Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy

The German police officer had an office in the church rectory. …

In rural Poland, it is customary for the farmers to go to confession often. The farmer reminded me, I had not gone since my arrival and urged me to go that week. Again I was confronted with a serious dilemma. I did not know what to do. I had no clue what was expected of me or what the protocol was when confessing. …

I entered the church and looked around trying to assess my surroundings. I had never been inside a Christian place of worship, but from what I overheard, I had a general idea what to expect. … I knelt at the top of the aisle and crossed myself before proceeding down the outside aisle towards a cubicle. Inside, I could barely make out the silhouette of a man. I entered the empty side, closed the curtain, sat on a stool and waited. A few nervous minutes passed, while I became accustomed to the dark interior.

From the other side of the partition, a voice spoke. “Bless you my son.”

I waited, unsure what to say. The priest remained quiet, and the silence became heavy. Confused and frightened, I blurted out, “Father, I don’t know what to do—I am a Jew.”

Again there was silence. The confessional window separating the two cubicles opened, and the priest looked at me, saying, “Do not be afraid my son, I will not betray you.” We looked at each other for a few minutes, and finally he asked me if I knew any prayers.

I nodded.

He began to pray, “God bless Poland … please help the oppressed …” and I repeated the words after him. When he finished, we talked, and as I was leaving he said, “when the hyena leaves Poland, and if you do not find any of your family, I will sponsor you for baptism, if it is your wish.”

For as long as I lived on the farm, the priest kept my secret. “Come to me whenever your heart is heavy and we will talk,” he told me. Over the next fourteen months, we had many conversations on numerous subjects. At no time did he make any attempt to convert me to a Catholic, nor did he make any offer to help me to escape. [To where one wonders.—M.P.]
A forest inspector found an 8-month old girl, Zelda, in the woods near Dzierzkowice and notified the village elder. The girl’s parents, Chemia and Sara Tenenbaum, had been deported to Kraśnik. Apolonia and Aleksander Ołdak took the child in and cared for her. In 1943 they adopted the foundling, calling her Barbara (Basia). Because some of the villagers were fearful of German repercussions and wanted the child to be surrendered, the local commander of the Peasant Battalions, who had found the child in the forest, requested Rev. Józef Baranowski, the local pastor, to baptize her, with the secretary of the commune office acting as the godfather. The protection of these various persons shielded the child from further adverse attention. After the war, Barbara Tenenbaum and the widowed Apolonia Ołdak settled in to Israel.⁴²⁰
Bronisława Eisner (later Szwajca), born in 1932, recalls the assistance she and her mother received from a number of families (the Twardziks, the Syndutkas, Mrs. Dębińska, Mrs. Szwestkowa, Mrs. Kaźmierczak, Mr. Sitek, Mrs. Świtał, Mrs. Ronczoszkowa, and the Czaplas), both in Sosnowiec and in her native Katowice, after their escape from the ghetto in Sosnowiec in August 1943. Bronia Eisner stayed the longest, until liberation, with the Czaplas, Polish-speaking Silesians whom she remembers fondly as “good people.” Among those who helped her and her mother was a Catholic priest, Rev. Józef Szubert.⁴²¹ (Account of Bronisława Szwajca, née Eisner, “Among the Silesians,” in Gutenbaum and Latała, The Last Eyewitnesses, volume 2, pp.293–95.)
We were also helped by Dr. Schubert [Rev. Józef Szubert], the parish priest of St. Mary’s Church [Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary], the second oldest and most important Catholic church in Katowice after the Cathedral. Mama knew him already from before the war, although I don’t know how. He assisted us financially. We used to go to the parish where Mama would give his two sisters manicures. They clipped out food ration cards for us, which we ourselves, didn’t receive at all. Following all the holidays, they would give us cakes to take home. The priest’s sisters brought me shoes and tights, as I remember.

They knew that Father was a Jew. Father Schubert did not insist on baptizing me; he declared it could wait until after the war, and then he did indeed try to convince me. Anyway, he continued to visit us many times. But one time he asked, “Bronia, would you like to learn the prayers?” I answered that I already knew them. I recited “Our Father,” “Hail Mary,” and “Angel of God.” I knew how to pray because Mrs. Czapla had taken me to church several times, and even before then, Zuza had taught me prayers—in Polish, of course. Dr. Schubert was very pleased and taught me several other things, gave me a little prayer book, and told me it would be good if I always carried it with me. He also presented me with a religious medallion, which I always wore from then on.

As fate would have it, Mama was quite soon able to repay the priest. Namely, he was arrested by the Germans and sent to Dachau. His terrified sisters pleaded with her to go there and give him a blanket into which they had sewn the names of some Germans who were willing to attest to his pro-German sympathies before the war. He was one of the few priests who had been willing to offer confessions to non-Polish-speaking Germans in their native language. [This claim is demonstrably untrue.—M.P.]

The sisters gave Mama cigarettes and vodka to bribe the guard, and Mama went there and delivered the blanket. After a few days, the witnesses from the list he received were interrogated, and Father Schubert was allowed to return to his parish. He was very grateful to Mama. Where did she, being a Jew, muster enough courage to go deep into Germany and mill around a concentration camp to bribe a guard? She was always very brave. Before the ghetto was set up, she traded in food products between Sosnowiec and Katowice. She could always keep a cool head in difficult situations. I assume she must have had some Aryan papers, but I don’t know anything about it.

