Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy

We talked for a while. Chana asked him to stay with us for supper. But he excused himself and left.

I tried to think of something to say that would help my parents in some way. But nothing occurred to me. I wrote a letter to my sister, telling her about the priest’s visit. If Dad had been able to contact a priest, perhaps he was also able to do other things to ensure their safety, I said.
Later, with the help of the Polish underground, Balbina Synalewicz obtained false identity documents in the name of Elżbieta Orlański and moved to Kraków. An arrangement was set up by Irena Adamowicz, a member of the Polish underground, for Balbina to maintain contact with Warsaw through letters sent to a Mother Superior in Warsaw. (Ibid., pp.31–32, 61.)
One day in the middle of summer of 1942, we were coming from the fields when someone said that Leah wanted to see me. She was in the kitchen with another woman, chatting. Leah introduced me to her as Irena Adamowicz.

Irena was a leader in the [Polish] Scout movement. Outraged by the injustice done to the Jews, she helped out however she could. Irena travelled across the country making contact with halutzim in the major ghettos and telling them about how the clandestine movement operated. …

Irena talked to me for a while. She told me that I would be sent to Krakow [Kraków]. She asked me how I felt about the work and whether I knew how to pray. I told her I knew the prayers by heart after so many years of hearing the Catholic students saying their prayers every morning at school. She seemed satisfied with my answers. Irena gave me an address, and told me to send a letter there on the seventh day of every month as a sign that I was still alive. Whenever the underground needed me, they would let me know. She handed me a prayer book. “Be careful, and good luck,” she said. …

As Irena had instructed me, I addressed my monthly letters to the Mother Superior; absolutely no one else knew.
Jews who had acquaintances among the Catholic clergy turned to them for protection in the face of the unfolding terror and uncertainty. Alfred Szancer (later Królikowski), born in Kraków in 1928, recalled the efforts of his father Zygmunt Lancer, to secure the family’s future by turning to his former classmate, Rev. Stanisław Proszak, the pastor of the parish in the nearby village of Biały Kościół. (Account of Alfred Królikowski, “Helped by Żegota,” in Gutenbaum and Latała, The Last Eyewitnesses, volume 2, pp.134–35.)
It was impossible to live in the empty apartment on Rzeszowska Street [in Kraków] because of the expectation that it would later be included in the ghetto area, and my father was determined to avoid being enclosed in the ghetto. Thus he made contact with a former classmate, Father Stanisław Proszak, a parish priest in the village of Biały Kościół, eighteen kilometers from Kraków, in the direction of Ojców. This priest helped us a great deal, giving his guarantees on our behalf when we rented a room at a local farmer’s, and later, by recording in the parish books a fictitious baptism of our entire threesome (Father, Mother, and me) and issuing us certificates of baptism. At that time our given names were also changed for the first time—Father’s to Stanisław Zygmunt, Mother’s to Jadwiga Zofia, and mine to Jerzy Alfred. According to our thinking then—somewhat naive, as it turned out later—this was supposed to disorient the Germans in case they discovered our escape from Kraków.

On the basis of these documents and thanks to Father Proszak’s connections, we received temporary indentification documents from the local administration—which we used as evidence of our identities for a brief period of time. For a time, Father, unable to make a living in the village, worked in Kraków at the Władysław Klimek Iron Foundry, owned by a friend of his, and on Sundays, he rode his bicycle to Biały Kościół. This lasted until the spring of 1941, when Father was warned—I don’t know how and by whom—of the necessity to flee further.
Pauline Witriol, born in 1937, and her sister were sheltered by a long string of Polish families in the countryside around Kraków. In all likelihood, their presence was widely known to many other villagers. At various points their rescue was assisted by a priest and nuns. Their parents perished. (Pauline Witriol interviewed by Miriam Barrere, California Holocaust Memorial Week, April 28–May 4, 2008, April 2008, pp.101–103.)
In the winter of 1942 my family already had been exiled from our town and my father, along with other male members of our family, was put into a labor camp in a neighboring town. My father and my mother’s brother, Yaakov, made their way back to our town to ask the priest there for baptismal certificates for us, my sister and I. He thought the certificates would make it safer for us to live with Polish people. …

Throughout the war my sister and I stayed with various Christian Polish families. These days I can’t remember if it was seven or nine families all together. We couldn’t stay with each family too long because they were so terrified of being found out and caught by the Gestapo, or the Polish police. Plus, it was war-time and no one had enough food to feed their own family, let alone extra people. …

The family we stayed with next hid us under the kitchen floorboards, in a hole in the dirt. That family had a dog outside that would bark when people came to the house to visit. One day our mother came to the house and saw us in the hole, all dirty, and she started crying. We asked her why she was crying, she said she was so happy to see us. We said, if you are so happy to see us why aren’t you laughing. She replied I’ve forgotten how to laugh. We thought that was so funny, how could she forget to laugh? When it was time for her to go we refused to say good-bye.

Overnight between families again, once we stayed in an abandoned house. It was a Jewish house, who else would it have belonged to? We were given bread and water to eat, and told to stay under a table. There was a window above the table, and anyone passing would have seen us. We did go up to the attic though and found it filled with books, Hebrew books. At one point we saw a rat and gave it some bread. We were just like that rat, dirty, unwanted.

My sister and I had each other for company and when we were lying in our hiding places, when strangers were visiting, after a length of time it was easy to forget ourselves and start to play and whisper. Then the woman of the house would quickly stamp her feet and say something like, “Darn these mice!” This was a signal to us that we had been heard. If the visitors present were wise to the situation, they never let on, fortunately for us.

In one family we were hidden on top of their stove. They had a cooking oven and a brick oven that stuck out into the next room where there was space on top. We were hidden on top, with boxes all around us. One day the couple’s two children started fighting right below us. The sister started crying and crying. As we peered around the boxes one fell. Someone walking by came into the house to see what was going on, and saw us on top of the oven. The father of the house ran in from the field terrified that the police were going to come. He marched us way out into the forest and hide us there without any food or water.

The people who kept us could not confide in any neighbor or friend for fear that they would be given away for the Gestapo and then, together with the whole family we would all be shot. The women in some of these families, because of their greater sympathy for little children, would sometimes take much abuse from their husbands and grown children because of this real and terrible fear. Some of the women would be able to confide in the nuns who came to visit. The nuns would nod and smile to us with gentle smiles, and sometimes bless us or give us religious medals to wear on pretty blue ribbons. At such times we were able to feel that it shouldn’t be held against us that we were Jews.