Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy

I managed to obtain a genuine Kennkarte from the German Municipal Bureau in the name of Stanislawa Wonchalska [Stanisława Wąchalska], our faithful Gentile co-worker. Anna had arranged with her priest not to report her daughter’s death, and assured me that if I would be detained as a Jewess, she would intercede on my behalf. At the same time, she told me the names of grandmothers, aunts and cousins. I was now a full-fledged Aryan with two generations of Gentile forebears.

In this manner a number of Jews acquired the names and birth certificates of deceased Poles, with which they obtained authentic Polish identification cards. Such documents afforded substantial protection, but they were not wholly dependable, for the Germans, if suspicious, could check documents against municipal and church records.
Leonora Rozen and her mother Sarah Charlap Muller, who survived the war passing as Christians in Warsaw, obtained false identity documents issued by priests via their contacts in the Polish underground. (Leonora Rozen, “Survival in Warsaw,” The Ser-Charlap Family Newsletter volume 10, no. 1, March 1999.)
When the “cleansing” of the Ghetto began, Mother and I were living in Warsaw under the cover of false identities. We had “good” false papers which were certificates of birth and christening, delivered by priests who were close to the Polish Underground network. They were issued by obliging civil servants in some other city in Poland and certified that the holders had been living in that place for many years. They were not easy to get and one needed time to have them made and delivered by the network. The underground organization also provided a “Kennkarte”, a sort of identity card printed as a real document and bearing authentic German seals. I still have two of those cards, my Mum’s and My Aunt Rita’s. So with these false papers I was known as Barbara Policzkowska and my mother was Anna Domanska [Domańska], born [née] Stolarczyk.
Jan and Zofia Topiński, activists in the Polish underground in Warsaw, are credited with rescuing at least twelve Jews. They procured false documents for Jews in hiding. Baptismal and birth certificates from Catholic parishes were indispendable. They turned for assistance to Father Zygmunt Trószyński, a Marian priest at Our Lady Queen of Poland (Matki Bożej Królowej Polski) parish on Gdańska Street in Warsaw’s Marymont district. (“The Topiński Family,” The Polish Righteous, Internet: .)
These were Zofia and Jan Topiński’s official jobs during the War. Both, however, were later involved with the underground. Jan worked in the Bureau of Information and Propaganda of the Home Army (his younger friend was Władysław Bartoszewski). From the beginning of the time when Jews needed to conceal their identity, Zofia helped in the manufacture of false papers. The Topiński couple produced fake papers on the basis of birth certificates obtained from the local parish. They set up an office in their home just for this purpose, equipped with blank “kennkarty” and the required fake rubber stamps.

At that time, Zofia Topińska received help from the priest Zygmunt Trószyński, parish priest of the church on Gdańsk Street. (Father Trószyński contributed to the rescue of many Jews. He was, however, never honoured for this). Today, little is known as to exactly which Jews were helped by the Topiński couple and specifically how they were helped. What is known is that they helped far more individuals than has been documented.
Herszek (Herszko) Fenigsztajn, a homeless Jewish boy who had been taken in by a Polish Catholic family before the outbreak of the war, was christened by Fr. Trószyński in 1940 and issued a birth certificate in a false name in order to maintain his cover as a Catholic child.³³⁶ (“Janina Bogdańska,” Story of Rescue, The Polish Righteous, Internet: .)
Janina Bogdańska lived with her husband Ludwik and son Tadeusz on ul. Potocka 4 (4 Potocka Street) in the Marymont neighborhood, Warszawa. In 1935, Ludwik Bogdański, the owner of a transport company, found in his stable a sleeping, ill and emaciated Jewish boy, twelve-year-old Herszek, the son of a homeless bagel seller from the Stare Miasto (Old Town). The Bogdańskis decided to keep the child and raise it. The boy’s mother died in 1937.

Herszek was to some extent a member of the Bogdański family when World War II broke out and the Germans started persecuting Jews. “I was trying to do everything during the Nazi occupation so as not to let Herszek end up in the ghetto,” Janina Bogdańska recalls in her account deposited in the Archives of the Jewish Historical Institute. Mrs. Bogdańksa spoke about her problems with priest Truszyński [Trószyński] from the Królowa Korony Polskiej (The Queen of Polish Crown) church on ul. Gdańska (Gdańska Street). In November 1940, the priest baptized the boy and issued him a certificate on the name Henryk Wichrowski.

In 1943, as a result of the denunciation made by a neighbor, the Germans came to search the Bogdańskis’ apartment. “Everybody in Marymont knew that I had been keeping and raising a Jewish child. Only one, the only person informed on us to the German authorities. (…) After the denunciation, the German gendarmerie came to us, but, after the intercession of Barbara Rutkowska, who accepted the Deutsche Volksliste (German People’s List) and was an activist of the ZNMS [Independent Socialist Youth Union – editor’s note], the gendarmerie gave up searching for the boy hidden in our place,” she recalls in the account deposited in the Archives of the Jewish Historical Institute.