The priest, having been released from a German prison, after liberation, ended up in a Polish [Communist] jail. Someone reported that he had returned from Dachau suspiciously quickly, considering that so very few returned at all. Unable to help in any way at the local level, Mama this time set out for Warsaw to the Ministry of Religions. She told them everything about herself and about what Father Schubert had done for us and explained the circumstances of his release from Dachau. He was soon released from this second prison but was not allowed to return to his parish. He took over the parish in Godula, a district of Ruda Śląska. Grateful to us, he visited us nearly every month for many years. He passed away already a dozen years or so ago.
After his parents were deported by the Germans, David Danieli, a 9-year-old boy from Rybnik, knocked on the door of the Kapica, his parents’ friends. They looked after him devotedly and saw to all his needs. The local priest baptized the boy and issued a birth certificate stating that he was their son. David stayed with the Kapicas until the area was liberated by the Soviet Army in January 1945. (Bogner, At the Mercy of Strangers, pp.62–63.)
The Kapicas, who adopted David Danieli, were a mixed family of [coal] miners—Anton [Antoni] a Pole, Martha [Marta] a German—who followed a typical proletarian way of life. They attached no special importance to their national origins and were not religious. Nevertheless, they were compelled to baptize David at the priest’s urging, so that he would be issued a birth certificate stating that he was their son. David attended school and joined a German youth movement. At first he was under the impression that no one in the neighborhood knew he was a Jew. Later, however, he discovered that many people had known he was Jewish but had not denounced his adoptive parents.
Open displays of solidarity with Jews by priests in Warsaw and in its environs of Kraków were recorded by Janina Bauman, who escaped from the Warsaw ghetto with her mother and hid on the Aryan side until they were forced to abandon Warsaw after the failed uprising of 1944. Along with other refugees, both Poles and Jews concealed among them, they were scattered in villages throughout the German zone. (Janina Bauman, Winter in the Morning: A Young Girl’s Life in the Warsaw Ghetto and Beyond, 1939–1945 [London: Virago Press, 1986], pp.145 and 180.)
One time Staś, who was making desperate efforts to help them, had to abandon them in a church [in Warsaw], while he rushed off to find a friend who, he hoped, might take them to her flat. The friend could not be found at that moment, so Mother and Sophie [the author’s sister] had to stay in the church for many hours. They were wearing their usual disguises and pretended to be praying all that time. The priest noticed them and took a deep interest in the two miserable figures. He must have guessed who they were and why they kept praying so keenly. When towards evening most of the congregation had left, he then brought them food and drink which they badly needed. He also found a few words of Christian consolation for them. Soon after Staś arrived with good news and took Mother and Sophie to his old friend Vala. …

… The Mass [in the village church of Zielonki near Kraków] continued, the young priest [Rev. Jan Pietrzyk] knelt and stood by turns, followed by the crowd. He sang, he prayed, he performed various rites at the altar, then he climbed into the pulpit and began to preach. The sermon was simple and clear. It was about the equality of all humankind in the eyes of the Almighty God and the sacred duty of every Christian soul to help those who were in peril, no matter what race they belonged to or which faith they espoused.

A Jewish boy from Kraków was one of several Jews smuggled out of Poland into Slovakia and then Hungary. After his parents had been seized by the Gestapo, the boy was smuggled out of the ghetto by nuns and sheltered in a convent. (Testimony of Ewa S. (Stapp), September 2005, Internet: .)
We reached the border. The guide shows us where the border is. We can see the Germans, we can see the dogs, and the lights. The guide shows us that we will cross between two posts and not to worry, because they know when the guards make their rounds. And indeed, just as they said, we crossed to the Slovakian side. Slovakian guides would come to pick us up and take us to the Hungarian border, to the town called Mikulasz [Mikuláš]. So we’re waiting for the Slovak guides and they never show up! So, to make things more exciting, for we have to have fun, we cross back to the Polish side. The Polish guides put us in a hay-loft which belongs to them. Apart from the two of us, there is a little boy, four people from the Kaczmarek family, an engineer from Lwow [Lwów] who escaped from the Yanovski [Janowska] camp and a woman from Warsaw, Hanka. Except for the Kaczmarek family, all of us are Jewish.

We sit there quietly. We can see the Germans and the dogs, we can hear German and there we are, not farther from the Germans than this balcony is form us [several meters]. We stay there for one day. Next day at night we start again. We walk for a long time, for the distance between Chabowka [Chabówka] and the border is about 20 kilometers.

We are in the care of two Slovak guides. They tell us that we will spend the night at their place and the next day they will take us to the train, buy us tickets and go to Mikulasz with us where the Hungarian guides will take over. The little boy spoke beautiful Polish. It was easy to tell he was an intelligent child. Of course, it was a Jewish child. He was from Cracow. He must have been from the family of the intelligentsia, for he spoke beautiful French, and nice German and Hebrew. He told us stories and sang French songs. We became very good friends. He was wearing a beret and a chain around his neck with a clover. I said, ‘You know, you’re inside, and one does not wear a hat inside.' And he says, ‘I won’t take it off!' I say, ‘Do take it off, for the lady of the house will feel offended.' So he took off his beret and it turned out his hair was red! That's why he kept his hat on!

We felt very close to this little boy. He told us his grandparents sent for him from Switzerland. His parents must have belonged to some Jewish organization. The Gestapo came, together with the Jewish police and they found weapons. They took the parents away, but the Gestapo man left the boy behind. Later he was at a convent; the nuns got him out of the ghetto.

There were rich Jews in Slovakia. I decided to get through to a Jew to ask if I could wash up the boy and ask for some clothes for him, for he didn’t have anything! I said, ‘Excuse me, Mister, we have this child with us, who’s been sent for by his grandparents. His grandparents paid for him and sent a man to Cracow. Please, help us take care of this child. Help me into a house so that the little one could wash up. Maybe you could get him some chocolate or something proper to eat, or maybe you have some old clothes? He only has what he’s wearing.' But they didn’t help. Until today, I can’t understand why. Maybe because they had not yet been beaten and kicked themselves.