Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy

Andrzej then went to the convent of Filomena. She was terribly moved by the story of the tragedy in Orelec.
On the way home from a village parish located about 150 kilometres distant from Lwów, Andrzej witnessed on the train in which he was travelling a betrayal of a Jewish man by a young woman. (Ibid., pp.95–96.)
After a short time the train stopped in a small railway station. The [German] policeman kicked the already unconscious old man out of the train and shot him.

There was silence, full of fear and terror, in the train. Even the informer did not say a word. After a while, when the train began to move, a peasant in the corridor between Andrzej and the informer asked: ‘Why did you do this? How could you be so cruel?’ ‘Shut up,’ she shrieked. ‘I will ask the policeman to check you. Perhaps you are also a disguised Jew.’ The peasant did not say a word and moved towards the end of the corridor. The train was moving slowly, leaving on the platform the body of the massacred man.

The informer returned to her compartment. Opposite her sat a young priest. After a while, he said: ‘God will never forgive you. You, and not the policeman, you yourself killed this innocent, poor man. Even when, after confession, some priests might absolve you and forgive on this earth, I can assure you that God has condemned you already for ever. You will suffer for ever, because you are not a human being. You are an Evil. For Evil there is only one place—hell.’

The young woman started at once to cry. The priest returned to his breviary.
The Weingrün and Lewkowicz families—consisting of Józef Weingrün, his wife Gustawa, and their daughter, Felicja, and Leon Lewkowicz, his parents and sister—were able to survive with the assistance of Rev. Bolesław Grudzieński, a Lwów prelate with ties to the right-wing National Party (Stronnictwo Narodowe). Rev. Grudzieński also helped other Jews. After the war, in 1947, the Communist regime staged a show trial in Warsaw at which Rev. Grudzieński and other members of the Committee of the Eastern Lands (Komitet Ziem Wchodnich) were prosecuted for crimes against the state. Two Jewish witnesses, Stefania Weingrün Westreich (Józef Weingrün’s daughter) and Leon Lewkowicz, came forward in defence of Rev. Grudzieński, attesting to the assistance he provided to Jews without any compensation and his compassion towards them.³⁰⁶
Rachel Kupferberg had befriended some Catholic nuns while working in a hospital during the Soviet occupation of Lwów. After the Germans invaded Lwów in the summer of 1941, she placed her young daughter, Edna (Alma), who was the seven years old, in the care of those nuns. When the Germans threatened to expel the nuns from their convent, Kupferberg, who was passsing as an Arab from Palestine and secured employment at a German military hospital, intervened successfully with her superior to prevent this from happening.³⁰⁷
Adela Fiszer found employment in the kitchen of a Catholic convent in Lwów thanks to the help of a priest, Rev. Jan Sokołowski, to whom she had been introduced by her Polish Catholic friend. She describes the nuns as Franciscans, but Rev. Sokołowski was actually the chaplain of the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, whose convent was located on Kurkowa Street. Adela Fiszer lived in the convent for about one year. In November 1943, she was arrested by the Gestapo and Ukrainian police after Bronia Dimand, a Jewish friend to whom she had confided her whereabouts, was herself arrested and under torture betrayed the hiding places of other Jews. The nuns’ insistence that she was a Catholic was to no avail. Adela Fiszer was sent to work in a factory where she met a Pole who smuggled her out and took her to Hungary. In Hungary, she met the brother of another Polish friend of hers from Lwów who provided her with his deceased sister’s Soviet passport. Adela Fiszer was then registered as a Pole. She survived the war and returned to Poland.³⁰⁸
Wanda Mehr (née Ida Spiegler), whose husband was killed in German captivity at the beginning of the war, and her daughter, Frieda (born in 1939), were able to survive the war with the assistance of several Poles including priests. While living in Lwów, Ida and her sisters were helped by the Polish caretakers of the buildings in which they resided. A Polish benefactor obtained birth certificates for Ida (as Wanda Grabowieńska), Frieda, and Wanda’s sister, Ela (as Krystyna Pawlik), from a Catholic parish. With those birth certificates, Ida and Ela allowed themselves to be rounded up on the street for forced labour on Germany. Before being taken to Germany in 1943, Ida and her daughter taken in by Józefa Głembocka, a poor single mother of two young children who lived in a small one-room hovel with her two young children. When Ida’s daughter fell ill, nuns at the hospital allowed Frieda to stay there for some time despite the fact that they knew she was Jewish. Ida was arrested in a sweep of black marketers and held for six months in the prison on Łącki Street. She was released after a priest, whom she did not know, convinced the German officials that she was his parishioner when he visited the prison. After her release from prison, Ida was followed by plainclothes policemen who suspected she was Jewish. In order to shake them, Ida entered St. Anne’s church. She was still there when the priest wanted to close the church for the night. Surmising her predicament, the priest allowed Ida to remain on the church premises until the following morning. Ida’s daughter, Frieda, survived the war in Lwów with Józefa Głembocka, and later was reunited with her mother.³⁰⁹
Lala Fishman (née Klara Weintraub) recalled the assistance that she and her Jewish friend Mila received from their Polish friends in Lwów when they decided that they would attempt to pass as Christians. They needed to become acquainted with Catholic prayers and rituals and secure birth certificates, which were furnished by an unidentified priest. (Lala Fishman and Steven Weingartner, Lala’s Story: A Memoir of the Holocaust [Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1997), pp.173–75.)
It was time to leave Lvov [Lwów]. … Mila also felt as I did. When I broached the idea of leaving to her, she enthusiastically endorsed it. The success of the plan hinged on fulfilling two requirements obtaining “Aryan papers,” counterfeit documents that identified us as Poles; and learning how to pass ourselves off as Polish Catholics. We straightaway embarked upon a crash course in Catholic prayer and ritual. Our instructors were sympathetic Gentiles, boys and girls around my age. Several of them had been friends of Fima [her brother]; now they were my friends too. Occasionally, they dropped by the apartment to drink tea and talk about the war and finally to help transform us into believable if not believing Catholics.

