Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy

I stayed with the Grey Nuns for a very long time, up to my grammar school graduation, that is, until 1952.
The aforementioned Irena Sendler, an employee of the Department of Social Welfare who worked with Żegota in Warsaw, recalled the obstacles she had to overcome in rescuing Jewish children. These children were often placed in Catholic convents. (Marek Halter, Stories of Deliverance: Speaking with Men and Women Who Rescued Jews from the Holocaust [Chicago and La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1997], pp.9–11.)
“Within the framework of our social duties, my friend Eva worked with the leaders of the Jewish community, who gave us the addresses of needy families, and I went there. Imagine: I went to homes of these people who had never seen me before, and announced that I could save their child. All of them asked the same question: could I guarantee that their son or daughter would survive? But there were no guarantees. I wasn’t even sure of getting out of the Ghetto alive. Certain parents were suspicious, and refused to let their child go. I would go back the next day in the hope of convincing them, and sometimes their flat was in ruins. The Nazis set it on fire just for the pleasure of seeing Jews burn. But more often they gave me their child. The father, the mother, and the grandparents would be crying, and I would lead the little one away. What a tragedy, each time! The children, separated from their mothers, sobbed ceaselessly all along the road, and we were crying as well. To avoid alerting the Germans with their cries, our driver had found a solution: he brought a fierce dog in the ambulance. As the guards approached we made him walk and his barking covered the children’s cries…

“With some friends, I arranged for four social assistance centers, where they could stay as long as necessary—days, weeks, whole months—to overcome the shock into which the situation had plunged them. We even had to teach them how to laugh again. Only then could we place them. Sometimes in welcoming families, but more often in convents, with the complicity of Mothers Superior. No one ever refused to take a child from me. I placed them with Sister Niepokalanski [niepokalanki—Sisters of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary], at the Visiting Sisters of Christ [?], and at the convent at Plody [Płudy, run by the Franciscan Sisters of the Family of Mary]. We also had a house at 96 Lesno [Leszno] where we hid some of the mothers who had escaped from the Ghetto. It took a lot of money to sustain it all. Around 1942, the Germans started to control us more strictly, and we couldn’t use social aid funds any more. Happily, in the autumn of that same year, Zegota [Żegota] was formed … Żegota had access to funds supplied by the Polish government in exile in London.”

Irena Sendler’s story has been dramatized recently in a play, Life in a Jar, which was adapted for television as The Courageous Heart of Irena Sander, and a PBS documentary film, Irena Sendler, In the Name of Their Mother, which is based on Anna Mieszkowska’s biography, Irena Sendler: Mother of the Children of the Holocaust.¹⁷⁷
Julian Grobelny (whose code name was “Trojan”) was an activist in the Polish Socialist Party and chairman of Żegota, the Councuil for Aid to Jews, since January 1943. Despite suffering from tuberculosis, Grobelny, together with his wife, Halina, was personally involved in the rescue of a large number of Jews. Both Julian and Halina devoted most of their time and energy to their rescue work, turning their small house in Cegłów, near Mińsk Mazowiecki, into a temporary shelter for Jewish children until they could move into more permanent accommodations. The Grobelnys were in close contact with Irena Sendler, head of the children’s section of Żegota. The Grobelnys also helped Jewish adults who fled from the ghetto by supplying them with Aryan papers, money and medicines. In March 1944, the Gestapo arrested Grobelny, but during a furlough to receive medical care he escaped.¹⁷⁸ The Grobelnys personally helped to rescue Chaja Estera Stein (born in 1929, later Teresa Tucholska-Körner), with the assistance of Rev. Franciszek Fijałkowski, the local pastor. Rev. Fijałkowski provided Julian Grobelny falso birth and baptismal certificates, among others for Chaja Estera Stein. Chaja was sheltered in the rectory for a period of time until, passing as Teresa Tucholska, she she could be taken to Irena Sendler in Warsaw. (“Chaja Estera Stein (Teresa Tucholska-Körner), The First Child of Irena Sendler,” The Polish Righteous, Internet: .)

Chaja Estera Stein was born in Cegłów in Mazovia. Her date of birth is unclear: “In fact I was born in 1927, but I received the baptism certificate of Teresa Tucholska with the birth dated on 14 February 1929”. However, Teresa’s friend, who has known her since her early years, claims that she could not have been born before 1931.

