Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy

The Germans took us to a POW camp in Radom. It was November [1939] and already cold. My leg was terribly swollen and the wound festered; I could barely walk.

… In the car with me was a Pole, an officer from my unit who was also wounded, and looking at me one day, he said, “If the Germans find out that you are Jewish, it will be your end. I advise you not to reveal that you are Jewish; our service books don’t show our nationality. …”

In the camp at Radom, I met a good friend, a former neighbor, a classmate of mine at school. In the Polish army he was a medic, the Germans too used him as such in the camp. He promised to help me in any way possible. First of all, he would see to it that I would be admitted to the hospital; to do this he intended to engage the help of another fellow from our town, who was a nurse at the camp hospital. When he told me who the other fellow was, I became frightened, because I remembered him from before the war, when he was an Endek who organized and took part in anti-Jewish brawls in our town. My friend, however, assured me that I had no reason to be afraid of him, because he’d changed and now hated the Germans more than the Jews. He would help me.

In fact, the next morning, when all the prisoners seeking admittance to the hospital had lined up in front of the entrance gate, the line was so long that joining it seemed to me to be a hopeless undertaking. I realized I would not be able to stand there for hours on my wounded, aching leg, and left the line in despair. My landsman, the Endek, saw me hopping back to the barracks. He came up to me and told me not to worry. He led me through a back door into the hospital and to the admitting desk, where he persuaded a Polish doctor, himself a prisoner, to admit me as an emergency case.

The next day I was on the operating table. A big chunk of steel was taken out of my leg. The doctor told me that a few more days of neglect would have led to gangrene, which would have resulted in the loss of my leg.

My classmate told me that he had spoken to a Polish priest, who visited sick prisoners in the hospital every day, and the priest promised him that he would do everything possible to help me.

Two Gestapo men came into the ward and took away a friend of mine by the name of Kraemer, and all other prisoners with Jewish names. I was spared because my name doesn’t sound Jewish.

The next day, when the priest came into my ward, he approached my bed and asked me if I wanted to confess. I understood that by pretending that it was a confession, we wouldn’t have any witnesses to our talk. When we were alone I told him that, as he knew from my friend, I was a Jew and therefore in great danger, and begged him to help me. He was a kind man and told me that all is in God’s hand and that I should not lose hope. He gave me a small cross to wear, and having learned from my friend that I was in the military orchestra, he also gave me a little hymn book. “Tomorrow,” he said, “I will be saying mass in the hospital, as I do every Sunday. Before the services I will ask if there are among the worshippers some with good voices, or from the music band. You should step forward and I will ask you to join the choir.” He said I should behave like all the others, cross myself and kneel when the others did, and with God’s help he hoped that there would be no suspicion of my being Jewish. Since then I became known in the hospital as the choir boy. …

However, after about six week in the hospital, an ordinance was received to dissolve the camp and to release the Polish prisoners, allowing them to return home.
William (Wolf) Ungar, a soldier in the Polish army who was injured during the September 1939 campaign, recalled waking up in a make-shift hospital in Gostynin and being comforted by a Catholic priest. (William Ungar with David Chanoff, Destined to Live [Lanham, Maryland, New York, Oxford: University Press of America, 2000], pp.63–64.)