… Our friends taught us how to genuflect and make the sign of the cross with a convincing display of piety. They provided us with copies of the catechism, and we memorized all the material therein. They also gave us silver crucifixes to wear on chains around our necks, just like the ones every Gentile in Poland seemed to wear. I secretly resolved, however, that although I would attend mass and kneel and appear to pray like a Catholic, I would not take Holy Communion, I would go through all the motions of being a Catholic save this one; and when I prayed, I would make up my own prayer, silently asking God for his aid and protection. I meant no disrespect to the Catholic Church and Christians by these actions. Rather, I felt that it would be both sacriligious [sic] and blasphemous for me to do otherwise. I believed that for a Jew to willingly accept what Catholics believed was literally the body and blood of Christ would be a sin, an insult both to my Jewish heritage and to the Christians who were doing so much—and placing themselves in such danger—on my behalf.

At any rate, Mila and I engaged in our Christian studies with the diligence of nuns preparing to take their vows, and I daresay that before long we could have gone into any church in Poland and played the role of devout Catholics without arousing any suspicions whatsoever among the genuine Christians. Sadly, the same could not be said for my mother and sister. Rysia was just nine years old, and therefore too young to learn Catholic rites and prayers, much less comprehend the urgent necessity for doing so. And my mother, devastated by grief, had undergone what amounted to a nervous breakdown and was incapable of the intense effort that even a false conversion to Catholicism demanded from her.

Nevertheless, we pressed forward with the scheme. Getting Aryan papers would have to be our next step. But how? This problem was solved when some of Fima’s friends brought a Catholic boy named Staszek to the apartment for one of our evening get-togethers. Staszek had been told about our plans and wanted to help. He mentioned that he could get four blank birth certificates (metrycas [metryka]) from his parish priest. …

Staszek got us the birth certificates. … We filled out the certificates with false names but with our actual birthdays. I decided that my name would be Urszula Krzyzanowska [Krzyżanowska]. A very Christian name. My mother, Mila, and Rysia each took a different name. We did not want to appear in any way related—an important consideration if one of us was arrested. At the bottom of each document was a blank line where the parish priest was supposed to sign his name. I thought up a likely name for the priest and then, wielding my pen with a flourish, signed it on all the documents in bold, sweeping letters.
Rev. Kazimierz Romaszkan, a Pole of the Roman Catholic Armenian rite, and another unidentified priest from Lwów are mentioned as rescuers in testimonies found at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. (Eliyahu Yones, Smoke in the Sand: The Jews of Lvov in the War Years 1939–1944 [Jerusalem and New York: Gefen, 2004], p.252.)
[Rev.] Romashkian [Romaszkan] … concealed the fifteen-year-old daughter of Bertha Kahana and treated her devotedly as he did his niece, Krystyna, a fifteen-year-old in poor health. Additional Poles [among them Rev. Bronisław Jakubowski of Ryków near Złoczów³¹⁰] and Ukrainians came to Kahana’s assistance; they include the Litwak and Brodziński families, who furnished her with “Aryan” papers.

An anonymous priest assisted Zyla Menkes-Post, who had fled from the Janowska camp with an infant in her arms. Poles helped her obtain “Aryan” papers with which she could escape from Lvov [Lwów].
Irena Wilder (later Krystyna Winecka or Christine Winecki), a young girl from Stanisławów (born in 1928), took refuge with her aunt in Lwów. Her aunt approached a Catholic priest, Rev. Józef Czapran, the vicar of St. Anthony’s Parish, who provided the child with a false birth certificate. She was taught Catholic prayers by a nun to assist her in passing as a Pole. These lessons proved to be invaluable when Irena Wilder was later apprehended and interrogated in Warsaw. (Christine Winecki, The Girl in the Check Coat: Survival in Nazi-Occupied Poland and a New Life in Australia [London and Portland, Oregon: Vallentine Mitchell, 2007], pp.61–62.)