Estera’s parents, Aron (born in 1900) and Fajge (born in 1905) Stein, had two daughters: Chaja Estera and Jochewet, who was 3–4 years younger than her older sister. In Cegłów, the family ran a shop selling “ell goods” (items sold by ell: a unit of measurement approximating the length of a man’s arm) and soda-water works.

Estera’s father, a wealthy citizen of Cegłów, was friends with Julian Grobelny, the owner of a grange lying near the town, and with a local parish priest. (Chaja: “It was pleasant to watch my father, wearing his gaberdine and a long bear, strolling along with the priest in a cassock at his side.”). Those two friends of the family later saved Estera’s life.

In fall 1940 in Mrozy, located a few kilometers away from Cegłów, the Nazis created a ghetto. All Jews living in Cegłów had to move to that new place of living. The Steins had to comply with the orders too, but they did not break contact with the friends outside the ghetto. In 1942 (Chaja: “I do not remember the exact date”), when the ghetto was to be liquidated, Grobelny procured for Estera a birth certificate. The girl and her parents luckily left the ghetto—her father hid the daughter and her mother in a shed and returned to the ghetto for Jochewet, never to come back ….

Somehow, Grobelny managed to find Estera and organized for her a transport by train. Although the train station was being occupied by the Germans, they let the little girl in. A prearranged person in one of the carriages began to wave to her, indicating a coach to get on. The man led her to the priest. Estera was never to see her parents or sister again. The priest (“or maybe Grobelny”) transported Estera (now called Teresa) to Warsaw to Irena Sendler, where she stayed for a few days. Irena then left the girl in her friends’ care: Zofia Wędrychowska and [her husband] Stanisław Papuziński. In the apartment where she lived, there were already four children of Stanisław Papuziński and additional three Jewish children in hiding. Teresa was an eighth child in the room. In February 1944 one of Gestapo agents burst into the apartment located in Ochota (at 3 Mątwicka Street). Seeing that older boys of Papuziński and their friends were practicing shooting, the Gestapo officer shot a few times in their direction, wounding one of the boys, and retreated for back-up.

Zofia Wędrychowska, fearing a hasty return of the Gestapo police, stayed with the wounded boy and sent the rest of the children away. Teresa, being the eldest child in the group, led the kids to the friends on Krucza Street to the address she had received from Zofia. Soon the Gestapo returned to the apartment in Ochota, taking the wounded boy and the woman along with them. The boy died on the way, while Zofia was transported to the prison on Szucha [Avenue] for interrogation. On 26 April 1944 she was executed in Pawiak.

