Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy

Once the following thing happened: The children were going out, everyone was looking at them, including a German officer, who finally said to me:

“There are a lot of different faces in your group, sister!”

“What else do you expect,” I answered him in German. “Do you want them all to look like you? Everyone has a different mother and father.”

I gave him a look, and that was the end of that. The officer did not think any more of the matter.

I also remember the daughter of a doctor from Turka. He was needed by the Germans for something, so he was kept alive and walked around with the Star of David. His daughter [Lidia Kleinman] was being hidden by our sisters in Lwow [Lwów], but they feared keeping her, for she was too well known. So I told them: “Give her to us; we already have many, so one more won’t make a difference.”

The little girl had very long tresses, so I said to her: “You have to make a sacrifice, my child.”

I cut off her tresses [so that she would not be recognized en route], and we found a birth certificate for her. A sister went to St. Antoni’s [Anthony’s] Church in Lwow; the priest gave her a baptismal book [register], and after a two-day search she finally found a girl whose age coincided with the age of the doctor’s daughter. The priest wrote out a certificate in the name of O. [Maria Wołoszyńska], a name which was used after the war by the father of the child also.

Not one of the Jewish children we had was killed. The majority of our children are grateful, and maintain contact with us.

We received children mostly from Warsaw. All the sisters at Lomna knew about the Jewish children, but no one was allowed to differentiate between the children, and no one did. At most, the children did so among themselves.

One day Sister Paulina arrived with some children, and a boy came over to me, and said:

“I beg your pardon, Mother Superior, Sister Paulina has brought some children from Warsaw, all of them Jews!”

“They are not Jews, but all are baptized children, so there are no Jews here!” I replied.

We tried to create an atmosphere where the children would feel safe and secure. After the Ukrainian attacks [on the convent] in 1943, we left Lomna, and together with the children moved to Warsaw. In Warsaw we lived in a small place on Wolna [Wolność] St., until the uprising. All of us left Warsaw in August of 1944.

The children came from Warsaw in groups. There were situations where the [train] conductor, seeing our nuns with a group of children, among which he could see Jewish children, closed the compartment and drew the curtains to assure the safety of the sisters and children. These conductors were Polish, but one time a German conductor did this also.

After the uprising, we stayed for some time in Kostowiec, then in Wegrocia [?]; finally we found ourselves in Lublin [Lubień] Kujawski.