Irena Bobińska-Skotnicka, a neighbor and a friend of Janina’s daughter – Jadwiga Maldis, an activist in the PPS (Polish Socialist Party) involved in the underground movement; during the war worked in the Arbeitsamt [job center]. Thanks to her help, in the fall of 1943, Herszek went to Germany, where – unrecognized – worked on a farm until the end of the war. He returned to his foster family in 1947.

From May 1943 on, Janina Bogdańska helped Irena and Aleksander Skotnicki, a Jewish fighter, who found a shelter in her place after the collapse of the Ghetto Uprising. He came to stay in Irena’s place on ul. Potocka 6 (6 Potocka Street) thanks to his sister Hanna Skotnicka. Bogdańska would bring him food. Aleksander and Irena married after the war. They moved to Gdańsk where Aleksander testified against Jurgen [Jürgen] Stroop, the man responsible for the bloody suppression of the Ghetto Uprising. In the end, the married couple settled down in Australia.
Father Trószyński provided food, temporary shelter, employment and false identity documents to many Jews, performed a marriage for a Jewish couple who were passing as Catholics, and searched for shelters for Jews. He placed at least two Jewish children in convents. One of the Jews he helped was a woman named Karpalska.³³⁷
After leaving the ghetto in Warsaw Stefanie S. and her mother Dunka passed as Christians in Warsaw with the help of false documents they had obtained from a priest. For a time they lived with a relative of her father’s family who had converted to Catholicism and lived openly with her Polish husband. (Yehudi Lindeman, ed., Shards of Memory: Narratives of Holocaust Survival [Westport, Connecticut and London: Praeger, 2007], pp.138–39.)
Shortly before her father’s death, when Stefanie turned four, plans were made to get her out of the ghetto. Her mother bleached her already dark blond hair. She was tutored in Catholic prayers, and instructed that outside the ghetto she could “never talk about what goes on in the house [or] say the names of anybody,” or reveal information that might betray her Jewish identity, such as her grandfather having a beard. …

The two of them remained together at the home of Adela, a relative from Stefanie’s father’s family. Adela was a Jewish woman who converted and married a Polish scientist. They lived in Zoliborz [Żoliborz], a suburb of Warsaw. Adela took very good care of Stefanie’s mother, Dunka, who was confined to bed with a bleeding ulcer. When Dunka recovered she got a job as an operating room nurse even though she did not have nurse’s training.

Stefanie and her mother had false documents that a priest had procured for them. These were the actual birth certificates of deceased people who were born at about the same time as Stefanie and her mother. As a result, they could not go by the same name. She remembers that her mother claimed Stefanie was her illegitimate child, named Maria. When Adela’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Krysia, was caught working for the underground, Stefanie and her mother fled from Adela’s home because they feared the Gestapo would search the house. …

Upon returning to Warsaw, Stefanie hid in a villa with her mother, only three houses from Adela’s home. The gentile woman who owned the villa was hiding seventeen illegal Jews (Jews without Christian papers). …

Two secret hiding places were constructed in the house in order to conceal the seventeen Jews in the event of a search. One was a hole behind a water closet in the basement, which extended into a tunnel that went several houses down. The other was in a small bedroom on the second floor. There was a cabinet built into the wall with shelves that could be removed. From there, people could crawl into the eaves of the house.
Masha Borenstein, a tiny Jewish girl, was smuggled out of the Warsaw ghetto in the summer of 1942 and taken in a rucksack by Elżbieta Andersz to the home of her parents, Helena and Leon Godlewski, in Warsaw. With the help of a priest friend, Rev. Edward Tyszka, the head of the Pruszków branch of the Chief Welfare Council (Rada Główna Opiekuńcza), they obtained for her a forged baptismal certificate in the name of Irena Maria Janik. In 1943, Leon Godlewski was arrested for his activities in the Home Army and was sent to Auschwitz, where he perished. Helena Godlewska had to cope with raising her three children, including Misia, as she was known, on her own. Despite her difficult financial situation, she did not abandon Misia and took care of her until the end of the German occupation and beyond, until her teens. Masha Borenstein, later Miriam Adika, immigrated to Israel in 1956. Helena Godlewska, who died in 1967, was recognized by Yad Vashem in 2011. Both Rev. Edward Tyszka and Rev. Franciszek Dyżewski appealed to their parishioners to help Jews in any way they could.³³⁸
Individual rescuers often turned to priests directly to obtain documents, or used intermediaries:

[1] Severin Kohn (now Gabriel), who passed as a Christian in Warsaw, obtained a birth certificate from a priest of the Church of the Holy Cross in Łódź, declaring him to be Władysław Gawroński.³³⁹

[2] The father of John K., who was the owner of an estate in Lubieńka, obtained Aryan papers for the whole family from Monsignor Aleksander Cisło, dean and pastor of Stryj, a good friend of the family. The family consisted of parents, John K. and his wife, and John’s sister and her son.³⁴⁰

