for a few days until her husband accompanied them to [the home of Baptists] Stiepan and Agap Mozol, where the Jewish refugees stayed until February 1943, at which time they joined the partisans. The other Jews who were left in the hospital were smuggled out in a similar fashion and found their way to partisan units in the forest. During the liquidation of the ghetto in Janów Poleski in Polesie (Polesia) in 1942, Fanya Gonsky (née Nowoszycka) and her sister, Paula, both teenagers at the time, escaped and hid in the woods. They approached a small convent where they were welcomed and given food by kindly nuns. Several days later, the girls’ mother arrived in the forest. They then moved to a larger forest where they joined a group of some thirty Jews who had built bunkers.260 Leopold Brajnes, who was born in Lwów in 1940, was living in Kraków by his mother. When he broke his leg, his mother brought her son to St. Lazarus Hospital in Kraków for medical care. Since he was circumcised, the doctors and hoospital personnel were aware of the boy’s Jewish origin. He was relocated to a convent in Miechów run by the Sisters Servants of the Blessed Virgin Mary Immaculately Conceived (of Stara Wieś) where he survived the war. He was taken from the convent by his aunt in July 1946.261 (Friedman, Their Brothers’ Keepers, pp.16–17.) There are known cases of hospital personnel hiding Jewish women. On occasion, even a Jewish male desperate for shelter was accommodated in a hospital bed, although the presence of a circumcised patient imperiled the whole staff. During the Nazi reign of terror in Cracow [Kraków], a Jewish mother brought her small boy to St. Lazarus Hospital. The boy had a broken leg. Both mother and child had “Aryan” documents, but Dr. Lachowicz, the chief physician, and the admitting nurse both took note of the fact that the prospective patient was circumcised. His presence at the hospital would be deemed by the Germans as a crime punishable by death. However, the doctor and nurse admitted the boy but sent the mother away. The boy’s leg was treated, and his belly bandaged as a precaution against Gestapo visits. During one such raid, Dr. Lachowicz refused to remove his young patient’s bandages, pleading with the Gestapo that the boy was a Christian, assuring the Germans that on their next visit he would show them proof. Two weeks later the Gestapo returned, but the boy was no longer on the premises. The staff had removed him to a convent in the neighborhood of Miechow [Miechów]. The Germans, who did not neglect making periodic searches among the nuns also, found the boy and threatened to execute him. The nuns insisted the boy was a Christian. They presented an official statement, signed by Dr. Lachowicz, explaining that a bad fall had so injured the boy’s foreskin and his leg that an operation was later performed to save his life. An undisclosed orphanage near Kraków became the home of Mike (Mieczysław) Ryczke from Konin. He was placed there by a Catholic uncle with the knowledge of the chaplain at that institution. (Mira Ryczke Kimmelman, Life Beyond the Holocaust: Memories and Realities [Knoxville, Tennessee: University of Tennessee Press, 2005), pp.225–26.) Mike Ryczke from Toronto … was born in Poland in 1939, a few months before the outbreak of World War II. His father, Aaron Ryczke, was a wealthy lumber merchant in Konin and owner of a sawmill. Both he and Mike’s mother, Janka, were quite assimilated. In 1941 Aaron Ryczke was killed by the Nazis. Mike (Mietek as he was called) was placed by a Polish uncle (not Jewish) in a Catholic orphanage near Kraków. Only the priest in the orphanage knew of Mike’s Jewish origin, but he never disclosed the secret. Until the war ended Mike did not know that he was Jewish. His mother, Janka, was hiding during the war years with Aryan papers. After the war, she and Mike left for Israel, where one of her sisters lived. Assistance came from nuns near a work camp for Jews in Bielany, a suburb of Warsaw, as related by George Topas in The Iron Furnace: A Holocaust Survivor’s Story (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1990), at pages 85–86. Once, assigned to a work detail in the surrounding wooded area, I helped load liquid containers aboard trucks. During the lunch break, I wandered within sight of a Catholic cloister, which was apparently still allowed to function. Two nuns were outside the building, washing kitchenware. When they saw me, one of them motioned for me to come closer; the other disappeared hastily behind the door and in a moment emerged with a pot of soup. “Please sit down and eat.” Yüklə 7,11 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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