Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy

Finally they released us …
Other Jewish accounts from the vicinity of Tarnopol also attest to the helpfulness of Catholic priests. Abraham Wand (Avraham Vand) lived in a village pasing as a Christian using false identity documents provided to him by a priest.³⁶⁴ Yosef Schwartz recalled that a priest provided food to Jews.³⁶⁵
Dr. Natalia Weisselberg was sheltered in Sady, a village near Trembowla, in Tarnopol voivodship, along with her husband and young daughter. Her testimony is recorded in Wacław Szetelnicki, Trembowla: Kresowy bastion wiary i polskości (Wrocław: Rubikon, 1992), at page 243.
On June 5, 1943 we had to flee [from the hospital in Trembowla], past the Ukrainian guards and barking of dogs, and in enormous fear we hurried to Sady, arriving at the home of the Ganczarski family where we remained until March 1944, when the Russians entered. Near the end of our stay, still under the German occupation, Jan Ganczarski wanted to assure himself that he was doing the right thing by sheltering Jews and thereby exposing his entire family to death. [A Polish pharmacist’s family living nearby had just been executed by the Germans.] He therefore went to confession. His confessor, Rev. Wacław Szetelnicki, presently residing in Wrocław, praised him for his actions, encouraged him to keep sheltering us and forbade him to surrender us to the Nazis. In March 1944, Mr. Ganczarski saw us off, giving us his blessing on our road to freedom.
Rev. Szetelnicki also paid regular visits (on the first Friday of each month) to an elderly Polish couple in Sady, by the name of Szajdek, who hid a Jewish couple by the name of Parille, from Tarnopol, in the cellar of their small one-storey home. The Parilles, who survived the war, would come out of their hiding place to converse with Rev. Szetelnicki during his visits.³⁶⁶
Rev. Jan Pawlicki, from Zborów near Tarnopol, was one of several Poles instrumental in saving the family of Maksymilian (Menachem) Droll. Rev. Pawlicki provided them with false documents and assisted them in finding a shelter. He was awarded by Yad Vashem in 1969. (Gutman and Bender, The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations, volume 4: Poland, Part 1, p.103.)
In 1942, after the massacres by the Germans and Ukrainians against the Jews of Zborow [Zborów], in the Tarnopol district, Maksymilian Droll and his wife, Anna, decided to flee with their daughter, Janina. Jan Pawlicki, the local priest, came to their aid, by providing them with false documents and moving them to nearby Brzezany [Brzeżany]. While in Brzezany, Droll found work through a friend, Karol Bogucki, who passed the Drolls off as acquaintances of his. In 1943, the Gestapo, on the basis of a tipoff, arrested the Drolls. When Bogucki discovered what had happened, he hurried to the Gestapo and testified that the Drolls were Polish friends of his. After the Drolls were released, Droll found work as an accountant in a Polish office run by Dr. Alfred Schuessel. Although Schuessel knew that the Drolls were Jewish, he tried to help them to the best of his ability. Amongst other deeds, he went to the population registry to testify that their papers were authentic. When the Drolls were rearrested by the Gestapo, Schuessel used ties with government officials to obtain their release. The Drolls were liberated in the summer of 1944…
Rev. Pawlicki is mentioned in a number of testimonies as a very courageous defender of Jews who encouraged his parishioners to shelter Jews. The family of Leib Kronish (Kronisch) from Zborów, consisting of a couple and their two daughter, were among nine Jews sheltered by the Tyrcz family in the village of Futory near Zborów. After liberation, in appreciation, a Jewish survivor made a cassock for Rev. Jan Pawlicki, who had counselled the rescuers to shelter these Jews. Another Jewish woman who was provided false documents by a priest, likely Rev. Pawlicki, was Faye Shapira, who was rescued by a number of Poles.³⁶⁷
Rev. Zygmunt Białowąs, the pastor of Jezierna near Zborów, provided false documents to Maria Fischer, a 13-year-old girl from Tarnopol, in the name of Maria Sieczka. She lived for several months with his nephew Stanisław Mazur, at the beginning of 1942. Afterwards, Rev. Białowąs put her father in contact with a black marketeer from Katowice who arranged for her to become a nanny in Breslau. Poles from Jezierna continued to pose as her family to assist her with her cover as a Catholic Pole. Her parents and brother remained in Jezierna, where “Everybody in the neighborhood knew we were hiding, but nobody told the Germans. The people in Jezierna were good people. They didn’t give us away. They helped us with food. We couldn’t have survived without them.”³⁶⁸
Maria Kamińska, born in Lwów in 1935 as Ruta Linder, survived the war in hiding with Polish families. Her parents owned a pharmacy in Pomorany, in Zborów county, Tarnopol voivodship. Their acquaintance, Rev. Stanisław Kostołowski, the local pastor, found a safe hiding place for their daughter with Malwina Lipińska in the village of Urlów near Zborów. Because of raids on the Polish population by Ukrainian nationalists, Lipińska and her young charge had to relocate to Czchów near Brzesko. (Śliwowska, The Last Eyewitnesses, pp.84–85.)
I was born and lived in Lwów before the war. My name was Ruta Linder. My parents, Sara and Sender Linder, were pharmacists. Several years before the war, they settled in Pomorzany, where they worked in their own pharmacy. …