Many Jewish testimonies in the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, housed at Yale University Library, in New Haven, Connecticut, also attest to priests providing false documents to Jews in various locatilities: Rozwadów near Stalowa Wola,³⁴¹ Mroczkowice near Rawa Mazowiecka,³⁴² Lwów,³⁴³ and Stryj.³⁴⁴

Among that collection is the testimony of Henryk (Froim Fiszel) Prajs from Góra Kalwaria near Warsaw.³⁴⁵ Rev. Stefan Ścibiorek, the assistant pastor of Osieck, issued a false birth certificate to Henryk Prajs, who received assistance from many villagers, often complete strangers. (Testimony of Henryk Prajs, January 2005, Internet: .)
On 25th February 1941 they deported the Jews from Gora [Góra] Kalwaria to the ghetto in Warsaw. My sister was already there, she hadn’t come back to Gora Kalwaria with the outbreak of the war. Mom didn’t even think of escaping, and me neither, I wanted to go to the ghetto with my family. The neighbors would come over and say, ‘Listen, run away, go, you don’t look like a Jew, maybe you'll make it.’ I heard there were Jews in Magnuszew [town 25 km from Gora Kalwaria]—there was this sort of grapevine during the occupation—and that there are no deportations there. And so I basically ran away in the evening, after a talk with Mom. I don’t know what happened to my family. I lost contact with them on that day. They were gone without a trace. Only my brother came to me later on. Lots of people left the ghetto then, everyone tried not to surrender.

It’s twenty-something kilometers from Gora Kalwaria to Magnuszew, wintertime, so I stepped in a yard once in a while, knocked on the door, I asked, ‘Hello sir, open, please, I’m a Jew, I ran away, please, help me.’ If it was a good man—hhe'd let me in, if not—he'd say ‘Go away, go away!’ The Jews stayed in Magnuszew until May or June 1942. [The Magnuszew ghetto was liquidated in October 1942]. I didn’t know anyone there. I basically worked as a tailor, people came in, gave me something to sew, I did it, and it was enough to get by.

Two months before the deportations they created a ghetto, put everyone in, and later moved them to Kozienice [town ca. 20 km from Gora Kalwaria, 80 km from Warsaw]. In Kozienice they selected young men and took them to Chmielew [village 5 km from Magnuszew] to dig irrigation ditches. There was a labor camp for Jews. I was one of those transported there.

We stayed there until December [1942], and later came the deportation and we went back to Magnuszew. I already had many friends there at the time, among those whom I tailored for. On our way back from Chmielew a Polish friend, Janek Cwyl, pulled me out of the column while the policemen weren’t paying attention. He took me with him, he saved me.

Somehow I managed to get through to Gora Kalwaria. I went to my neighbor, Mrs. Wasilewska. She immediately started to plan what to do. We went to Osieck [town 15 km of Gora Kalwaria] together, to a parish priest, Kuropek [Rev. Stefan Ścibiorek] was his name I think. He issued a birth certificate for me. Later I got myself a kenkarta, in the name Feliks Zoladek [Żołądek]. You had to do it with the help of friends and friends of friends. Because the priest gave me the certificate, but not the kenkarta, naturally. A friend took the certificate, went to one of those doing funny business [people who fabricated false IDs], and had them make me a kenkarta, that’s how it was done. It wasn’t legal.

I lived in the country, staying with different farmers and tailoring for them. One told some other he knew a tailor, and so I kept going from one person to another. Some of them knew I was a Jew, they figured it out, but well, I did survive. I stayed in one village, returned to another, kept in hiding for some time, had to run away on another occasion, one was always looking for a safe house.

I’ve been exceptionally lucky. They told me: ‘Heniek, you don't look like a Jew at all.’ I also spoke correct Polish, more or less, I mean I had the right accent, because as for the grammar a peasant wouldn’t notice. I could quite safely assume I wouldn’t be recognized by anyone. Plus I was a soldier, I was brave. That’s why I took risks, I probably wouldn’t otherwise, just like many others. You can’t imagine, you could be killed any time, and not just you, but also the person harboring you. [On 15th October 1941 the death penalty for hiding a Jew was introduced in the General Government.]…

My longest single stay was in the village Podwierzbie near Zelechow [Żelechów, Podłęż community, Garwolin district] with a Mrs. [Katarzyna] Pokorska. She was an acquaintance or a cousin of Mrs. Wasilewska [Mr. Prajs’ neighbor]. Many decent people lived there generally, the Pyz family for example, the Polak family, the Marciniaks. Even the head of the village protected me. And as for the villagers, some did and some did not believe that I was a Pole. Not once did they later tell me, after the end of the war: ‘It made us think, you lived here, it’s a poor house, and nobody came to see you, you didn’t leave for Christmas; we eyed you, a nice looking boy.’ They didn't know what to think.

I went to the dances once, but later decided not to go anymore, because I was afraid. I went to the church once, too, but was afraid someone would recognize me as well. But nobody gave me away, simply Godsend. I went to that church after the war and ordered a thanksgiving mess for all the villagers.

