Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy

On the day of my departure from Slonim, July 12, 1941, they instituted the yellow badge for Jews.
Rev. Grochowski was arrested by the Germans and accused of hiding Jews. Since no Jews were found in the rectory he was released. Rev. Grochowski was arrested again in March 1942 and imprisoned in Baranowicze. He was executed in an unknown location soon after.⁶²
The Holocaust Gets Under Way with Full Fury, 1942–1945
The Germans introduced the death penalty for assisting Jews because so many Poles had been willing to come to their assistance. Despite repeated warnings, incessant anti-Semitic propaganda, and sanctions such as fines and imprisonment, Poles continued to deal with and shelter Jews thereby frustrating German attempts to isolate the Jews, a precondition for their annihilation. Hence the Germans felt compelled to introduce harsher measures to curtail contacts between Poles and Jews, to the fullest extent possible. Gazeta Lwowska, an official German daily published in the Polish language, stated on April 11, 1942 (Bartoszewski, The Blood Shed Unites Us, p.40):
It is unfortunate that the rural population continue—nowadays furtively—to assist Jews, thus doing harm to the community, and hence to themselves, by this disloyal attitude. Villagers take advantage of all illegal ways, applying all their cunning and circumventing regulations in order to supply the local Jewry with all kinds of foodstuffs in every amount. …

The rural population must be cut off and separated from the Jews, once and for all, must be weaned from the extremely anti-social habit of assisting the Jews.
A circular issued on September 21, 1942, by the SS and Police Chief in Radom District, outlined and justified the new Draconian measures that were to be undertaken to put an end to this “problem” (Bartoszewski, The Blood Shed Unites Us, p.40):
The experience of the last few weeks has shown that Jews, in order to evade evacuation, tend to flee from the small Jewish residential districts [i.e., ghettos] in the communities above all.

These Jews must have been taken in by Poles. I am requesting you to order all mayors and village heads as soon as possible that every Pole who takes in a Jew makes himself guilty under the Third Ordinance on restrictions on residence in the Government General of October 15, 1941 (GG Official Gazette, p.595).