Reclaiming Jewish children started as early as 1945. When someone called at the convent, they gave a name and collected a child. But sometimes it was different. …
Róża Peiper was the wife of a judge from Sambor who had been deported during the Soviet occupation. After the entry of the Germans in 1941, she turned to Rev. Michał Ziajka, the pastor of the Catholic parish in Sambor, who promised to her that he would care for her daughter Urszula (born in 1934). He placed Urszula in the orphanage of the Franciscan Sisters of the Family of Mary in Łomna, where she remained until the nuns and children were forced to leave the area because of threats from Ukrainian nationalist partisans. During her stay there, Rev. Ziajka provided Urszula with additional food and clothing. When the orphanage was evacuated, Urszula left and returned to the parish rectory but did not want to remain there because her presence was well known. Rev. Ziajka arranged for her to stay in a shelter for children until the arrival of the Soviet army. Rev. Ziajka kept Róża Peiper at the rectory for several weeks when her cover became risky. She then found other hideouts, the last one in the home of a Ukrainian woman who denounced her. She did not survive the war.¹⁴³
Anna Henrietta Kretz (later Daniszewska), born in 1934, was one of a dozen Jewish and three Gypsy children sheltered by the Franciscan Sisters of the Family of Mary in their orphanage in Sambor, under the care of the superior, Sister Celina (Aniela) Kędzierska. After the family’s hideout with a Polish family was betrayed by a fellow Jew, miraculously Anna managed to run away from the German executioners who killed her parents and their Polish benefactors. She approached the orphanage with caution because part of the building was occupied by German soldiers who used the courtyard as their field kitchen. When she arrived at the orphanage Anna turned to Sister Celina with these words: “Sister, be my mother; I don’t have parents anymore.” When Anna’s uncle came to claim her after the war, Sister Celina, then seriously ill, said to Anna on parting: “Remember, be a good person.” Those words forever left an impression in Anna’s heart. In October 1993, Anna Kretz penned the following testimonial (Teresa Antonietta Frącek, “Ratowały, choć za to groziła śmierć,” Part 6, Nasz Dziennik, April 4, 2008):
In memory of the Sister superior and other Sisters who, risking their own lives and in those terrible conditions, cared for me and other Jewish children and helped to instil in us faith in people, which we could have lost forever together with our lives. May the memory of their deed never fade, because by their deeds they showed that love of one’s neighbour could lead to the highest form of generosity and heroism. I will never forget that. May I be worthy of it.
Sister Celina (Aniela) Kędzierska was recognized as a Righteous Among Nations by Yad Vashem in 2015. Sister Maria Sawicka, who worked at the orphanage in Sambor, recalled Anna Kretz and a number of other Jewish children sheltered there, including Rysiek and Urszula Paiper, who had distinctly Jewish appearances, and a girl named Marysia.¹⁴⁴ Jerzy Bander (born in 1942), who was smuggled out of the Sambor ghetto in June 1943, was one of several Jewish infants brought to the orphanage in Sambor run by the Franciscan Sisters of the Family of Mary by Maria Wachułka, a secretary at a local high school and family friend. Jerzy was was reunited with his father, who was rescued by the Wachułka family, after the war.¹⁴⁵ Janina Shosh Ronis was sheltered in the convent of the Franciscan Sisters of the Family of Mary in Lwów, where she went by the name of Janina Ryszarda Glińska. She was placed there by her mother in 1942. After the war, she was reunited with her mother.¹⁴⁶
Mina Deutsch (née Kimmel) recalled the assistance she, her husband Leon and their young daughter Eva received from many persons, including the Franciscan Sisters of the Family of Mary in Dźwiniaczka, near Borszczów, where her husband had worked for the Germans as a doctor. (Mina Deutsch, Mina’s Story: A Doctor’s Memoir of the Holocaust [Toronto: CW Press, 1994], p.48.)
We used to hide from time to time in a nearby convent where the nuns were quite nice to us and asked us to come to them when there was an urgent need. After being there for a day or two a few times, the Sister Superior suggested that we leave our daughter with them …
Regina Kartyganer (later Maria Damaszek) was seven years old when her father entrusted her to Czesława Kisiewlewicz (later Strąg), who lived in Brzeżany with her mother Rozalia Kisielewicz. With the permission of her father, Regina was baptized by a priest who was brought into the conspiracy and provided with a false baptismal and birth certificate in the name of Maria Szkolnicka. Afterwards, the Polish Welfare Committee arranged for Regina to be placed with the Franciscan Sisters of the Family of Mary in Podhajce, where she resided in an orphanage under the care Sister Helena Chmielewska, the superior of the convent. Towards the end of the war, the nuns and their charges left Podhajce and moved to Lwów, where they stayed in the order’s mother house on Kurkowa Street. They were then evacuated to Staniątki near Kraków, and later to Nysa, before settling in Koperniki in Silesia. After the war, Regina became a doctor. Three of her rescuers, apart from the priest, were recognized by Yad Vashem in 2014.¹⁴⁷
The Sisters Servants of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus (Siostry Służebnice Najświętszego Serca Jezusowego, popularly referred to as Siostry Sercanki) opened their orphanage in Przemyśl to children of all faiths. Among the nuns involved in the rescue mission were Sister Emilia (Józefa Małkowska), the Mother Superior, who initiated the rescue, Sister Longina (Leokadia Juśkiewicz), Sister Ligoria (Anna Grenda), Sister Bernarda (Rozalia Domicella Sidełko), and Sister Alfonsa (Eugenia Wąsowska), who was made responsible for the Jewish children. The latter four nuns were recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Gentiles. Thirteen Jewish children—ten girls, among them, Anna Rubin, Maria Reinharz (later Miriam Klein), Barbara Friedman, and Fryda Einsiedler (later Frieda Stieglitz),¹⁴⁸ as well as three boys—found shelter there until the city’s liberation in July 1944, whereupon they were turned over to the newly constituted Jewish committee. Children were often received under dramatic circumstances, on occasion simply left at the gate of the orphanage. Sister Alfonsa saw to it that the children did not lack food or clothing, and often ventured out to collect alms in order to support the young charges. The following account is recorded in Mordecai Paldiel, The Path of the Righteous: Gentile Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust (Hoboken, New Jersey: KTAV Publishing House, 1993), at pages 219–22.
Hedy Rosen (a four-year-old child in the summer of 1942) and her mother had wandered through the woods for two years, seeking shelter from the fury of the Nazi Final Solution. One day they arrived outside the walls of a convent in Przemyśl in southern Poland. Panting for breath and on the verge of collapse, Hedy’s mother looked into her daughter’s eyes and told her quietly: “You have no choice. From now on your name is Jadwiga Kozowska and you are a Christian Pole.” After repeating with her several verses of a Catholic prayer, she placed Hedy near the convent’s entrance and disappeared behind a tree. Hedy stood there alone and wept. Her cries alerted the nuns, who opened the gates and fetched the child inside. There she stayed for two full years. She was the first Jewish child to be admitted. Twelve others followed in her wake.

St. Joseph’s Heart was a children’s orphanage with main offices in Cracow [Kraków]. In 1942, Sister Alfonsa (Eugenia Wąsowska) was sent from Cracow to the Przemyśl convent to help the other five nuns and one priest to care for the forty-seven orphaned Catholic children. With the approval of her Cracow superiors, the Przemyśl mother superior decided to give shelter to Jewish children; she then suddenly took ill and expired. When her successor in turn fell ill, Sister Alfonsa was made responsible for the “Jewish Section” of the Catholic orphanage. Under her stewardship, a total of thirteen Jewish children (ten girls and three boys) were sheltered in the orphanage until the city’s liberation in July 1944.