I’m not surprised people didn’t want to hide Jews. Everyone was afraid, who would risk his family’s lives? You can accuse the ones who kept a Jew, exploited him financially, and later gave him away or killed him. They’re murderers. But you absolutely can’t blame an average Pole, I don’t know if anyone would be more decent, if any Jew would be more decent.

After escaping from the Warsaw ghetto in January 1943, 13-year-old Mosze Rozenblum (later Marian Rosenbloom) sought refuge with Stanisław Drabich, a family friend living in Warsaw. Drabich, who also assisted other Jews, took the boy in. He obtained a false birth certificate for Mosze in the name of Marian Rudzki from a priest he was acquainted with. About six weeks later the Gestapo raided Drabich’s home. When Mosze was searched, his ghetto registration card was found on his person. Drabich was arrested and executed on July 16, 1943. Mosze Rozenblum managed to escape and was sheltered by a Polish family in the Praga suburb together with several other Jews.³⁴⁶

Felix Horn obtained false identity documents from the Home Army in Warsaw in the name of Feliks Wójcik, including a birth certificate supplied by a priest.³⁴⁷ Jehoszua Grinberg, born in Radzymin in 1907, obtained a false birth and baptismal certificate in the name of Jan Milewski from a local priest, which allowed him to pass as a Catholic Pole in the vicinity of Warsaw.³⁴⁸

In her Yad Vashem testimony,³⁴⁹ Helena Korzeniewska (née Kruk, later Korazim), who was recognized as a Righteous Gentile for smuggling six Jews out of the Warsaw ghetto who were then sheltered by her uncle and aunt in Warsaw,³⁵⁰ states that she repeatedly turned to Rev. Kolski for baptismal and birth certificates for these charges. Rev. Jan Sztuka, the pastor of the Purest Heart of Mary church on Szembeka Square in the Grochów suburb of Warsaw, directed her to a woman who provided an identity document for Janka Eisenstadt. Two Jews whom Korzeniewska assisted, Justyna Lilienthal and her young son Józio, were sheltered by Rev. Aleksander Grabowski in the parish rectory in Grodzisk Mazowiecki.

Stanley Bors was sheltered in Grodzisk, outside Warsaw, in the home of his wife’s uncle, who was married to a Polish woman. He and his family members passed as Poles with the assistance of a priest. (Sylvia Rothchild, ed., Voices from the Holocaust [New York: New American Library, 1981], pp.224–25.)
We ran away to my wife’s other uncle, the one who was married to a gentile woman. They lived in Grodzisk, another suburb of Warsaw. We were able to stay with them till the end of the war. The family consisted of the uncle, his wife and his young daughter. We were six people in a two-bedroom house. All our relatives were gambling with their lives by helping us. We had false birth certificates and passports obtained by the colonel [a member of the Polish underground] through his contacts in city hall, but any priest would know we were Jews from our lack of knowledge about the customs and traditions of the Catholic religion. The priest in that neighborhood didn’t report us. He was a good man and didn’t want to cooperate with the Germans. …

My wife’s uncle was a teacher in his seventies. His wife was about the same age. They were married a long time and had lived in Lodz [Łódź]. When Hitler came they came back to Grodzisk, where his wife’s family lived. Everybody knew my uncle was Jewish but no one reported him to the Gestapo.

The following are some additional examples of priests from Warsaw who issued false baptismal certificates to Jews (Gutman and Bender, The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations, volumes 4 and 5: Poland, Part 1, p.405, and Part 2, pp.722–23):

[1] At first the relations during the occupation between Henrk [Henryk] Krueger, a resident of Warsaw, and his friends interned in the local ghetto were completely businesslike. But the humanitarian values imbued in Krueger soon induced him to help the needy and the persecuted, at great risk to his own life and without receiving any payment. He supplied food to his acquaintances in the ghetto, such as Halina Wald and the Frydman family, but in the summer of 1942 when the big Aktion began in Warsaw in which the ghetto’s Jews were taken to Treblinka, he felt compelled to do more to save their lives. He managed to get into the ghetto, which was more closely guarded at the time, bringing Aryan papers in his pockets. He gave these to 20-year-old Mina Frydman and accompanied her to an apartment he had prepared to shelter her on the Aryan side of the city. While she was in hiding, Krueger continued to supply Mina with everything she needed, and when she was threatened by blackmailers he moved her to another apartment. [He secured new identity documents for her based on a certificate he obtained from Holy Cross church in Warsaw.³⁵¹] She remained there until the late summer of 1944 and after the Warsaw Uprising was taken, with her borrowed identity, to forced labor in Germany, where she was liberated by the Allied armies.