As accomplices are also considered those Poles who feed run-away Jews or sell them foodstuffs, even if they do not offer them shelter. Whatever the case, these Poles are liable to the death penalty.
On the eve of the liquidation of the ghetto in Żelechów near Garwolin, which took place on September 30, 1942, the Jewish leaders placed their confidence in the local Catholic parish. The story is related in Jonathan Kaufman, A Hole in the Heart of the World: Being Jewish in Eastern Europe (New York: Viking/Penguin, 1997), at page 102.
The night before the Germans came, with rumors of the deportations sweeping the terrified ghetto, several Jewish leaders hurried across the dark market square and knocked on the door of the rectory across the street from the church. When the priest answered, they asked him to hold the documents of their community—the birth and death records and the most important papers—in safekeeping. They would be back to retrieve them when they could. The priest agreed, and he hid them in the rafters of the rectory for safekeeping. The next day, the deportations to Treblinka began.
Priests and nuns throughout Poland responded to the increasingly harsh measures imposed by the Germans by helping Jews who fled from the ghettos. Jewish children were particularly at risk, but rescue efforts on their behalf were not always welcome. It has often been charged that conversion was the primary or at least a very important factor in the decision of the clergy and religious to extend assistance to Jews. In fact, this was one of the reasons given by Warsaw’s Jewish leaders for their refusal of the Catholic Church’s offer to place several hundred Jewish children in convents and monasteries. Emanuel Ringelblum, the chronicler of the Warsaw ghetto, acknowledges this offer of assistance and records, in most unflattering terms, the motivation attributed to the Catholic clergy by the Jewish community leaders at the time: proselytism (“soul-snatching”), financial greed, and looking out for their own prestige. After meeting with vehement opposition from Orthodox and other Jewish groups, the project was shelved. Jewish parents were, however, given a free hand in placing their children privately in Catholic institutions, though many rabbis remained adamantly opposed to that idea too. Some of the discussion recorded by Ringelblum merits repeating (Emmanuel Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations During the Second World War [New York: Howard Fertig, 1976], pp.150–51):
I was present at a discussion of this question by several Jewish intellectuals. One of them categorically opposed the operation. ... The priests’ promise not to convert the children would be of no avail [even though a register would be kept of the children, recording their distribution throughout the country, so that they could be taken back after the war]; time and education would take their toll. ... Jewish society has no right to engage in such an enterprise.
Although Ringelblum is anxious to shift the blame for the failure of this project to the Catholic clergy, it is not reasonable to believe that the Church authorities would initiate the undertaking only to welcome its demise, when in fact numerous convents and monasteries were already active in sheltering Jewish children. Moreover, there was reluctance on the part of many Jews to give over their children to Poles for safekeeping. One survivor records the following conversation (Pearl Benisch, To Vanquish the Dragon [Jerusalem and New York: Feldheim Publishers, 1991], p.131):
“I gave my little son to a Polish family and I hope to God he’ll survive,” a young father said with relief. “Oh no,” I heard Mr. Blum exclaim. “I’d never give my children to a Christian family. Who knows if my wife and I will survive to claim them after the war? And if not,” he continued in a voice charged with emotion, “they’ll grow up to be good Christians, God forbid. Oh no!” he repeated passionately. “It’s better that they should die as Jews. Let them go together with their people; let us perish together. I couldn’t entrust my children to the gentiles,” he concluded with determination.
As Jadwiga Piotrowska, a social welfare worker active in rescuing scores of Jewish children points out, it was not the goal of the nuns to convert their Jewish charges. Rather, in order to ensure their seemless integration into orphanages and other institutions where the Jewish charges passed as Polish Catholics, complete religious assimilation was crucial for the success of the rescue effort. (Ewa Kurek, Dzieci żydowskie w klasztorach: Udział żeńskich zgromadzeń zakonnych w akcji ratowania dzieci żydowskich w Polsce w latach 1939–1945 [Lublin: Clio, 2001; Lublin: Gaudium, 2004], p.209.)
The children who were being rescued not only had to have documents made for them, and an “Aryan past” created for them, and found another place to survive. It was also necessary to instil in them an awareness that they were not worse in any way, that they did not differ from their native Polish brothers, that they were also Poles. The Germans frequently visited the orphanages run by religious orders, checked the children’s documents and also their religious knowledge, ordering them to pray or recite the catechism. Any inaccuracy on the children’s part could have led to the deaths of many people, including the children. What is more, it could have endangered the entire rescue operation. … Therefore it was out of necessity that the Jewish children were baptized and taught religion. The nightmarish memories of their past were carefully erased, so that they would not differ in any way from the Polish children. In truth this was no conversion, no augmenting of adherents of Catholicism, but only a fight for life, in which no error could be made.
Jan Dobraczyński, a prewar member of the nationalist National Democratic Party (“Endecja”), used his offices in the Department of Social Welfare in the Warsaw municipal corporation to place 500 Jewish children in Catholic convents. This was a daunting task. Many of the children had a Semitic appearance, often they spoke Polish poorly or with a Jewish accent, and most of them had little or no knowledge of Catholic prayers and rituals, so it was not easy for them to blend in. (Even when the children learned Catholic rituals, they would overdo them, for example, by making the sign of the cross several times, rather than once, before a meal.) Dobraczyński recalled those times in an interview published shortly before his death. (“Traktowałem to jako obowiązek chrześcijański i polski,” Słowo–Dziennik Katolicki, Warsaw, no. 67, 1993.)
I was afraid to place [Jewish] children in just any institution; I relied only on convents. I was well known to all of the Sisters and they trusted me. I gathered the Sisters and told them: “Dear Sisters, we will be hiding Jewish children. If a child is sent with my signature, that will be an indication that the child is Jewish, and you will have to know how to act on this.” I also told them that we would not be sending more children to any institution than we agreed to …

… our social workers searched for [Jewish] children. Sometimes they were found on the street, or in some primitive hiding place. Once we were informed that two boys were hidden in a cubbyhole in [the suburb of] Praga. One of them was running a high fever and it was imperative to move them. A nun took the sick boy on a streetcar and he started to scream out something in Yiddish. The driver was astute enough to sense the danger and yelled out: “This streetcar is going to the depot. Everyone out.” At the same time he signalled to the nun that she and the boy should remain.

