Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy

As we were leaving, Dr. Taren said, “Go hide in small villages. There you will find less anti-Semitism than in the cities.” We thanked him and left. …

Pannek was too scared to hide us near the house during the day. Since a lot of people came to his house he was afraid we would be seen. During the day, when it wasn’t raining, he told us to hide in the nearby fields. …

Once when we were hiding in the field we heard someone coming. We crawled into a stack of wheat. I looked out and saw 2 women walking towards us. It was Mrs. Yakobovich and her daughter, Estarka. Estarka was about 20 years old. They were neighbors of ours before the war. … Estarka got out [of the ghetto] and got to village a few kilometers from our home. … There she was able to hide out with a Christian family until the end of the war. …

One day Pannek said that we would have to leave. He was too afraid to hide us any longer. …Pannek’s wife was truly a wonderful human being. She pleaded with her husband to let us stay. … But still he said no. So after two weeks of hiding at Pannek’s we were sent away.

We went to a village near Wojcin [Wójcin]. Wojcin was the town my mother was born in. We went to a family that had done business with my father. In the house lived an old woman with her daughter and son-in-law. The old woman had gone to school with my mother. She asked us why we didn’t bring our mother with us. She would have helped her hide too.

We stayed there a short while hiding in their attic. One day two Germans came into their yard. Both the old woman’s daughter and I saw them come in. We got very frightened. I was sure that someone had told on us until I saw they had bicycles and one was broken. They stopped to fix it and then went on their way.

We had such a bad fright that a few days later Fay noticed a patch of hair on my head had turned white. The young woman was pregnant then. She had been married for five years and this was going to be her first child. A few days after we had seen the Germans come into the yard she lost the child. It may have been because of the fright she had. The next day the husband came up to the attic and told us we would have to leave. He was very sorry about it, but they felt that they couldn’t keep us anymore.

From there we went to another village called Drzdskowitz [Dzietrzkowice], to a Christian farmer named Urbonek [Urbanek?]. My husband knew him from doing business with him and felt he was a good man. My husband wrote that if I had to hide I should go to this man’s house, tell him who I was, and he would surely let me hide there.

When I got there I found out that Urbonek was a leader in the village, appointed by the Germans. We came to his house at night. He let us in, gave us some food, and took us up to the attic.

Urbonek was in his middle 20s. He had a wife and some young children. His wife was very scared to have us in the house. We would sometimes hear them arguing about us being there. Since he was working for the Germans some of them would come to the house. Also they had a lot of enemies in the village because of the work they were doing. His wife was afraid of us being found there. It would have cost them their lives if we were.

Once I heard him say to his wife that if he was destined to die, he would, whether he was hiding Jews or not. But his wife prevailed and we were sent away. …

Urbonek sent us to his brother in another village, but they were also afraid. As soon as we came to their door Urbonek’s sister-in-law started yelling that the village was surrounded, and that the Germans were looking for us. None of this was true, but the woman was hysterical. We could not stay there. They sent us somewhere else.

For a time we were just sent from village to village. A Christian once said to me, “Why do you risk our lives? No Jews will survive anyway.”

In one place we came to, as soon as we walked in, the man there said that he was sure we were spotted and made us leave right away. Another place we came to late at night. We were allowed to stay the night but no more. In the morning we had to leave. After a while there was no place for us to go, so we decided we had to go to the Jewish ghetto in Czestochowa [Częstochowa].

We went to another village, named Toplin. It was the village in which Alter was born. Toplin was 28 kilometers from Boleslawiec. There we went to a Christian named Antos Krzyzos [Antoś Krzyżoś]. He was the same man who took the money to my cousin in Wielun when I tried to rescue my husband.

As soon as we came to his house we told him we only wanted to stay for a short while. We told him of our wanting to get into the ghetto. Antos’ family tried talking him out of letting us stay. They were afraid. But he said he would help us and took us up to the attic.

We couldn’t just walk into the ghetto. If we were caught outside we would be shot. We had to be smuggled into it. I had a cousin in the ghetto named Rachel Liss. Rachel ran away from Wielun when her husband was taken away to labor camp. I knew that she had ended up in the Czestochowa ghetto. Antos helped me get a letter to her. We were taking a chance writing a letter to someone in the ghetto. If the letter had been read by the Germans we would have been caught, but Antos agreed to take the chance.

In the letter I asked her to find out how we could get into the ghetto. This was in September 1942. It was on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, that we sent the letter. We spent the holiday up in the Krzyzos’ attic. Two weeks later a letter came back from my cousin.

My cousin told us to go to the Ponow [Panów(?), i.e., the Lords’] woods. The Ponow woods were near Wielun. There we would find a man whose name I can’t remember now. She said that this man could smuggle us into the ghetto.

The next day we said good-bye to Antos Krzyzos and headed for the Ponow woods. We walked all day until we got to the woods. I remember it was a beautiful day. A number of Poles spotted us for Jews as we traveled there. Some were kind to us; some were not; but none of them turned us in. One told us that just the day before we came there the Germans had finished a large “operation”. For 2 weeks they searched the woods for Jews. Over 30 were caught hiding there. The Germans took them all to Wielun where they were all executed.