[2] Before the war, the Sliwczynskis [Śliwczyńskis], from the town of Mlawa [Mława] in the Warsaw district, lived on the same street as Ella Zlotnik [Złotnik] (later Perkiel), who was in the same class as one of the Sliwczynski girls. During the occupation, the two families moved to Warsaw, where the Zlotniks were interned in the ghetto. In 1943, when Ela [sic] and her father hid on the Aryan side of the city, the ties between the two families were renewed and Ella and the Sliwczynski’s son, Jerzy, met frequently. In 1944, after the Gestapo arrested Ella’s father, Ella had to change her identity and disappear. Jerzy helped her by arranging a temporary hiding place for her outside the city and obtained new Aryan papers for her. When Ella returned to Warsaw, she stayed with Sliwczynski until the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944. When the Germans arrested Jerzy, Ella stayed with his father, Tadeusz Sliwczynski, until after the war, when she emigrated to the United States. The Sliwczynskis helped other Jews from the town of Mlawa who hid on the Aryan side of Warsaw, including the Makowskis, the Kleniecs, Celina Czech, and Biezunska [Bieżuńska]. Despite the danger, the Sliwczynskis considered it their human duty to help their Jewish friends and never expected anything in return. [They were able to obtain false Kennkarte for these Jews based on birth and baptismal certificates issued by Rev. Dudziński of St. Charles Borromeo parish in the Powązki district of Warsaw.³⁵²]
While being sheltered on the esstate of Jan and Franciszka Wójcicki in Dąbrówka Szlachecka on the outskirts of Warsaw, with whom Sima Wasser (née Gleichgewicht) was placed by her aunt, Dora Śnieg, the Wójcickis’ niece, Apolonia Gorzkowska, turned to a priest for assistance. The priest agreed to issue a false baptismal certificate for Sima in the name of Krystyna Budna, which was used to fabricate a Kennkarte (a German identity document) by a Polish underground cell.³⁵³
The risk associated with issuing false documents is illustrated by the following example (Tatiana Berenstein and Adam Rutkowski, Assistance to the Jews in Poland, 1939–1945 [Warsaw: Polonia Publishing House, 1963], p.43):
September 1942—in Włochy, outside Warsaw, the Germans had seized Fr. [Julian] Chruścicki, the parish priest, Franciszek Kostecki, the Mayor, Kazimierz Tarnas, the Registrar, Teofil Gruszka, the Town Hall cashier, and two teachers, Latosiński and Borkowski, for helping Jews by issuing them with birth certificates and other documents. They were all taken to the Gestapo in Warsaw and their homes were searched from top to bottom. The organist of the Church of the Holy Cross in Warsaw was arrested for abetting Jews in the procurement of false baptismal certificates.
Guta Tyrangiel (later Genevieve Tyrangiel-Benezra) was born on August 26, 1940, one day after the establishment of the ghetto in Mińsk Mazowiecki. When the Germans liquidated the ghetto in August 1942, Guta’s parents managed to escape with Guta and her younger sister Esther. They hid in the surrounding villages and then moved to a labour camp named Kopernikus where the danger to their lives seemed less immediate. Their young daughters were hidden in the attic of a building because it was forbidden for children to live in the camp. Guta and her sister were smuggled out of the camp in a closed wicker basket in October 1942. A local Catholic priest named Hert (?), who worked with the Żegota organization, and a notary supplied them with false baptismal certificates and made arrangements for them to be cared for by different Polish families. Guta was entrusted to Józef and Bronisława Jaszczuk, a childless Polish couple who lived in Mińsk Mazowiecki. They presented her as their niece, Genowefa Filipiak. Guta survived the war, but her parents and younger sister did not.³⁵⁴ (Gutman and Bender, The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations, volume 4: Poland, Part 1, p.308.)
In August 1942, after the liquidation of the Minsk [Mińsk] Mazowiecki ghetto in the Warsaw district and the transfer of most of its inmates to the Treblinka death camp, the Tyrangel couple arranged a hiding place for their two baby daughters while they themselves found shelter with a peasant family in a nearby village. The girls’ hosts, fearing for their safety, enlisted the help of the parish priest to transfer Guta Tyrangel to the Jaszczuks, who lived in Minsk Mazowiecki. The other girl was sent to another family, where all traces of her were lost. The girls’ parents perished, and only Guta survived, thanks to the devoted care of Jozef [Józef] and Bronislawa [Bronisława] Jaszczuk, who saw to all her needs. … After the war, the Jaszczuks adopted little Guta, who later emigrated to Canada.
After escaping from the Warsaw ghetto in the spring of 1942, Henia Niewiadomska (later Krystyna Wasiak), born in 1926, wandered from village to village in the vicinity of Mińsk Mazowiecki. She stayed for short periods of time with various farmers who were aware or suspected she was Jewish. She eventually arrived at the farm of Leopold Sawicki in the village of Dąbrowa. Sawicki agreed to keep her longer. He obtained a birth and baptismal certificate for her in the name of Krystyna Orzechowska, a deceased relative, from the parish in Czerwonka Liwska, whose pastor was Rev. Franciszek Osiński. Henia retained this identity when she moved to Radzymin, where she resided in the home of Mrs. Wasiak. After the war, she married Mrs. Wasiak’s son, Bolesław. She moved to Israel in 1966 together with her Polish husband and their three children.³⁵⁵