Each of the children was taken for a few days to the home of a social worker. There they were taught their new names and prayers, and how to make the sign of the cross. The children were after all being taken to Catholic institutions and couldn’t differ outwardly from the Polish orphans residing there.

All but one of the children survived the war. (The one boy who didn’t survive was killed by Ukrainians in Turkowice, where he was sheltered in a convent.) … a few of the children remained Christians, but the rest reverted to the faith of their forefathers.
Żegota activist Irena Sendler (Sendlerowa) recalled that sometimes Jews asked her for “guarantees” that their children would survive the war. Sendler explained to them that she could not even assure the children’s safe passage out of the ghetto. This too discouraged Jews from seeking placements for their children with Christians.⁶³ Izajasz Druker, who was charged with task of finding Jewish child survivors after the war, has stated authoritatively, based on his extensive experience during the years 1945 to 1949, that “in the convents the issue of money did not play a role.”⁶⁴ While it is true that some Poles asked for payment for the upkeep of their Jewish charges, this was to be expected given the risks involved and the material hardships faced by everyone under the German occupation. The highly praised Danish rescue effort was paid for by large sums of money provided primarily by the Jews themselves,⁶⁵ and rescue in Belgium and other countrues was also subsidized heavily by the Jews themselves.⁶⁶ As a recent study shows, unlike Western Europeans, the overwhelming majorirty of Poles were simply not in a position to offer long-term material assistance to Jews.⁶⁷ Honest survivors, such as Yitzhak Zuckerman, a leader of the Jewish underground in Warsaw, are appreciative of even paid aid to Jews. (Yitzhak Zuckerman “Antek”, A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993], pp.461, 493.)
Anyone who fosters hatred for the Polish people is committing a sin! We must do the opposite. Against the background of anti-Semitism and general apathy, these people are glorious. There was great danger in helping us, mortal danger, not only for them but also for their families, sometimes for the entire courtyard they lived in. … I repeat it today: to cause the death of one hundred Jews, all you needed was one Polish denouncer; to save one Jew, it sometimes took the help of ten decent Poles, the help of an entire Polish family; even if they did it for money. Some gave their apartment, and others made identity cards. Even passive help deserves appreciation. The baker who didn’t denounce, for instance. It was a problem for a Polish family of four who suddenly had to start buying double quantities of rolls or meat. And what a bother it was to go far away to buy in order to support the family hiding with them. … And I argue that it doesn’t matter if they took money; life wasn’t easy for Poles either; and there wasn’t any way to make a living. There were widows and officials who earned their few Złotys by helping. And there were all kinds of people who helped.
If I gauge the phenomenon by one of the finest figures I knew, Irena Adamowicz, who helped Jews deliberately and consciously, as a devout Christian, who assisted as much as she could, I nevertheless cannot ignore the fact that she also saw another mission for herself: to convert Jews, since there is no greater commandment than to convert Jews to Christianity, accompanied by the faith that will save the world. I’m not saying she would have abandoned someone even if she hadn’t kept her sights fixed on the Christian purpose; but let’s look at this from the other side: for example, if a rabbi chanced to save a gentile. He wouldn’t see anything bad if, at this opportunity, he began telling him about the religion of Moses and the various practices of Judaism. Is there anything wrong in that? Irena also filled such “missions.” I know of at least four or five such cases.
On the other hand, American sociologist Jan Tomasz Gross has referred to the practice of baptizing Jewish children without the consent of their parents as “ritual murder”: “I have in mind the ‘ritual murder’ of Jewish children by Catholic clergy, which took place, in a manner of speaking, every time a Jewish child was baptized without a specific request or authorization by his or her parents.”⁶⁸ This charge is eerily reminiscent of the obscene accusations that were levelled at Jan Dobraczyński and Jadwiga Piotrowska when they visited the Jewish Committee after the war to present to them the lists of rescued Jewish children. When asked what she thought she had gained from those years, Piotrowska answered (Ewa Kurek, Your Life Is Worth Mine: How Polish Nuns Saved Hundreds of Jewish Children in German Occupied Poland, 1939–1945 [New York: Hippocrene Books, 1997], p.87):
The awareness that I behaved in a decent manner and with dignity. And also, a deep would in my heart which is there even today. … When Poland was liberated in 1945 a Jewish Committee was established, and Janek Dobraczynski [Jan Dobraczyński] and I went over to it to give them the lists of the saved children. They were not even full lists but the best we were able to reconstruct. We did not count on any gratitude, but we did not even think that someone would accuse us. …

