Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy

The Switzky family “had a whole bunch of children, like five or six kids,” Barbara said, though none of them knew that she and her sister were Jews. …

Mrs. Switzky was a nervous woman, Barbara said, who was “afraid for her own family.” It was clear to Barbara that the woman was not happy with her husband’s decision to hide Jewish children, and she did not hide her angst well. … 

Barbara and Leah stayed with the Switzky family for just four or five months, during which time they never saw their own parents. Only later did they learn that their mother, hiding in the sewers of Vilna as the Germans were destroying the ghetto, had given birth to their brother, Henry, who Mina had tried—but failed—to abort. [Henry also survived the war, hidden by a Polish family.—M.P.]

Then one evening at the farm Barbara overheard Mrs. Switzky tell her husband that the next day he must go to the German authorities and turn in these Jewish children to receive the award being offered—some sugar. [This was likely done to scare the girls into leaving on their own, as those who turned in Jews whom they had sheltered risked severe punishment.—M.P.]

“So I was afraid to wait until the morning,” Barbara said. As her sister slept that night, Barbara sneaked into the pantry and cut off some bread from a large loaf. While in the pantry, she saw some jars of what she took to be honey on the shelf. So she slathered some on a piece of bread and went to wake up Leah, who always seemed to be hungry. …

After Barbara got Leah dressed, they slipped out of the house and took off quickly down the road in the dark. “I didn’t know where to go, just down the road,” Barbara said.

The girls were cold and tired, and Leah was not happy to be running in the dark. So eventually they located the brick kiln where Father Jan found them and from which he took them to the Benedictine convent. …

It was still dark when the clip-clop clip-clop of horse hooves awakened Barbara Gurwicz and her little sister, Leah, near the brick klin where they had found rest and warmth. Barbara looked up and saw a priest driving a buggy. He slowed and gazed at the girls, and they at him, but then he drove on. So not knowing what else to do, Barbara (called Basha) and Leah went back to sleep. …

An hour or so later the priest returned. “this time he looked at us, and he stopped,” … The priest asked the girls if they were Jews. Barbara’s father had prepared this little girl well for exactly this question. No, she lied. Bombs had fallen on their family’s house, she told him, and she and her sister did not know where anyone was. They were lost. That was the story she had rehearsed and rehearsed. And she thought she told it well.

The priest nodded and smiled. Barbara later decided that the man knew right then and there that the girls were, in fact, Jews. “Would you like to come with me to a safer place?” he asked. Barbara, speaking for herself and for her younger sister, said yes.

So the priest loaded them in his buggy, hid them under some blankets, and took them to a nearby convent run by Benedictine nuns on a farm not far outside Vilna [Wilno]. The priest, known to Barbara only as Father Jan (she never knew his last name) took them to safety, to survival, to a future that many times in the war before then had nearly been cut off. …

When Father Jan drove up to the convent with the girls in his buggy, nuns quickly emerged and rushed them inside. They were fed, bathed, and given a warm bed. In a few days they were into a routine, rising early in the morning, attending Mass, then having breakfast, after which came quiet time. Nuns began to teach them basic reading and math, and the girls had some housekeeping chores to do, too. …

But rarely did they have anyone to talk with except themselves. The nuns generally spoke little, except when leading the girls in their lessons. None of them, for instance, ever asked the girls if they were Jewish. Rather, they simply taught them as if they were Catholic, instructing them in traditional practices. Barbara and Leah neither saw nor heard any other children at this convent, so it was a lonely existence, but not an unhappy one—especially for Barbara, who enjoyed the peace, the security, the rhythm of life, the tender care of the nuns, and the chance to draw pictures, read, and write poetry. Barbara, in effect, created her own tightly ordered world and became attached to the convent’s structured pattern of life. She was baptized, took Communion, and learned to be an obedient Catholic. She believed the theology she was learning “very, very much,” she told us.

There were, of course, special rules for the children—who the nuns knew were Jewish. “We were told not to venture from the house by ourselves. I usually was a very good girl and listened.”

Usually. But not always. One day Barbara wandered into the forest adjacent to the convent. As she did so, she began to hear what she described as popping sounds in the woods. Curious, she moved toward them. “I stayed behind a tree,” she said. “Then I saw a group of people undressed by a huge ditch. I began to hear voices. I saw a group of women undressed. Some were holding babies in their arms. The Germans were shooting randomly and the women and babies were falling. I was so stunned I couldn’t move. I was like hypnotized. Very soon afterward, somebody grabbed me and carried me from there. It was one of the older nuns.”