The risks inherent in providing false documents are illustrated by the following account of Maria Rajbenbach, a Jewish woman who escaped from the Warsaw ghetto just before the outbreak of the uprising on April 19, 1943. (Bartoszewski and Lewin, Righteous Among Nations, p.233.)
How did we obtain our documents? A brother [Tadeusz Romaszewski] of the painter [Marian] Malicki was employed, together with his wife [actually, with his sister Maria], at the Record Office of the Municipal Administration. Together with a parson they had forged both the death and birth registers to secure Christian birth certificates of two deceased women. Thus several people had to collaborate to prepare such certificates. The Malickis had supplied numerous Jews with such certificates. Unfortunately, one of these Jews was identified by the Gestapo and in this way the names of the three people became known to them. The parson was shot dead, the Malickis were sent to Treblinka [actually it was Majdanek] concentration camp and Malicki had his arms and legs broken in an attempt to extort the names of other rescued Jews. But he would not give them away. Both perished in Treblinka camp.
Not all the facts in this account are correct. Both Tadeusz Romaszewski and his sister, Maria Malicka, were employed in the chancery (record office) of the Warsaw cathedral parish of St. John the Baptist. As members of the extreme right-wing Szaniec group (a continuation of the interwar National-Radical Camp “ABC”), they issued scores of false baptismal and birth certificates to endangered Jews, as well as Poles. Maria Malicka was betrayed to the Gestapo by her brother’s fiancée, Irena Lis, who—unknown to the organization—was a Gestapo agent. The Gestapo arrested Maria Malicka and her husband Marian Malicki, who was sent to Majdanek, where he perished. Maria Malicka was imprisoned in Warsaw, but survived the war. Tadeusz Romaszewski went into hiding. The information about the parson’s death has not been confirmed, and appears to be an embellishment. As a result of this one act of denunciation, scores of Jews and Poles were apprehended by the Germans. The Polish underground issued a death sentence against Irena Lis, but she escaped to Lwów. She was brought to trial after the war.³⁵⁶
At least seven Jewish children were sheltered by the Sisters of St. Elizabeth, who had been displaced from Grabie near Toruń and relocated to Świder, now a part of Otwock, a town near Warsaw, where they ran a home for children known as the Educational Institute of St. Anthony (Zakład Wychowawczy św. Antoniego–“Promyk”). The children were given false identities and supporting birth and baptismal certificates were issued by Rev. Canon Ludwik Wolski, the pastor of St. Vincent de Paul parish in Otwock, and his vicar, Rev. Jan Raczkowski. (The children were not required to undergo baptism.) Two nuns—Sister Gertruda (Stanisława) Marciniak, the Mother Superior, and Sister Ludwika Małkiewicz—as well as Rev. Ludwik Wolski, Rev. Jan Raczkowski, and Bronisław Marchlewicz were recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Gentiles. Among their charges were: Daniel Landsberg (passing as Wojciech Płochocki), Maria (Marysia) Osowiecka (passing as Halina Brzoza, later Michaelle Donat and Michèle Donnet), Ruth (Rutka) Noy (passing as Teresa Wysocka), Leopold Bliksilber (pasing as Adolf Karol), Jurek Adin, Helena Kokoszko, Sasza Wecer (Staszek Wetzer or Szaszka Thau³⁵⁷), Salome Rybak, and Anita Szapiro. Their stories are set out below. Two Jewish adults were also given refuge by the nuns. The local commander of the Blue police, Bronisław Marchlewicz, a Home Army member, extended his protection to the convent. (Gutman, The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust: Supplementary Volumes (2000–2005), volume II, p.592.)
Bronisław Marchlewicz from Otwock (Warsaw District) was a veteran police officer. During the occupation period, he served as the commander of the Polish “Blue Police” (named for the color of their uniform) and had connections with the Polish underground, the Home Army (AK). He was known for his fair treatment of both the Polish and the Jewish inhabitants of the city. Unlike many of his colleagues who collaborated with the German authorities, he endeavored in the framework of his complex job to help rescue Jews who arrived on the “Aryan” side from the local ghetto. While the ghetto still existed, Bronisław would turn a blind eye to Jews who came to market in order to purchase staples. He also released those who had been arrested and brought to the police station. He protected the Jewish woman, Zofia Eisenstadt, from Polish collaborators who tried to blackmail her. As a policeman in the city working under the direct command of the Germans and privy to classified information, he would warn Jews when deportations were about to take place. His involvement in the rescue of Jews increased after the liquidation of the ghetto in August 1942, particularly in the rescue of children. In this matter, he cooperated with the nuns of the St. Elizabeth convent (Zgromadzienie Sióstr Św. Elżbiety), under the guidance of Gertruda Marciniak, the mother superior, who ran the Promyk orphanage where