During the conversation we were told that we had committed a crime by stealing hundreds of children from the Jewish community, baptizing them, and tearing them away from Jewish culture. We were also told that we were worse than the Germans. The Germans only took the body; we took the soul, condemning the children to damnation. Our arguments that we were fighting for their lives were put off right away: “It would have been better if those children had died…”

We left completely broken. … Over forty years have passed, and I am still grappling with this in my conscience. Would it really have been better if we had sent those children to their deaths?
In fact, as Ewa Kurek points out, “[s]ome nuns did baptize the children, while others did not, and a majority of them accepted without question the false baptismal certificates presented to them.”⁶⁹ Moreover, the kidnapping of children who had Polish Catholic fathers, or to use Jan Gross’s imagery, their “ritual murder,” was not something anathema to the Jewish Committee at the time, nor has it been condemned by Jews since. As Izajasz Druker candidly admitted (Kurek, Your Life Is Worth Mine, p.210–11),
Another one of my post-war duties was taking back women who during the wartime were compelled [?] to marry the men who saved them and with whom they had children. There were several incidents where, without the knowledge of their husbands, I took the women and their children. The involved the issue of abduction and tricking the husbands, who later went mad, running about and searching for their wives and children.
Rev. Stanisław Szczepański of Wilga near Garwolin, together with his sister Marianna Różańska, sheltered two Jewish sisters in the parish rectory for several months, and provided them with false documents that enabled the sisters to survive the war passing as Poles. (Israel Gutman and Sara Bender, eds., The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust, volume 5: Poland [Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2004], Part 2, p.679.)
One day in September 1941, German policemen surrounded a labor camp for Jews in the forest near Wilga, Garwolin county, Warsaw district, and prepared to make a Selektion among the inmates. Several prisoners, fearing for their fate, fled from the camp. They included the sisters Luba and Lea Berliner, who knocked on the door of the village priest [Rev. Stanisław Szczepański⁷⁰] and asked for assistance. Marianna Rozanska [Różańska], the priest’s sister, quickly placed the two fugitives in hiding and when the Germans came to search for them she carefully shielded them. The Berliners stayed in their hideout until Rozanska equipped them with forged papers, with which they survived by enlisting for forced labor in Germany. After the war, one of the Berliner sisters stayed in Germany, and the other resettled in Israel.
Escapees from the Warsaw ghetto were taken in by the Sisters of the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ (Resurrectionist Sisters) in the Warsaw suburb of Żoliborz. Ruth Altbeker Cyprys, who was assisted by numerous Poles while passing as a Christian in Warsaw, writes about her stay with the Sisters in the early part of 1943 in her memoir, A Jump For Life: A Survivor’s Journal from Nazi-Occupied Poland (New York: Continuum, 1997), at pages 129–30, 134, 163, and 222.
At my friend’s house, the advocate Mrs. L., I met her husband’s sister, Sister Maria-Janina, a nun of the Sisters of Resurrection Order from the Convent in Zoliborz [Żoliborz] Street. Apart from her duties in the convent she directed a small carpenter’s workshop in a shed near the cloister. Sister Maria-Janina, upon learning of my troubles, offered me accommodation on the workshop premises, which I gladly accepted. The room was small but comfortable. Although it was very cold and lacked conveniences, I felt at home there at last. I could spend my whole time there doing whatever I liked except for a few hours during which the room served as an office. Slowly I grew acquainted with my new surroundings. Next to my room, in the kitchen, there lived a maidservant who ran the house and cooked for the boys in the shop. She had an illegitimate son … On top of this she was very inquisitive and talkative. It was apparent that the shed was inhabited by other people as well: I heard voices through the partitions although I never saw anybody. In great secrecy Sister Maria-Janina confided in me that in the next room there lived two Jewesses. The older one, who had typically Semitic features, never went out, not having been registered anywhere. The younger one on the contrary was out all day, and was even employed somewhere.