   In 1941, we found ourselves in the ghetto [in Brzeżany]. After three months, my mother decided that we had to get out of the ghetto. …

   In order to survive, my parents had to turn me over to some Polish family, because I was frequently sick and my cough could have given us away.

   We made our way to Pomorzany. Here, my parents gave me over to a Polish family they knew. Unfortunately, I ran away from there to my parents. Another time, an acquaintance, Father [Stanisław] Kostołowski, placed me at the home of a lady he knew, Malwina Lipińska, in the village of Urlów in the Tarnopol province.

   There, I stopped being Ruta Linder and began life as Maria Kamińska. The way it happened was as follows. Mrs. Lipińska was reading aloud a list of those who had been shot to death, and I happened to remember precisely this name and surname. I received a false certificate of my christening, I had to learn prayers other than the ones Mama had taught me, and I ceased being a child. From then on, fear that someone might recognize me was constantly with me. I lived like other country children. I took the cows to pasture and fed chickens and turkeys. I longed so much for my parents that I tried to kill myself by hitting my head against a wall, but I only managed to get my head banged up and not to kill myself.

   We live in a Ukrainian village, and the followers of Bandera began to bother us. Surprisingly, the ones who helped Mrs. Lipińska were the Germans. There were German officers (Austrians) quartered with us. They gave us a truck and transported us with all our household belongings to Czchów on the Dunajec River in the province of Krakow.

  We moved in with the sister of Mrs. Lipińska, Mrs. Maria Barącz. I was there as a relative. I called both ladies “Auntie,” and everybody knew that my parents had perished during a bombardment. Mrs. Barącz had a very nice home in which there was also a pharmacy. The front rooms were occupied by Germans as their living quarters. It was extremely crowded in the house, because Mrs. Barącz’s entire family had sought shelter under her wings. I remember that all the time I slept in a small child’s bed. Behind the hose, in the woodshed, a Jewish man was hiding under the firewood.