several Jewish children were being hidden. The Jewish child, Maria Osowiecka (later, Michèle Donnet), was brought to the police station at the time of the liquidation of the ghetto. Bronisław Marchlewicz entrusted her to the Polish woman, Aleksandra Szpakowska and helped to bring the child to the convent. In addition, he arranged for another three Jewish children to be taken into the convent: Daniel Landsberg, Renata Noj, and Salomea Rybak. Bronisław did not participate in the liquidation of the ghetto and ignored the command of his German superiors to shoot fleeing Jews. He also forbade his Polish subordinates to participate in the plunder and pillage. After the liquidation of the ghetto, he knew of several Jews who were hiding in the city in Polish homes or under false identities, and was in contact with them and warned them in times of danger. Among these were the members of the Fleising family who entrusted him with valuables for their subsistence during the war, knowing that they would receive the remainder back.
The rescue of Maria Osowiecka (later, Michèle Donnet) is decribed in Gutman, The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust: Supplementary Volumes (2000–2005), volume II, at page 623.
In August 1942, on the eve of the liquidation of the ghetto in Otwock (Warsaw District), five-year-old Maria Osowiecka (later, Michèle Donnet) and her mother, Anna (née Litewska), were evicted from the apartment they were renting after the landlord discovered that they were Jews, Maria’s mother tried desperately to find someone who would take her daughter in. She asked Aleksandra Szpakowska to rescue the girl, who in the meantime had been taken to the local police station. Following an exchange with the Polish police chief, Bronisław Marchlewicz, Aleksandra secured the girl’s release and took her home with her. Maria stayed there for a time, until Aleksandra obtained a Christian birth certificate for her [in the name of Helena Brzoza] from the community priest, Ludwik Wolski, who cooperated with her. After Maria learned the Christian prayers, Aleksandra, who declared herself the girl’s legal guardian, moved her, under an assumed identity as a Polish orphan, to the St. Elizabeth convent (Zgromadzenie Sióstr Św. Elżbiety), under the guidance of Gertruda Marciniak, the Mother Superior, who ran the Promyk orphanage where several Jewish children found refuge. She kept in touch with the girl and visited her frequently, and when danger loomed moved her to a different location. The girls’ [sic] parents were murdered, and at the end of the war her cousin, Hanna Kaminska [Kamińska], arrived and took her. During the occupation, Aleksandra, who was known in Otwock for her activity in aid of the needy and distressed, opened her home to other Jewish fugitives as well.
The family of Max Noy survived the war in Otwock with the assistance of a number of Poles, among them a priest and the Sisters of St. Elizabeth who sheltered their daughter Ruth. (Gutman and Bender, The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations, volume 4: Poland, Part 1, pp.485–86.)
Raizel Noy of Otwock, near Warsaw, gave birth to her daughter Ruth in September 1939, after the German occupation began. In August 1942, during the large-scale deportation of Jews from Warsaw, the Noys managed to escape from the ghetto with their young daughter. Maks Noy, Raizel’s husband, worked in a labor camp run by a German contracting company in the nearby town of Karczew; Raizel and her daughter wandered in the vicinity with no hope of finding shelter. Because she looked Jewish, Raizel experienced constant tension and fear of the lurking dangers that she and her daughter faced. Aware that the likelihood of her survival was dwindling, Raizel decided to spare no effort to at least to save Ruth. At his workplace, Noy made contact with Ludwika Malkiewicz [Małkiewicz], a Catholic nun who taught at the Otwock convent orphanage, and asked her to rescue his daughter. Malkiewicz consulted with Krystyna Bykowska, the mother superior [this is inaccurate, as the mother superior was Sister Gertruda Marciniak; Bykowska was not a nun, but the daughter of Władysława Cygler], and the two agreed to admit the girl. In coordination with Malkiewicz and Bykowska, Ruth was left in the convent corridor one night and when she began to cry—alone and in the dark—the nuns came out and brought her inside. Little Ruth was placed with the Polish children and the nuns cared for her devotedly. Sisters Malkiewicz and Bykowska performed this act of rescue as a human duty flowing from their deep religious faith and sought no recompense for it even though it endangered their lives. Maks Noy eventually escaped from his labor camp and he and Raizel found shelter in Praga, Warsaw, in an apartment they rented from Wladyslawa [Władysława] Cygler. Although Cygler knew they were Jews, she prepared a hideout for them in case of danger and sheltered them from inquisitive neighbors. The only person who knew their address was Sister Malkiewicz, who, in the summer of 1944—five weeks before Praga was liberated—brought Ruth to them because a child in the orphanage had threatened denunciation. After the war, the Noys immigrated to the United States ….
Max Noy provides the following testimony in Kurek, Your Life Is Worth Mine, at pages 218–20.
During the German occupation, I worked in the Otwock ghetto as a guard.