Sister Maria-Janina advised me not to communicate with them. Actually I preferred sitting alone in my little room, during the long evening hours, not making any new friends. I noticed the same trait in the behaviour of Jews in hiding: a tendency to keep away from other Jews. One could only tell the other sad stories, terrible experiences, the loss of nearest and dearest ones—there would be no end of unhappy memories. In order to live on we had somehow to forget the past and strive to become accustomed to the present.

Sister Maria-Janina, who was sixty years old, had an exceptionally beautiful character. The widow of an advocate, for the past fifteen years she had been devoting her strength and energy to the convent and public welfare. The toy workshops were designated for the poorest boys, the street urchins. The Sister admitted anybody who applied. …

As I had no job at the time I tried to help out as much as I could. Whenever there was anything to sort out in the city I went readily. Often I was sent to cash money in some welfare institution, or to collect provisions for the boys. …

One day in our house in Zoliborz a skirmish broke out which could have had very serious repercussions for all of us. The boys were coached in grammar school subjects by a teacher popularly nicknamed ‘Student’. This ‘Student’, as it turned out, was a Jew—a fact of which Sister Maria-Janina was well aware. Quite by accident a young man came to the workshop and recognized the teacher as a fellow student from university, a communist, with whom he had constantly quarrelled. These two had a very sharp altercation after which the visitor reviled the Sister for sheltering a Jew. It was quite obvious that the unexpected visitor was bound to turn the teacher over to the Gestapo, and the trembling inhabitants of our slum implored the teacher to leave, for a short time at least. He was courageous, however, and insisted on staying; he admitted that in any event he had nowhere else to go. Sister Maria-Janina’s behaviour was remarkable. She did not give him notice nor did she tell him to quit. ‘God will help us,’ she said, and nobody denounced us. Yet I considered it unsafe to stay in the small house in Zoliborz and as soon as I had received another offer of a job I took the opportunity and left the hospitable shelter, but I stayed in touch with Sister Maria-Janina until the end of the war.
Afterwards, Sister Maria-Janina signed a deposition attesting that she was Ruth Albeker’s relative. As the latter explained:
A genuine Aryan relative was priceless to a Jew at that time. The best documents could prove worthless if a crafty Gestapo man asked: ‘It’s all right with your papers; they are in order and I believe you to be an Aryan. But give me some names of your friends or relatives who have known you for a long time.’ Such a Jewish Gentile, a human creature with no relatives and acquaintances would then be lost.
After the failed Warsaw Uprising of 1944, Ruth Altbeker was evacuated to the Kraków area. There she encountered Mrs. Maria, who had also been evacuated from Warsaw. Mrs. Maria, who worked closely with a Polish organization that rescued Jewish children, had sheltered Ruth Altbeker’s daughter, Eva, and several other Jewish children. During the evacuation Mrs. Maria had become separated from two of her Jewish charges, but they were found living in a small town under the guardianship of a local vicar and soon rejoined Mrs. Maria. Although she attended mass regularly in many churches during the occupation, Ruth Altbeker encountered no hostility on the part of the Catholic clergy toward Jews.
Irena Bernstein received help in Warsaw from several orders of nuns: the Sisters of the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth. (Władysław Bartoszewski and Zofia Lewin, eds., Righteous Among Nations: How Poles Helped the Jews, 1939–1945 [London: Earlscourt Publications, 1969], pp.306–7.)
Two persons played a considerable role in delivering me and my parents from death and suffering. The first—Bożena Stanisławska, a classical philologist, my school-mate: at present Sister M. Piotra, a Franciscan Servant of the Cross in Laski. Bożena met me in 1940 on Nowogródzka [Nowogrodzka] St—I was then lugging home bedspreads to be sold [in the market] on Kazimierz Square. As she told me after the war, she was immediately aware that I was hungry. Then she began to earnestly persuade me [to] come to Szczekocińska St to a shelter for academic students, victims of the war, conducted by Sister Emanuela Roman, a Resurrectionist—that food could be had there cheaply and even a place to live. I lived at the Resurrectionist shelter home to the middle of 1942; when too much interest began to be shown in me. I was ordered to move to the country. From then on, I began to go ‘as a tutor’ to the mansions of the country gentry, directed there by the nuns of the Immaculate Conception and the Nazareth Order.