Barbara later learned that she had inadvertently wandered into the Ponary killing fields and watched Germans murdering Jews. The memory never left her, even though she “was told not to mention that. Forget about it. Erase it from my mind.” [Since the two sisters were sheltered north of Wilno, it is unlikely that they wandered into Ponary, which is located south of the city and the executions were carried out by Lithuanians. M.P.]

The nuns decided Barbara and Leah could not stay there any more. So they fetched Father Jan again, and that same day he took them to the main convent in Vilna. Again they hid under hay in his buggy. When they got there, nuns quickly took the girls inside, fed them, bathed them, and gave them their list of rules, including an important prohibition against going beyond the small area to which they were assigned inside the building. This time, Barbara listened and obeyed. While at this convent, she occasionally heard the voices of other children but almost never saw them. It was, she decided later, a way of making sure children did not give away other hidden children if pressured by the German authorities.

At this convent, Barbara and Leah fell into the rhythm of cloistered life. Nuns continued to teach them school subjects as well as prayers and other religious practices. But the girls’ contact with the outside world was so limited that news of the end of the war did not reach them until 1947, two years after the fighting stopped. That was when their mother, who had been searching for them the whole time, finally found them. She had gone door-to-door, asking people if they had seen her two girls, one blonde, one with dark hair. Finally, a woman told her that she may have seen at least the blonde girl singing in the choir at a worship service at the convent.

Mina went to Mass to see for herself. And there she saw two girls she was sure were her own. She asked to speak to the priest who celebrated Mass there, Father Jan, to tell him of her search and to ask to meet with the girls.

“He came to me,” Barbara told us, “and said there is a woman who lost her children—he didn’t tell me that she was Jewish or anything—and is looking for them. She thinks that maybe you might be one of her children. Right away I was on guard. Everything in my background I had put away, far, far, away. I never forgot my parents. I never forgot my grandmother. But I thought that being a Jew must be something really, really bad if people are killing them and doing all those awful things. And I was scared to think about it.”

So Barbara did not want to see the woman who might be her own mother. She had found comfort and security in a Catholic convent and was loathe to lose it. “But then Father Jan came again and again. I think what an angel he was. He told me the lady is crying and looking for her children, so ‘would you please reassure her that you’ll help her to look for them?’ So that’s how I said OK.”

But the woman Barbara then met with did not match the image of her mother in her memory. That image was of a tall, strikingly beautiful woman with black shiny hair and shiny eyes. By contrast, this woman was “bent down,” wore glasses, and had a babushka over her gray hair. “I did not recognize her. But I started to talk to her and I said, ‘Don’t cry. You will find your children.’ And she said, ‘My daughter, Basha. I’m your mother.’ And I recognized the voice. But then I ran away. Isn’t that something? I was so scared. I just ran to the door. And they let me run.”

A few days later Father Jan came again and asked Barbara if she was ready to see her again. “I said yes. She was sitting there smiling. I remembered her smile. And she said, ‘My daughter, my daughter.’” 

Leah reunited with her mother first. Somehow she was more ready than Barbara to reconnect. “She probably forgot my mom. But by their second or third meeting she just went to her like you wouldn’t believe. My mother hugged her and kissed her and Leah was sitting on her lap. I thought to myself, how could she do that and I could not? I had so many questions I wanted to ask her. I was angry with her. Why did she leave us? Why did we separate? There was so much emotion. Where was our father? There was anger about that. But she didn’t want to tell us everything.” 

Out of this anger and this questioning, Barbara made an extraordinary demand of her mother. “When the time came for us to leave, my mother had to promise me that she would come to the church and she would convert and she would be coming to the Mass.”