Irena Sendler put Teresa and other children in the holiday camp near Garwolin, where the girl stayed until winter 1945. After the Warsaw Uprising, Irena came back to Warsaw and took Teresa to her apartment. Teresa lived there for a few years together with her rescuer and her husband, Stefan Zgrzembski.
Jadwiga Piotrowska, who also worked with Irena Sendler, devoted her life to the welfare of her Jewish charges and helped to place many Jewish children to convents. (Gutman and Bender, The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations, volume 5: Poland, Part 2, at pages 611–12.)
Jadwiga Piotrowska was a member of a devout Catholic family. During the occupation, Piotrowska lived with her parents in Warsaw and worked in the social services department at City Hall. Piotrowska, who faithfully assisted Jan Dobraczynski [Dobraczyński], who was responsible for street children in the same department, happened to find herself in the Warsaw ghetto in her professional capacity, where she witnessed the hardships of the Jewish children firsthand. In the framework of her work, Piotrowska made contact in the ghetto with people who cared for children, including Janusz Korczak, whom she considered, as she put it, “a saint, although he was not a Christian.” In time, Piotrowska joined Zegota [Żegota] and helped smuggle children out of the ghetto and save them on the Aryan side of the city. Piotrowska was one [of] Zegota’s most active members and personally cared for many Jews who came over to the Aryan side without any address or money. She provided them with places to hide and financial support. Her home served as a transit station for Jews, both adults and children, and they found respite there from the terrible anxiety and fear they endured. She helped prepare them for their life on the Aryan side of the city. She personally took a number of Jewish children to hide with Polish families and in convents. Among those she saved were Pola and Mieczyslaw [Mieczysław] Monar, their two children, their niece, Halina Zlotnicka [Złotnicka], Josek Buschbaum, a youth who stayed in her home from 1943 to 1946 (who she considered adopting), the Rapaczynski [Rapaczyński] family, the girls Maria and Joanna Majerczyk, and others. Piotrowska considered the help she extended to Jews her moral duty and the saving of their lives both a patriotic and a religious calling.
Another vital member of this network who worked closely with Catholic Church and lay institutions to rescue Jews was the journalist Irena Schultz. During the occupation she worked in the Social Welfare Department of the Warsaw municipality together with Jan Dobraczyński, Irena Sendler and Jadwiga Piotrowska. One of her many missions involved obtaining a large number of blank birth and baptismal certificate forms from Rev. Władysław Pokiziak, a vicar at St. Nicholas parish in Lwów. (“Schultz, Irena,” Internet: .)
Irena Schultz worked already before the war in the Social Welfare Department of Warsaw. This Department also cared for poor Jews, providing ca. 3,000 of them with inexpensive meals, medicine, clothing and money. After the closing of the ghetto, 90% of Jews found themselves walled in it. Irena Sendler procured for herself and for Irena Schultz a work permit of the sanitary task group for fighting infectious diseases. This enabled them to enter the ghetto freely, beginning in January 1943. They made contact with the organization CENTOS, a relief organization for Jewish children, and with Ewa Rechtman. They also renewed old contacts with their charges and made new ones. The two, Irena Schultz especially, entered the ghetto sometimes two and three times daily, bringing with them food, clothing, medicine and money. They delivered ca. 1,000 vaccines against typhoid fever. Other workers of the sanitary task group secretly brought a further 6.000 vaccines. Irena specialized in getting Jewish children out of the ghetto, either by the underground corridors of the court building on Leszno Street, or through the tram depot in Muranów. In the court building, the janitors received a small reward, “because of the risk.” Those children were placed with Polish families who received, if needed, a certain amount of money for their expenses from Żegota; others were placed in the Boduen orphanage, directed by Dr. Maria Propokowicz-Wierzbowska and operated by the Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul. To make it impossible to place in it Jewish children, Germans made a rule that the children could be placed there only with police approval and escort. Once, when a young Jewish mother wishing to go for work in Germany appeared with a newborn baby, the baby was presented at the police post as the child of the janitor, whose wife often left him to go to the country. And so the baby, called Feliks, was accepted in the orphanage. On another occasion, Irena Schultz extricated from a manhole a small Jewish girl who had a note pinned to her garment giving her age only. The girl was in such lamentable state that nobody would take her in and it was necessary to put her in the Boduen orphanage. The little girl had fair hair and blue eyes, so nobody suspected that she was Jewish. At the police station Irena was suspected of being an unnatural mother who brought her daughter to such a terrible state and tried in this way to get rid of her. Fortunately in that orphanage there were some people to whom the truth could be told. The orphanage advised the police that it found the mother of the girl on their own and so Irena was free of the suspicion of abusing her child. In spite of those difficulties, the [Father] Boduen orphanage accepted ca. 200 Jewish children, part of the several hundreds already there. A Blue policeman warned one of its doctors, Dr. Helena Słomczyńska, “You are accepting too many children, it is not good.” Irena saved many people especially from the medical world. In 1942 she went to Lwów and [through the intermediary of Professor Izydora Dąmbska made contact with and] obtained from priest [Władysław] Pokiziak [of St. Nicholas parish] many birth certificate forms, supposedly from a church [St. Mary Magdalene] that had burnt down.¹⁷⁹ They served later as the basis to get “Kennkarten” (German identity cards). Irena Sendler said that “what was impossible for others, Irena Schultz always achieved with success.”
See also Gutman and Bender, The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations, volume 5: Poland, Part 2, at page 700, which provides the following additional information:
Early in the occupation, Schultz, together with Irena Sendler, began helping Jews in the ghetto by providing them with medicine, money, and clothing and was one of the first members of Zegota [Żegota]. Schultz’s job involved frequent visits to the ghetto, occasions she exploited to cooperate with CENTOS, a relief organization for Jewish children. On the eve of the ghetto’s liquidation, Schultz, as a member of Zegota, help smuggle children out of the ghetto to the Aryan side of the city. Schultz became an expert in the field, so much so that her co-workers later testified that no one could smuggle children out of the ghetto as successfully as she. Schultz also let her home be used as a transit point and temporary shelter for Jewish fugitives until they found permanent shelter. At her own initiative, Schultz provided a number of Jewish intellectuals and doctors with forged documents and found them hiding places. Among those who owed her their lives were Helena Witwicka and her daughter, Mira Pazynska [Pażyńska], and Aleksander Dubienski [Dubieński] and his sister, Gizela Gebert.
Another participant in this rescue network was Magdalena Grodzka-Guzkowska [Grodzka-Gużkowska] (née Rusinek), a teenager when she joined the Polish underground, who collected children from the Warsaw ghetto, cared for them, and took them to their places of refuge with Polish families or in convents. (“Ceremony Honoring Magdalena Grodzka-Guzkowska from Poland as Righteous Among the Nations at Yad Vashem,” Internet: .)
Magdalena Grodzka-Guzkowska [Grodzka-Gużkowska] (née Rusinek) was 15 years old when she joined the Polish Underground against the Germans. In 1943, she met Jadwiga Piotrowska, later recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations, and joined her in rescuing Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto. Magdalena collected the children, cared for them and escorted them to their places of refuge with Polish families or in convents. She displayed enormous dedication and love, although she was placing her own life at serious risk. Before bringing the children to their hiding places, she taught them Christian customs in an effort to disguise their Jewish identity.