The shelter on Szczekocińska St was an asylum for several other Jewesses and persons of Jewish extraction besides me. When my parents were ‘stolen’ out of the ghetto, the Resurrectionist nuns procured a room for them nearby, on Ursynowska St, and provided them with dinners.
Occasionally, Jews decided to convert—not always sincerely—to increase their chances of survival. Chaja Sara Wroncberg, also known as Zofia, a widow, and her daughter Halina Wroncberg (later Masri), born in Warsaw in 1934, were saved by their Polish friends, Renia Boćkowska (later Czaczkes) and her husband Stefan, who arranged for them to leave the Warsaw ghetto via the courthouse. They obtained false papers for Zofia and Halina and arranged for them to receive religious instruction at the parish church of the Holy Saviour (Najświętszego Zbawiciela) in Warsaw, where they were later baptized. Halina became Jolanta Chmielewska, and her mother went by the name of Jadwiga Stanisława Chmielewska. Halina and her mother stayed in an apartment rented by Renia. In the fall of 1941, Halina was enrolled in a Catholic convent boarding school on Mokotowska Street run by the Sisters of the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ (Resurrectionist Sisters). The school was later moved to the summer palace of Prince Franciszek Radziwiłł in Starawieś (near Węgrów), some 30 miles east of Warsaw. At the time Zofia lived with another friend from before the war, Rita Bauman Hasslauer and her husband. With her help, Zofia visited Halina a few times at the convent. Both mother and daughter survived the war, and soon after they abandoned their Catholic faith.⁷¹ (Henryk Grynberg, Drohobycz, Drohobycz and Other Stories: True Tales from the Holocaust and Life After [New York: Penguin Books, 2002], pp.206−11.)
Mother bought honey-cakes in a honey shop on the corner of Marszałkowska Street and the Square of the Redeemer [Saviour], and often talked with Pani Renia who worked there. Her husband, Pan Stefan, was an engineer with the gas-works. One day Mother said to her, “I have a problem. I have to move into the ghetto.” “Why?” Pani Renia asked. “Because I am a Jew.” “Ah, don’t go there.” “But I have to.” “No, you can’t go there.” …

Pani Renia also put us in touch with a priest and we went to him at the Church of the Redeemer through the sacristy. He was a prelate who demanded that we know the catechism very well. …

Our baptism took place in the evening, by candlelight. Long shadows played on the walls, and the echo carried each word high. Pan Stanisław, Rita’s first husband and Yola’s father [Rita, a divorcée, was the lover of Halina’s uncle Hipolit—M.P.], was my godfather. We didn’t go back to the Jewish side. Pan Stefan, Pani Renia’s husband, went there in the gasworks’ van and brought out suitcases with our things to an apartment which Pani Renia had found for us at 7 Miodowa Street. …

Men in black leather coats stopped us on the street by our house and came with us into the apartment. I no longer know whether they ordered me to, or whether I knelt down myself and started to pray out loud. And I don’t know which was more effective—my prayer, or the money which they got from Mother. Immediately after that, Pani Renia found me a place with the Sisters of the Resurrection, and Mother moved in with Rita who had married an Austrian and was living in a German quarter on Aleja Szucha. …