Her mother, in turn, indicated to Barbara that she would do that, but in fact that was just a way of gaining custody of her daughter. Her mother never did convert, and Barbara, after a short time, became an observant Jew again.
Zlata Rozhanska (Złata Różańska, later Zolotareva) was rescued by Stanisław and Bronisława Wiszniewski in the village of Dubinki near Worniany. She was able to pass as Helena Wiszniewska thanks to false documents obtained from Rev. Piotr Niemycki, the pastor of Ostrowiec. (Gutman, The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust: Supplementary Volumes (2000–2005), volume II, p.631.)
During World War II, Stanisław Wiszniewski, a forest warden, and his wife Bronisława, a childless couple, lived with Stanisław’s elderly father on a remote farm in Worniany (Wilno District). In the autumn of 1943, Stanisław came across a Jewish girl, Złata Rużańska, who had succeeded in escaping from the Vilna [Wilno] ghetto on August 23, 1943, one month before its liquidation by the Germans. As she was terribly exhausted, he brought her home and he and his wife nursed her back to health. At Stanisław’s request, Jan Nemycki [Niemycki], a priest from Ostwowiec, issued her a birth certificate in the name of Helena Wiszniewska, enabling her to live in the open. She learned Christian customs and accompanied the Wisniewskis to church on Sundays. So well did she integrate into the life of the community that the [Lithuanian] policemen who arrived to check her identity, after being alerted by an informer, suspected nothing. In the course of time, Złata took notice that Bronisława was preparing more food than the three of them needed, but only after the liberation did she learn that the Wiszniewskis had also been helping a group of Jews from Ostrowiec and Gudogai [Gudogaj] who were hiding in the forest. In June 1944, upon the arrival of the Red Army, Złata found her younger sister, Cilia, who had also hidden in the area. Their parents did not survive. After the war, Złata settled in Vilnius [Wilno] and stayed in touch with the Wisniewskis until their death.
The following account describes the fate of a Jewish family from Wilno by the name of Perewoski, who took refuge in an area located near the town of of Gródek or Horodek, near the prewar Polish-Soviet border. A number of Poles, among them Home Army members, as well as the local priest came to their assistance. The pastor of Gródek at the time was Rev. Stanisław Budnik. (Korsak Family, The Righteous Database, Yad Vashem, Internet: .)
When war broke out, Shmuel and Dora Perewoski were living in Vilna [Wilno] with their two small children, Eli (Leszek) (b. 1935) and Celina (b. 1939). The family owned a lumber business. After the first wave of killings, Shmuel realized the hopelessness of the situation and in early 1942 decided to smuggle his family out of the ghetto. Tadeusz Korsak, a prewar business acquaintance, offered to help. The first to be taken out of the ghetto was Eli. Shmuel, who was employed in forced labor outside the ghetto, took his son out of the ghetto with … [Show more]him in the morning, concealing him among the lines of Jews marching to their work place. The children’s former nanny, a non-Jew, was waiting at a pre-appointed place on the street, and took Eli to a temporary hiding place. Soon his mother and sister joined him. Then the nanny took them in a horse-drawn cart to Korsak’s home in the village of Balcery (today in Belarus). Sometime later, Shmuel escaped from the ghetto and arrived in Balcery. The reunited family lived in the basement of the Korsak home under the guise of a Polish family. Young Eli even served in the local church as altar boy. [Probably to Rev. Stanisław Budnik, the pastor of Gródek—M.P.]

The danger for both families—the Jews and their rescuers—was very high. In addition to possibly being detected by the Germans, they were threatened by the pervasive enmity between ethnic groups in the region as well as political struggles between the Polish national underground and the Soviet-oriented partisans. One day in the summer of 1943, Shmuel was captured by Soviet partisans. The following day his body was found in the fields, riddled with bullets. Eight-year-old Eli, his mother and Tadeusz Korsak identified the body and secretly buried it. Many years later, Eli tried in vain to relocate the burial place.

Locals began to grow more and more suspicious of the family living with the Korsaks, and the situation became very precarious. Eli and Dora escaped to the forests and joined the partisans. Three-year-old Celina stayed with the Korsaks, who promised to take good care of her until the war was over. However, the Korsak family, too, fell victim to the turbulent times. A few months after the death of Shmuel Perewoski, Tadeusz Korsak and his two daughters were also murdered by Soviet partisans. Władysława, who had lost her entire family, took Celina and fled to her relatives, Jan and Maria Michałowski, who lived in the small village of Jerozolimka. Although the Michałowskis had five children of their own, they took in Celina and cared for her until liberation, when her mother and brother came to collect her.
Rev. Aleksander Hanusewicz provided food to the ghetto in Raków, as well as to the orphanage run by the Sisters of the Family of Mary who took in Jewish children. He also assisted in placing some of the Jewish children with local farmers. After the liberation, he asked the survivors who had returned if there was anything they wanted him to do for them. They asked him to announce in the church on Sunday that those who had taken belongings from abandoned Jewish homes return them to the Jews.⁵¹⁵
After his escape from Wilno with the help of Poles, Oswald Rufeisen ventured to the town of Nowa Wilejka where he was sheltered for a brief period by the local pastor, Rev. Stanisław Miłkowski. Rev. Miłkowski also provided refuge to a 15-year-old Jewish girl.⁵¹⁶ Afterwards, Rufeisen made his way eastward to Mir, where he passed as a German. He was employed as an interpreter by the Belorussian police, until his cover was exposed by a Jew in August 1942. Rufeisen took shelter first, briefly, with a Polish family, and then in a convent of the Sisters of the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ (Resurrectionist Sisters) in Mir. He remained with the nuns for 16 months, until December 1943, hidden in the loft of the convent’s granary. To avoid detection by the Germans when he came down from his hiding place, he dressed as a nun. After leaving the convent, Rufeisen joined the Soviet partisans. Euzebia Bartkowiak, the mother superior of the convent, was recognized by Yad Vashem in 2002.⁵¹⁷ Three other nuns also resided at the convent, among them, Andrea Głowacka and Laurencja Domysłowska. (Nechama Tec, In the Lion’s Den: The Life of Oswald Rufeisen [New York: Oxford University Press, 1990], pp.72–73, 76, 98–99, 163–66, 172, 173–76.)
At the very beginning, disregarding their own safety, the cantor and the rabbi’s son-in-law ran through the streets calling in suppressed, yet weeping voices, “Jews come out to your slaughter!” This was their way of warning about the imminent danger. They wanted to alert the people to the threat, hoping that somehow some will succeed in eluding the enemy. Some did. A few escaped by hiding with or without help from the Christian neighbors. Among those protected by Christian neighbors was the rabbi’s wife.

