Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy

In reality Irene was, originally, Irena Landesdorfer, born November 9, 1929, in Kraków, the only child of Regina and Samuel Landesdorfer. …

Irene and Regina Landesdorfer not only pretended to be Irene and Zofia Glowacz, they also regularly went to church, pretending not to be Jews. And they were helped with this by the fiancé of Zbigniew’s [Bolt] cousin, with whom they hid for a time at Stanislaw’s house. Although Jewish he knew a lot about Catholicism—indeed, he later married Zbigniew’s cousin and became a Catholic. …

And when she attended church, she regularly took Communion and went to confession. In fact, she said, she came to be a believer, at least for a time …

But one day when they came home from church, the people at whose house they lived told Regina that “people are saying that you don’t know how to pray and you don’t know how to use the rosary.” But Regina credibly [?] dismissed the complaints, saying that in the big city of Kraków, where she came from, they did things differently. Regina had other explaining to do, too, such as why they had left Kraków. She told people who asked that her family was active in the Polish underground and that several family members had been arrested, so they left to find a safer place to live. …

After a time in their new place, Regina was deported to Germany and employed as a Polish forced laborer. Left alone, Irene would make more regular visits to Stanislaw’s house [in the nearby village of Kalembina]. …

Once in the middle of the night, while Irene was sleeping at Stanislaw’s, two Polish policemen came and took her away to the police station on suspicion of being Jewish. Stanislaw came running after them, yelling, “What do you want? She’s just a little girl. She’s not Jewish.”

But the police hit him in the head with a rifle and said, “Go back home if you don’t want your house to be burned and you end up in a concentration camp.”

One of the arresting officers then left to look for Polish people the Germans wanted for forced laborers. The other officer stayed with Irene and prepared to take her to the police station. But he offered her a way out.

“Look, little girl,” he said. “I will look this way and if you want to go I won’t see you.”

Irene, however, refused. This girl, now fourteen, already understood clearly what she would be required to do if she hoped to survive.

“I’m not going,” she told him. “I have nothing to hide.”

She knew that if she ran away, he would know for sure she was Jewish and not only would her life be in even more danger but authorities would come after Stanislaw, too. So Irene and the officer went to the police station, which was little more than chicken coop, with live chickens and with bars on the windows. There they began to interrogate her at length.

… Next, however, a German soldier was brought in to question her. Because he was a Volksdeutsch, he spoke to her in Polish, but he finally concluded that Irene was not Jewish.

… after being in jail for two days, she said to [the police chief], “I cannot just sit here, Either you do something or let me go.”

“You can go, he replied. “I have all your papers. You can go, but come every morning at 10 o’clock and report to me and I’ll see if those papers are real.”

They were not real, of course, and all the man had to do to discover that was to pick up a phone and trace them, but he never did. Something kept him from deciding to end Irene’s life, and she attributed it to her own spunkiness and her lack of fear in his presence. In fact, one day she came to the police station as ordered and found it full of Germans.

When the police chief saw her, he quickly and quietly said to her, “What are you doing here? Get out.” …

However, without her mother and without her papers, she was stuck. She had no way to buy food or to compensate the people from whom they rented the room for feeding her—to say nothing of not being able to pay the rent. Those people, however, had grown fond of Irene and even called her their baby. But she did not want to live there without money, completely beholden to them. Unsure what else to do, Irene went to confession at church and told the priest that she was a Jew in hiding.

… the priest went to the police station. There he said to this police chief, “Give the girl back her papers. I knew her parents. The girl is not Jewish.”

After that, Irene returned to see the police chief, who said to her, “I don’t know what it is with you and that priest. But he came here and he told me that he knew your parents and that you are not Jewish. So here are your papers. Go.” …

[There was also another helpful priest from a neighbouring village from whom Irene received a false birth certificate. The priest had been informed of the whole situation by a Home Army member, who was also a friend of Zbigniew Bolt, a Home Army member and one of Regina and Irene’s protectors. The cleric promised to keep the secret in case of any danger.²⁷⁶]

With her papers back, Irene found a job in a grocery store stocking shelves. She continued working there until the area was liberated by the Soviet Union in the fall of 1944. And although she lost her rented room because others needed it more, the family from whom she rented simply took her in and let her continue living in the same house.

Rozalia (Róża) Allerhand, a Jewish girl, had to leave her hiding place in Monasterzyska near Buczacz and travelled by train to Kraków, where she was to be relocated. She was able to pass a German inspection without documents with the protection of Rev. Alfons Walkiewicz, a vicar from the town of Barysz near Buczacz, who pretended to be her brother. He then placed Rozalia with a Polish family in Kocmyrzów, a village near Kraków, where she survived the war going by the name of Kasia. There she met Mania Malz or Maltz (Mina Schwinger), a Jewish girl from Bukowsko near Sanok, who had obtained a birth and baptismal certificate from a priest in her village in the name of Czesława Sokołowska. Mania was directed to the same Polish family via two contacts, one in Kraków, the other in Kocmyrzów.²⁷⁷ The Jewish girls’ true identities were not known to each other. Rozalia Allerhand’s brother, Aleksander Allerhand, relates this story in Isakiewicz, Harmonica, at pages 76–77 and 81.

Meanwhile, there was no news about my other sister. We thought she had perished. But after some time Mr and Mrs Kwiatek let me know in the camp that she had come back, and that she was at Kocmyrzów, near Kraków. What had happened? Those people she used to stay with—a Polish woman and a Ukrainian—after a year, more or less, told her, ‘You may go to Kraków.’

She was going by train. In the compartment with her, there was a priest wearing a cassock, whom she knew from Monasterzyska [where she had been sheltered] and who escorted her to Kraków. She had no papers, and all of a sudden the Germans were there to check documents.

‘Documents, papers,’ they demanded.