One day Sister Ludwika Malkiewicz [Małkiewicz] came to me with a piece of paper from the Germans stating that she would be getting some furniture. I don’t remember the precise details but she needed ten beds. … I told the sister to take as many beds as she wanted …

Soon our conversation turned around to my family. I told her I had a daughter. At first I feared revealing where Ruth was hiding, but finally I told her that she was in Otwock with relatives, but that it wasn’t a permanent arrangement and that is why I would like for her to be in an orphanage. At that time my wife was staying with an acquaintance of hers, a Polish woman.

Sister Ludwika took the beds, as many as she wanted, and from that time we became friends—she used to telephone me, and I her, so as not to lose touch with each other. …

Irka, the Polish woman, was frightened because she had her own family. After all, the Germans killed entire Polish families for harboring Jews! … my wife went with Ruth to Kocowa [?], if only to stay there for two weeks. After staying in Kocowa, my wife wandered around with my daughter. Somehow we always managed to stay in contact. Then one day we made an arrangement. I sent a Pole I knew, Kobus, to bring my daughter. He couldn’t take my wife because there was too much risk involved.

Kobus took my daughter to his place in Otwock, and then she became ill. … She had to see a doctor. Since I had been a student at Warsaw University, I had many Polish doctors as friends. I asked a pediatrician, Stas Wieslawski [Staś Wiesławski], to help, He visited my daughter. …

It was winter already. I made contact with Sister Ludwika, and as soon as Ruth got well, we gave her the child. It was a winter’s evening, cold and snowy. The doors of the orphanage were open and my wife said to Ruth: “Go inside; you’ll get some candy there.”

Ruth went. We made an arrangement with Sister Ludwika that in case of trouble she would light a candle in the window. If no light shone that would indicate that everything had gone alright. We froze outside for two hours, but no light came, so we left the orphanage.

We visited our daughter only twice. She was under the care of Sister Anna, a brave young nun. Later, when we were in hiding, our link with our daughter was the Polish woman I’ve already mentioned, Irka.

Sister Ludwika was very careful in her activities, which is why we felt safe having Ruth stay in the convent. We left Ruth with a letter, because that’s how it was done in those days. She also had an authentic [baptismal] certificate, with the name of Teresa Wysocka on it, which I got in Otwock from a priest I knew.

Provided with the letter and certificate, Ruth started to cry once she was inside the orphanage. The nuns came down to see what was happening, and then they talked about whether the child was Jewish and if so, whether they could put the other children in danger if they took her in. My daughter went up to the mother superior at that point, and the mother superior reacted with these words:

“If the child has come to me, then I will share her fate.”

Luckily, my daughter did not talk Yiddish or Hebrew; she only knew Polish and we only spoke Polish at home. Before we left for the convent, we had taught her what to say—that her mother had been taken by the Nazis to Germany, and that her name was Teresa Wysocka.

We gave Sister Ludwika carte blanche when we sent Ruth to the convent; she could do anything she wanted with the child for its safety, including baptizing it, for a little water would not be bad if it saved the child’s life. We also left the nuns a little money. They accepted the money, but it would have made no difference if we had not given it, for Ruth would have been accepted into the convent regardless.

We informed the Polish police commissioner in Otwock of the fact that we had given our child to the convent. He assured us that in case something happened and the child ended up at the police station, he would call an engineer living nearby, Szpakowski, and then his wife would take the child in as her own, so that our daughter would not fall into the hands of the Germans.

When Ruth was already in the convent, my wife and I went to Praga to hide. When the Germans were already losing the war, and the front was nearing Warsaw in 1944, Sister Ludwika managed to inform us that the Germans were moving the orphanage to the west and that she didn’t know what would be happening to them. So we sent our liaison, Irka, to pick up the girl, and after our daughter was with us. She didn’t have to hide anymore and no one suspected that she was Jewish.

Sister Ludwika Małkiewicz provided additional details of the rescue activities in an interview conducted in 1984. (Kurek, Your Life Is Worth Mine, pp.157–61.)
When on October 10, 1940, the Germans kicked us out of the children’s home in Grabia [Grabie], near Torun [Toruń], and sent us to the General Government (to make room for the Hitlerjugend), the Social Welfare Dept. of Warsaw picked us up at the station in Warsaw and placed us with the Sisters of St. Teresa in Swidrze [Świder] on Mickiewicz St. The living space was too small for all of us, so we requested the mayor to let us have the Jewish boarding school in the neighborhood, which was empty since the Jewish population was already in a ghetto. By ourselves we painted the interior and created a chapel, and the mayor gave us the necessary furniture from that furniture that had been left behind by the previous boarders. I received desks from a Jewish school that had been closed in Otwock.

The owner of the boarding school, as we found out, was Jozef [Józef] Kaplon, a Jew, who was at the time in the ghetto in Otwock, about a kilometer away. We decided that since we were using his establishment, it was only proper to see if he needed food in the ghetto. I sought him out. It was 1941.

Kaplon was without any family and already very old and also ill. He was happy to see me and asked me to visit him regularly. He had something to eat, but every Sunday I brought him a warm dinner and a bit of this and that. Thus I became acquainted with Jews.

I always entered the ghetto under the barbed wire, for there was no entrance from the side of Swidrze. Except for Kaplon, the Jews looked at me with suspicion. But this didn’t last long. The ghetto police themselves proposed that when I would be going from Otwock to Swidzre, I should shorten my way by walking through the ghetto. With time they began to trust me completely, so much so that they gave me their savings for safe keeping, and, needing money, they came for it at night. Later I started going to the ghetto on Saturday, right after school lessons, to see how the Jews prayed and observed the Sabbath.