Mir had a convent of the Order of the Sisters of the Resurrection where four Polish nuns lived. During the day of destruction a number of Jews found shelter there. The frantic soldiers overlooked the place, as they did all other non-Jewish quarters.

During the Russian occupation, because of the spaciousness of the convent and the Soviet persecution of Poles, the Catholic priest, the Dean Antoni Mackiewicz, and his sister had decided to move in with the nuns. On November 9, [1942] some Jewish families came to the door of the convent. Mackiewicz let them in. Inside they pleaded: “Please have mercy on us, hide us!” “Because of my position I am not allowed to lie. If the Germans will ask me if there are Jews in my house, I will not be able to deny it. But in the yard there is a stable, a pig sty, a barn. All these places are open. I am not responsible for what is in the yard. Go out there. I don’t want to know about it.” The fugitives understood, they scattered and hid in all those places. They were spared. A few managed to survive the war.

For the rest of the onslaught Mackiewicz stood close to the window that faced the main road. Bewildered, helpless, unable to move, he watched. His eyes had a faraway strange look. As if transfixed, he seemed unaware of the silent tears that kept running down his cheeks. …

On the balance, however, most contacts between the Jewish and Christian neighbors were good. This was particularly true for the exchange of goods. And so, local peasants supplied the Jews with farm products, while the Jews offered the peasants used clothes, furniture, and all kinds of other personal belongings. Both partners to these exchanges were poor. Both were eager to receive the goods the other had. These transactions continued. Even though they reduced starvation among the Jews, they could not eliminate hunger. …

Since in Mir most Poles were removed from the official Nazi machinery, and because Oswald had more in common with the Poles than with the Belorussians, he decided to cultivate his relationships with Poles. …

He also made a point of staying away from the Polish priest, Mackiewicz. … He explains, “I did not trust the priest. I did not know him. Nor did I know that he had a positive attitude toward the Jews. This I discovered much later …”

For the same reasons that he avoided the priest, he kept his contacts with the nuns to a bare minimum. … Only much later the nuns served as intermediaries between Oswald and the Jews. This happened when Oswald supplied the Jews with blank document forms. Oswald had stolen these forms from his office. Such papers facilitated a move to the forbidden Christian world. He was told by his contacts that the nuns would deliver these items to the ghetto. …

It is ironic that when the Russian occupation of Mir ended and the Nazis took over, the Polish priest, Mackiewicz, conducted a special mass thanking God for the termination of the Soviet occupation and the arrival of the Germans.

The night after Oswald saw the parked trucks, in the Mir region alone twenty-five Polish men and women, all defined by the Nazis as the intelligentsia, as leaders of their communities, were arrested. Balicki and the priest Mackiewicz were among them. In Mir only one Polish man was spared, the one who listened to Oswald’s warning and ran away. In the vicinity of Nieśwież scores of other members of the Polish intelligentsia were rounded up.

Of the arrested all were taken to the prison in Stołpce, where they remained for about two months. From there they were transferred to the concentration camp in Kołdyczewo. … In fact, these Polish arrests fit well into the overall Nazi policies that aimed at the elimination of the Polish elite. …

This policy was put in effect for the entire country. In the [north]eastern part of Poland the Nazis tried to give the impression that moves against the Poles were not only initiated and executed by Belorussians but also motivated by Belorussian nationalists.