The boarding school of the Sisters of Resurrection was at 15 Mokotowska Street. I always remembered the numbers and names, but nothing other than that interested me. A new name is a new name, I didn’t ask about anything. I knew that despite my baptism I was still a Jew, which was very bad. That was enough, I didn’t want to know any more. When it became too dangerous on Mokotowska Street, they moved us to Stara Wieś [Starawieś], to a white mansion with a turret and little towers belonging to a prince. … the mansion which stands to this day in Stara Wieś, Węgrów district, belonged to Prince Radziwiłł. German officers occupied part of the mansion. They had a separate entrance on the other side, but they used to come to our chapel. Sister Alma once said to my mother, “Ah, Halusia is so smart, when she sees a German, she immediately runs away.”

We carried water from the well and peeled potatoes—two buckets of water and forty potatoes a day. In the summer, we picked mushrooms, strawberries and blueberries in the woods. The nuns made tasty dishes out of them. We prayed in the morning, evening, before and after eating. We confessed every week, and for one day a month we spoke to no one except the cross on the wall. I prayed very sincerely. On these words, which I often did not understand, depended my life not only on heaven, but also here on earth. We went to church for Sunday Mass and Communion, but Confession, Novenas and Vespers were held in the chapel at the mansion. The priest who heard our confessions had escaped from Germany and hidden with the Sisters of the Resurrection because—which we didn’t know—he had been born a Jew. Germans also confessed to him because he spoke good German and even had a German last name. How were they to know that a Jew was hearing their confessions?

We went to the village school, but the nuns gave us extra lessons in Latin and German. They also taught us embroidery and to make play things out of paper and straw. They arranged games and theatricals for us. They darned our stockings and repaired our clogs. They cared for us and treated our flu, hepatitis, and scarlet fever. They went into the countryside to ask for milk and potatoes and flour for us. We didn’t have enough to eat, but I never felt it. I only felt fear in my stomach. My face grew thin, my nose longer, and fear showed in my eyes, and I looked nothing like Shirley Temple any more.

I went to my mother to Warsaw for holidays. Yola [Jola was Rita’s daughter—M.P.] took me to the circus where the antics of the acrobats filled me with dread, and to the cinema where I sat even more anxiously because everything was in German and I only saw Germans around me. Once they sent me to fetch milk from Meinl’s, a shop for Germans and Volksdeutsche. A moment later, the telephone: “Frau Haslauer, who is that Jewish child?” Walter immediately took me back to Stara Wieś and I never went there any more. My mother came to see me, but I was afraid of her visits. Krysia Janas’s grandmother came once and took her back for Easter. They were discovered in the train. The Sisters tried to save Krysia, but one of the Germans told them to desist because it could end up badly for the whole boarding school. I don’t remember her face. She was nine years old, the same as me.