One such rescue activity saw Magdalena save the life of a six-year-old Jewish boy called Adas [Adaś], who had been severely injured by local thugs. Magdalena took the boy for medical care at the hospital, and then moved him to a hiding place in a monastery. She also saved the life of five-year-old Wlodzio [Włodzio or Włodzimierz] Berg. In spring 1943 his parents managed to smuggle him out of the ghetto and bring him to an elderly couple [Stefan and Maria Magenheim¹⁸⁰]. Someone denounced the family, and a new place had to be found for the child. Magdalena brought him to a safe place. She brought him food every day, as well as colors with which to draw pictures. Eventually he was brought to a convent [of the Daughters of the Purest Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary] in Otwock. Wlodzio Berg, now called William Donat, survived the Holocaust and requested that Yad Vashem recognize his rescuer as Righteous Among the Nations.
Jona Altschuler (Yonah Altshuler), then a 7-year-old child, and her mother came to Warsaw from Lwów in 1943. Jona was placed in the convent of the Sisters Servants of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus in the Old Town, where she was under the case of Sisters Jadwiga Wyszomirska and Kinga Zakrzewska. As a sign of her gratitude, Jona invited the nuns to visit her in Israel in 1963.¹⁸¹ Another Jewish girl was also hidden in this convent at the time of the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. When the convent was closed down after the uprising, the nuns were dispersed. However, they continued to care for their charges as best they could. (Bogner, At the Mercy of Strangers, pp.176–77, based on the testimony of Yonah Altshuler, Yad Vashem Archives, file O.3/5568.)
Yonah Altshuler was hidden in a convent in Warsaw with another Jewish girl. After the Polish uprising was suppressed, the convent was closed down and the nuns were exiled to Germany as forced laborers. The girls’ caregiver, a nun about forty years old, kept them with her and did not abandon them, despite the many hardships of the way. In her place of exile she continued to care for them as if she were their mother. She took them with her to the fields where she had to work at hard manual labor from sunrise to late evening, and shared with them the meagre rations she received from her German peasant overseer. After the liberation, they returned with her to Poland, and before she resumed her prewar life she placed them in a convent in Częstochowa. It is no wonder that Yonah, summarizing her experiences of convent life, said, “I have a sentiment for the Catholic faith and I have nothing but good things to say about the nuns.”
After the failed insurrection in Warsaw (August to October 1944), Catholic institutions including convents and orphanages were forced to evacuate Warsaw and the surrounding areas. At great risk, nuns spirited their young Jewish charges to shelters in other parts of the country. One such child was Necha Baranek, who was evacuated from a convent near Warsaw to Zakopane. After the war, Necha Baranek and four other Jewish children (two girls and two boys) were taken by the Jewish Committee and placed in an orphanage in France, where Necha eventually met up with her mother, also who survived the war. Her testimony is found in Mark Schutzman, ed., Wierzbnik-Starachowitz: A Memorial Book (Tel Aviv: Wierzbnik-Starachowitz Relief Society in Israel and Abroad, 1973), at page 51.