Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy

Hirszfeld’s reflections contradict the views of those Jewish writers who saw in the ghetto baptisms nothing but a search for some kind of material profit. …

What struck me in reading these pages for the first time—many years ago—was the insistence on patriotism, on an inalienable union of God and Country. I remember that during the war in Poland this was precisely the common, accepted, and indisputable view.
Accounts gathered by Yad Vashem, which has recognized Rev. Władysław Głowacki as a Righteous Gentile, attest to the following. (Gutman and Bender, The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations, volume 4: Poland, Part 1, p.239.)
From October 1940 to August 1942, Wladyslaw Glowacki [Władysław Głowacki] exploited his position as priest of the Leszno Street church [of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary] in the Warsaw ghetto to provide a number of Jews, including Amelia and Rudolf Arcichowski, Aleksander Bender, Tadeusz Seidenbeutel, and his father, Maksymilian, with Aryan papers. Glowacki also sheltered Helena Labedz [Łabędź] in his apartment [in the parish rectory in the suburb of Służewiec where he was transferred in August 1942²⁰⁶] from the summer of 1942 until January 1945, when the area was liberated.
One of the parishioners of the Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin was Alina Brodzka-Wald, who was born in Warsaw in 1929 to Nikodem and Helena Brodzki. Her mother was Russian. Alina lived in the Warsaw ghetto with her parents from November 1940 until her escape to the Aryan side, at age twelve, on July 22, 1942. She left the ghetto with a falsified baptismal certificate issued by Rev. Henryk Komorowski, a vicar at the church. She survived under the protection of Catholic nuns: the Franciscan Sisters of the Family of Mary in Warsaw, and the Sisters of the Resurrection in Warsaw and Częstochowa. Alina’s parents, as well as her older half brother, Jan, all survived the war.²⁰⁷ Her story is told in Dembowski, Christians in the Warsaw Ghetto, at pages 108–10.
She was baptized early in her life, following her mother’s wishes. Her godfather was Stanisław Wiesel (or Wizel), a convert of long standing. … Alina’s parents went to the ghetto in November 1940 because of their deep attachment to their own parents, who were old and had refused to go into hiding, although they could have done so because their Polish was fluent and faultless. [Alina’s grandparents] Salomon and Gustawa Brodzki died peacefully in the ghetto, before the Aktion … One of Alina’s aunts, Eugenia Brodzka Jakubowicz, was baptized in the ghetto … As a little girl, Alina felt the antipathy of the ghetto population: “We were not loved, we were strangers.”

The day that Alina’s family arrived in the [Warsaw] ghetto he father took her to the Church of the Nativity of the B.V.M. For the next almost twenty months, she went to the parish every day to attend the school, taught by priests as well as lay teachers. She remembers the horror of those trips. Daily life in the ghetto was rendered particularly difficult because, among other tings, of the incredibly crowded conditions in the streets. One especially dreaded street was the narrow Karmelicka, the only passage, until the fall of 1941, from the southern part (small ghetto) to the northern part (larger ghetto). Alina had to take this passage to reach the church on Leszno Street from her home on Orla Street. …

For Alina, entering the small door into the church garden, after the horrors of Leszno and Karmelicka Streets, was like entering another world, a world of green nature, one of tranquillity and a sense of security. She knew the head of the parish, Monsignor [Seweryn] Popławski, Rev. Teofil [Władysław] Głowacki, and Rev. [Aleksander] Zyberk-Plater, whom she remembers as the “intellectuals of the parish.” Alina belonged to the parish children’s group, which had several dozen members. The leader of this group was Rev. Henryk Komorowski, the priest whom Alina remembers best. He played volleyball with “his” children, and Alina’s most cherished souvenir that she managed to bring from the ghetto is a photograph of the parish volleyball team dedicated to her by Rev. Komorowski as “his dear player.” He was truly a charismatic person, not only restected but loved. He enjoyed the total trust of his wards.

The school offered the usual subjects as well as a course of studies in the Christian tradition. Besides sports, the parish offered dancing and rhythmic gymnastics lessons given by Irena Prusicka. The parish had run an elementary school since the inception of the ghetto. At first it was a clandestine operation, but in October 1941 it became a legal Catholic school. Regular religious education was offered both in the school and outside it.

We know that the gardens of both the Nativity and All Saints churches were greatly admired, desired, and envied as the only islands of green in the sea of overcrowded and noisy streets. The Nativity parish garden was more substantial than the garden of All Saints or the deactivated Saint Augustine. … the elite among the converts used to meet in the garden of the Nativity Church: doctors, professors, engineers, and teachers. …