Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy

I wish to add, that there were Christians, who sympathized with the Jews, and gave them help, and many times suffered themselves because of it.

Such a person was the Milliner Brylowski [Bryłowski], whose garden bordered on the Hospital garden. He showed us a way. Where we could flee if an automobile full of Germans arrived to take us away: behind the stable he set aside the obstacles, and freed up the way for us, down to the river.

I also wish to mention Dr. [Józef Kazimierz] Spoz, the Canon Cieslicki, the Vicar, the organist [Bolesław] Stec and his daughter, the Komornik, and the Pharmacist [Jan Szczygłowski], who helped Jews. At a number of these, hidden Jewish articles were found, and because of this they suffered greatly.
Rev. Cieślicki was arrested by the Germans in June 1940, and after his release, hid from them in the Tarnów area. With time, as German acts of terror became commonplace, interventions proved to be less and less effective, and were soon futile. The vicar Rev. Franciszek Kapalski headed the Welfare Committee (Komitet Opiekuńczy) in Szczebrzeszyn, which extended assistance to both Poles and Jews.³⁴
Sometimes priests could do no more than console the victims of German executions as in Konin, in the so-called Wartheland, as related by Issy Hahn in his memoir, A Life Sentence of Memories: Konin, Auschwitz, London (London and Portland, Oregon: Vallentine Mitchell, 2001), at pages 11–12.
The next day, Thursday 21 September [1939], the Germans began arresting influential people from the town as hostages; the reason given was that two German soldiers had been found shot dead. Another poster went up on the tower: ‘Tomorrow morning at 11 o’clock the execution of two hostages will take place.’

The next morning just before 11 o’clock Liberty Square was crowded; there were 300 or 400 people there. I pushed my way through the crowd to get to one of the two public water pumps in the square and climbed on top to have a good view of the spectacle. Over the heads of the crowd I saw the two condemned men being marched by six soldiers and one officer of the German army from the town prison to the square. The hostages came to a stop, facing the blank white wall of the old gymnasium. The crowd was silent. The men were told to turn and face the crowd.

One of the hostages, Mordechai Slodki, was a religious Jewish man of 70 who owned a fabric shop; I knew him well. The other was Aleksander Kurowski, a Polish Catholic who owned a posh restaurant near the main coach station. …

A Catholic priest wearing a long mauve robe and a scarf around his neck approached the prisoners. He spoke first to the Jewish man. Then, with his Bible raised, he said a prayer with the Catholic man and made the sign of the cross. Then he turned and walked away. One of the Germans blindfolded the hostages.

The officer in charge ordered the firing squad to retreat 20 metres from the two men and take up their firing position. … The officer in charge gave the order and the soldiers lifted their guns. …

Some of the crowd moved towards the dead men. When I got close enough to see the bodies I couldn’t believe my eyes: the men’s arms and legs were still moving. Everyone was wiping tears from their faces as they passed the blindfolded corpses to show their last respects. Some made the sign of the cross.

The accounts attesting to widespread sympathy on the part of Poles toward persecuted Jews are borne out by a report filed by Wehrmacht General Johannes von Blaskowitz. On February 6, 1940, he wrote to General Walther von Brauchitsch, Commander-in-Chief of the German Army:
The acts of violence carried out in public against Jews are arousing in religious Poles [literally, “in the Polish population, which is fundamentally pious (or God-fearing)”] not only the deepest disgust but also a great sense of pity for the Jewish population.³⁵
The reverse situation was not unthinkable, as the following highly unusual case shows. On September 1, 1939, Leon Schönker, the wartime leader of the Jewish community in Oświęcim, hid and cared for a wounded German pilot, who had parachuted from a crashing plane, without informing the Polish authorities of his presence. When the German army entered the town several days later, the Jews led them to the wounded man who, it turned out, was an important Nazi officer. This officer reciprocated by intervening with the local German military commander to alleviate conditions for the Jews, at least for a time. When some old, defective rifles which had been used for mandatory military drills before the war were found in a school run by the Salesian Society, the Germans arrested a dozen priests and threatened to execute them. Leon Schönker intervened on their behalves with the local commander and persuaded him that the rifles were useless as weapons. The priests were released from jail. Word of this deed spread through the town and Leon Schönker became a local hero.³⁶
Felix Kaminsky, who served in the Polish army in September 1939, recalled that after their defeat, the captain told everyone to go on their own. Kaminsky set off with a Polish friend, and “a priest gave us two old priests’ uniforms [i.e., cassocks] to disguise.”³⁷
Sympathy for downtrodden prisoners-of-war, both Poles and Jews, taken during the September 1939 campaign and guarded by the Germans in a school courtyard in Rzeszów, was openly expressed by Polish nuns. (Testimony of Chaim Bank in A Memorial to the Brzozow Community, Abraham Levite, ed. [Israel: The Survivors of Brzozow, 1984], pp.95–96.)
Twice we received nourishment in the form of a bowl of soup from the German military kitchen. The Catholic nuns brought kettles of food for the Polish prisoners. The Jewish hostages from Kolbuszowa refused to eat non-kosher food and literally starved. I owned a few “zloty” [złoty] (Polish currency) and asked the nuns if they could possibly buy me some chocolate in town. They fulfilled my request and that chocolate was the only food the Jewish hostages would eat. The nuns let me know of the horrible misfortune befalling the Jews of Rzeszow caused by the German army right after the beginning of the invasion.
Sydney W. from Pułtusk near Warsaw, who was interned by the Germans after the September 1939 campaign at a prisoner-of-war camp for Polish soldiers, recalled the assistance he received from a Polish priests in Joachim Schoenfeld, ed., Holocaust Memoirs: Jews in the Lwów Ghetto, the Janowski Concentration Camp, and as Deportees in Siberia (Hoboken, New Jersey: KTAV Publishing House, 1985), at pages 293–95.