We came to the man my cousin told us see. He said that he could not get us into the ghetto anymore. Once he used to lead animals into the ghetto to be slaughtered for food. Then he was able to smuggle someone in by dressing them up as a helper. But the Germans stopped letting meat into the ghetto since they started taking Jews out of there. …

In the morning we were able to see a village in the distance. We went there, and we looked for a house that was run down. We knew that the people living in poor houses were not Germans or collaborating with them.

We came into a house. We told the people the truth about who we were and what had happened to us. They said not to fear. They would talk to the village priest, and he would know what to do. The priest was a very fine man. He advised that we go to the city of Klobuck [Kłobuck] which was not far from there. There were still some Jews in Klobuck. One of them was the dentist. We were to go to the dentist, and he’d be able to help us get into a Jewish work camp nearby.
During the round-up of Jews in a village near Olkusz, an old woman became frightened by the sudden appearance of an unknown Jewish girl at her door and alerted a nearby German soldier nearby who shot the child on the spot. Her confession was recorded in Chava Kwinta, I’m Still Living (Toronto: Simon & Pierre Publishing Company, 1974), at pages 159–60.
Not far from the little town of Olkush [Olkusz] the Germans rounded up all the Jews to have them sent away. One mother, desperately wanting to save her child, told her to run away, to go as far as she could and then ask some Polish family to take her in as their daughter. She was a clever little girl of eight, and she managed to steal away. She was wearing a nice summer dress. In a village she knocked on one of the doors. An old woman appeared. “Grandma,” the child appealed to her, “will you take me for your daughter?” The old woman did not think; automatically she called a Nazi soldier. … she said to him, “Here’s a Jewish girl.” The German shot the child on the spot. The old woman did not expect that, she thought he would simply take the child away; and she could find no peace. She went to her priest for confession.

“You did a very bad thing,” he told her. “You should have given the child the refuge she was looking for, or at least you should have let her go to look for it elsewhere. You did a very wicked thing. Jesus will not forgive you and I cannot take your guilt on my conscience.” The old woman went home and, after a short time, she died.

Throughout occupied Poland, Poles were encouraged to purchase or, less often, simply take Jewish property after the Germans had deported the Jews from the town. Sabina Rachel Kałowska, a Jewish woman passing as a Pole, recalled how Rev. Stanisław Marchewka, the pastor of the former Cistercian monastery church in Jędrzejów near Kielce, implored the faithful in his sermons not to acquire property confiscated from the Jews: “People, do not go there. Don’t buy any of those things. Don’t take anything, because it is stained with blood.”²⁷² A priest in Głowno near Łódź implored impoverished Christians not to cut trees down in a Jewish cemetery during the cold winter months, although they were in need of wood to heat their cottages.²⁷³
A Polish family sheltered Goldie Szachter, a Jewish girl, on their farm near Świętomarz near Bodzentyn. They confided in the village priest, Rev. Eugeniusz Skrzypczyk, who assisted in the pretence that the child was a member of the family—their niece—and a Catholic. This Jewish girl would later write, “I nevertheless recognized the beauty of the spirituality of the church services as well as its sanctifying influence on the Polish peasant household in general.”²⁷⁴
Irene Bau (née Irena Landesdorfer) and her mother, Regina Landesdorfer, who hailed from Kraków, were able to pass as Christians with the help of Poles. After relocating to Koszyce, a village northeast of Kraków, they went into hiding in November 1942 when the Germans began deporting the Jews. Regina had obtained false identity papers from a priest in Koszyce. Later, when Irene was living in the village of Wiśniowa near Strzyżów, suspecting that she was Jewish, the local police seized her identity card. Irene confided in a local priest that she was a Jew in hiding. The priest went to the police station and vouched for her, claiming that he was acquainted with her parents. The police chief returned her documents. With her papers back, Irene was able to find a job in a store and continued working until the area was liberated by the Soviet army. After the war, she was reunited with her mother. Two of their benefactors, Stanisław Kwieciński and Zbigniew Bolt, were awarded by Yad Vashem.²⁷⁵ The latter part of the story come from Bill Tammeus and Jacques Cukierkorn, They Were Just People: Stories of Rescue in Poland During the Holocaust (Columbia, Missouri and London: University of Missouri Press, 2009), at pages 28–31.
Stanislaw [Stanisław Kwieciński] located another house for them to rent in a village west of Kalembina, Wiśniowa. The people from whom they eventually rented had no idea they were Jewish. That was a secret that Stanislaw kept as he helped them in various ways.

In their new rental situation, their disguise was aided by the fact that they spoke fluent Polish. In addition, they had false identity papers. Regina’s, which a priest in Koszyce helped her get, said she was Zofia Glowacz [Głowacz]. Irene’s, which Stanislaw obtained for her, said she was Irene Glowacz [Irena Głowacz].