Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy

Later on there appeared: Stefan Świerzewski with his wife Nata, a Catholic from a Jewish background.

“I called together all the workers and asked: The Świerzewskis want to go to Warsaw. I am offering them the opportunity to stay, but you must decide. And everyone answered: Miss, let them stay, because if we help them here maybe someone will help our people in Russia too.”

Ms. Dąmbrowska’s mother was transported deep into Russia in 1941.

It continued like this: she went to Wilno, she stopped for a visit with the Fedecki family, they had a house and were hiding a young married couple on their veranda, the Mińkowskis. He was a lawyer from Sosnowiec and she was the daughter of a well-known dentist from Wilno. They asked if she would take them in. By all means, the house is large.

Then she was in Wilno again. “Ma’am,” someone turned to her, “you can save a child.” The girl was named Miriam [Kurc] and was three years old, she was blond and spoke only Russian, they carried her from the ghetto.

The last to come was Sonia Tajc, the granddaughter of the Nitsons, wealthy landowners. She was 15 years old and did not speak Polish very well. What to do? She came up with an idea: Sonia will herd the cattle with Janusz, so they will have to leave early in the morning and return after dusk.

But that’s not all. There were also acquaintances from the poets’ group “Po Prostu”, different Jews who stayed two or three days, and also Helena Snarska, whose real name was Lusia Wajnryb, who had jumped from a train heading to Treblinka and had somehow made it to Wilno to the priest, Father [Jan] Kretowicz, who, like Father Chlebowski, managed to obtain birth certificates for Jews.
Emanuela and Stanisław Cunge, natives of Łódź, took refuge in Wilno at the beginning of the war. There they converted to Catholicism under the guidance of Rev. Leon Puciata. They passed as Poles in the vicinity of Żodziszki near Smorgonie, where they mixed in the company of many friendly and helpful Polish and Belorussian landowners and professionals, some of whom knew of their Jewish background or suspected it. Emanuela enjoyed the protection of Rev. Paweł Czapłowski, the pastor of Żodziszki, who was executed by the Germans for his support of the Polish underground.⁵¹⁴
Barbara Turkeltaub (née Gurwicz, born in Wilno in 1934) and her younger sister Leah (born in 1936) were smuggled out of the Wilno ghetto and placed in the care of a Polish farmer in Wierszuliszki, a suburban village of Wilno. Since the farmer’s family was going hungry and feared that sheltering the young girls had become too dangerous, Barbara and Leah girls decided to leave this home and hid in nearby brick factory. They heard an approaching wagon and as it drew near, the girls could see that it was being driven by a priest. The priest, Father Jan, had the girls climb into the back of the wagon and covered them up with hay so that they would not be seen. He took them to a nearby Bendectine convent. (The order in question was possibly the Sisters Servants of the Blessed Virgin Mary who ran shelters in Wierszuliszki and Wilno.) The two sisters were later moved to a second convent in the city proper. They lived in the convent for two years after the war ended, until they were found by their mother, who also survived. (Tammeus and Cukierkorn, They Were Just People, pp.140, 144–48.)
After this incident with the buses [where children were seized from the children’s center in the ghetto attended by Barbara and Leah], Barbara’s father sat down and explained as much as he could about the realities of war for her Jewish family. “My father put me on a little stool and lowered himself to the same level and said, ‘Basha, there is a terrible war going on. In order for us to survive we need to separate. You will go with your sister to a farmer. Mother is going to stay in the ghetto and there’s a special place where she’s going to hide.’ She was expecting a baby then. My father and two older sisters were going to the partisans. He told me, ‘Never admit that you speak Yiddish and never say your last name. Say a bomb fell on your house and you don’t know where everyone is and you’re lost. And you are always to take care of your sister.’” As Barbara’s father said all this, her mother was standing next to her, crying, and “I was clutching to her dress and she was holding my sister and she was praying.”

  So Moishe and Mina [Gurwicz] made arrangements with a farmer whom Barbara and Leah were taught to call “Uncle,” but whose last name may have been Switzky [Sawicki?]. The family knew him because he made regular deliveries of milk to them before there was a ghetto. Switzky put them in his wagon, covered them up with hay, and slipped them past bribed ghetto guards. “We were lucky. Sometimes the Nazis would stick bayonets into wagons like this but they didn’t do that this time.” They went to his home in the nearby village of Wierszuliszki. The Gurwiczes gave the farmer and his wife some money or jewelry to cover the costs of extra mouths to feed, and Barbara said the Switzky family probably did this more for the money than for any altruistic reason. [The risk assumed by the farmer and his family was hardly commensurate with any reward the girls’ parents could offer for sheltering them.—M.P.] But, she said, Switzky “wasn’t a bad person.”