We were not taught hatred—only love, above all for the Lord Jesus. But hatred was stronger. Especially when coupled with love. Because how could you love the tormented Jesus, and not hate those who betrayed Him? And how strong must the hatred have been if even little Krysia Janas was betrayed? That’s why I made a pact with the Christian God that I would never be a Jew and that, in exchange, no one would hate me. That was Easter 1944.
Another Jewish girl who was accepted by the Resurrectionist Sisters in Warsaw and taken to Starwieś near Węgrów was Irena Bialer, born in 1928. She survived the war and was reclaimed by her uncle. She recalled her stay there favourably.⁷² Other Jews who were taken in, or assisted in other ways, by the Resurrectionist Sisters included were Elżbieta Sobelman, Eva Grosfeld, and Eva and Jan Schutz. (Gutman and Bender, The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations, volumes 4 and 5: Poland, Part 1, pp.349, 459–60; Part 2, p.753.)
[1] Elzbieta [Elżbieta] Sobelman was 11 years old when both her parents died in late 1942. Before his death, her father had asked Krystyna Klarzuk, a former acquaintance of his, to take care of his daughter. Klarzuk, a young married woman with a baby who lived in central Warsaw, welcomed the young orphan and looked after her devotedly without expecting anything in return. Although the neighbors soon became suspicious, Klarzuk refused to be intimidated by their threats and blackmail. After obtaining Aryan papers for Elzbieta, she enrolled her at an institution run by the Resurrectionist (Zmartwychwstanki) nuns, where she continued to look after her and watch out for her safety. Elzbieta was transferred to a transit camp for Poles who were evacuated from the Zamosc [Zamość] region and sent to the orphanage belonging to the RGO [Rada Główna Opiekuńcza, a social welfare agency]. Elzbieta remained in the orphanage until the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising in the summer of 1944, when she was deported to Pruszkow [Pruszków] with the rest of Warsaw’s population. After wandering from one hiding place to another, she finally reached the village of Chorowice in the county of Skawina, Cracow [Kraków] district. Although Elzbieta lost contact with Klarzuk, the ties between them were renewed immediately after the liberation in January 1945 and continued for many more years.
[2] Aldona Lipszyc, a widow who had been married to a Jew and lived with her seven children in Warsaw, owned a farm and house in Ostrowek [Ostrówek], in the county of Radzymin. Before the war, Lipszyc had been active in the PPS [Polish Socialist Party] and was known for her progressive views. During the war, Lipszyc, guided by humanitarian principles, which overrode considerations of personal safety or economic hardship, helped her Jewish friends by offering them shelter in her home. The first to stay in her apartment in Warsaw was Helena Fiszhaut, an old school friend who had escaped from the ghetto during the large-scale Aktion in August 1942. Thanks to her ties with the Polish underground, Lipszyc was able to provide Fiszhaut with Aryan papers and find her a job with a Polish family as a maid. In the fall of 1942, a woman introducing herself as Olga Grosfeld knocked on Lipszyc’s door, telling her that she had come from Przemysl [Przemyśl] with her 13-year-old daughter, Eva, following the advice of a mutual acquaintance. Lipszyc gave Grosfeld a warm welcome, and looked after her until she was driven out of the city with the rest of Warsaw’s population following the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944. Lipszyc also arranged for little Eva to be admitted to an institution for war orphans run by the Zmartwychwstanki [Resurrectionist] Sisters, where she stayed under an assumed identity until the liberation. [Aldona Lipszyc also sheltered a number of other Jews.]
[3] During the war, Irena Stelmachowska lived in Warsaw with her two daughters, Wanda and Aleksandra. In winter 1942, Irena offered Eva Schutz and her 11-year-old son, Jan, shelter in her apartment. Eva and Jan, who had false papers in the names of Ewa and Jan Sarnecki, had escaped from the Lwow [Lwów] ghetto and reached the Nunnery of Resurrection in Zoliborz [Żoliborz] with the help of an acquaintance. At the nunnery, the mother and son were handed Irena’s address [the contact was established by Sister Laurenta⁷³]. Eva and Jan stayed with the Stelmachowskas [sic] until the end of the Warsaw Uprising in October 1944, when they were deported to Pruszkow [Pruszków] and separated. After the war, Eva and Jan left Poland.
Hania Ajzner was a young girl when the war broke out. She lived with her family in the Warsaw ghetto until a Catholic friend of her father’s provided them with birth and baptismal certificates. After escaping from the ghetto, Hania was placed in a boarding school in the suburb of Żoliborz, run by the Sisters of the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ, under her new identity of Anna Zakościelna. Her true identity was known to the nuns and the chaplain, but she was never asked about her baptism. She recalls an episode that occurred when a revolt broke out in the Warsaw ghetto. (Hania Ajzner, Hania’s War [Caulfield South, Victoria, Australia: Makor Jewish Community Library, 2000], p.143.)
One night, Sister Wawrzyna came into the dormitory after the girls had already settled down. “Get up, girls, come up to the windows,” and she drew aside the black-out curtains. They could al see a red glow over the fields to the South. “That is the Ghetto, burning,” she said. “There was an uprising in the Ghetto. You must all pray, girls, for there are heroes fighting and dying there.”