  The girls of this family belonged to the Home Army. It was a heroic family and very noble. Unfortunately, both sisters are no longer alive. I am still in touch with their daughters and grandchildren. At one time, I wanted to arrange for them to receive the medal of the “Just Among the Nations of the World,” In response, I heard, “You know, Marysia, that is completely unncessary. For us, the biggest reward is that you are alive.” …

   In July 1945, my parents were repatriated to Bytom, and they then retrieved me from Czchów.
According to Polish eyewitness accounts, two Jewish women were sheltered on the parish farm in Pomorzany. During an attack on the village by Ukrainian nationalists in April 1944, in which 48 Polish inhabitants lost their lives, the Jewish women had to escape from their hideout when it was set on fire. They were shot dead by the Ukrainian assailants.³⁶⁹
Canon Adam Łańcucki, the pastor of Brzeżany near Tarnopol, provided a number false identity documents that helped Jews survive the war. (Gutman and Bender, The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations, volume 4: Poland, Part 1, p.152; Michał Grynberg, Księga sprawiedliwych [Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 1993], p.89; Gutman and Bender, The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations, volume 5: Poland, Part 2, pp.561–62.)
[1] Stanislaw [Stanisław] Codogni, a blacksmith by profession, lived with his family in the town of Brzezany [Brzeżany] in the Tarnopol district. Throughout the existence of the Brzezany ghetto, the Codognis kept their Jewish friends, the Bomzes, supplied with food and fuel. During the ghetto’s liquidation (April–June 1943), Fishel and Ricka Bomze, their daughter, Chana Redlich, and her six-year-old son, Shimon, hid in the attic of their apartment in the ghetto. Even after all the Jews had been deported, they continued hiding in the attic, while Codogni continued to see to all their needs. In November 1943, when new people began moving into the ghetto, the refugees had to find a new hiding place. Under cover of darkness, Codogni’s son, Karol, helped move Redlich and her son to a shelter Codogni had found for them on one of the farms in the nearby village of Raj. … Redlich and her son stayed on the farm in Raj until the area was liberated in the spring of 1944.
[2] Twelve-year-old Zula Helman also benefited from the assistance of Karol Codogni. She was the daughter of a lawyer from Brzeżany who perished together with a large group of Jews in the first days after the German army entered the city in 1941. Her mother and two younger sisters perished during the liquidation of the ghetto in 1943. Zula Helman managed to flee from the place of execution. She turned to the Codognis for help. Karol Codogni obtained a baptismal certificate for her from the local priest (Adam Łańcucki) and took her to an acquaintance of his in Lwów, where she worked as a nanny. Zula Helman survived the war.
[3] Zofia Sniadecka [Śniadecka], a teacher from Brzezany [Brzeżany] in the Tarnopol district of Eastern Galicia, had been friendly with the Podhorcer family and the dentist Emil Ornstein before the war. Thanks to her fluency in German, Sniadecka was hired as a secretary with a German company that had warehouses in the Jewish quarter of the city. This enabled her to remain in contact with and help her Jewish friends. In the spring of 1942, Rosa Podhorcer approached her, asking her to help save her family. Sniadecka took the seven members of the Podhorcer family into her home, among them Emil Ornstein and his six-year-old son, Jacek. After she located a family of farmers that would agree to hide the Jews in their home, she transferred five members of the Podhorcer family to the farm and hid them in the hiding place the farmer prepared. Disregarding the danger to her life, she took the care of the family upon herself … although she obtained false papers for Ornstein, she decided to hide him in her apartment because of his Jewish appearance. Sniadecka searched for a suitable hiding place for Ornstein’s son Jacek for a long time until she found a place to hide him far from the city. In late March 1944, a member of the Podhorcer family, Ornstein’s sister—who was in the advanced stages of pregnancy—suddenly showed up at Sniadecka’s door. The farmer on whose farm they had been hiding refused to allow her to give birth in his home and she had come to Sniadecka to give birth in her apartment. Sniadecka called in a trustworthy midwife and little Danita was born. The baby remained with Sniadecka and the mother returned to the hiding place on the farm. [Sniadecka notified the parish of the child’s birth and Rev. Adam Łańcucki registered her in the parish books and issued a birth certificate for her.³⁷⁰] The Germans eventually discovered the Podhorcer family’s hiding place and murdered them all. Sniadecka, who feared that the Germans would soon come to search her home, moved Ornstein to her brother’s home and fled with the infant to stay with friends who lived outside the city. Sniadecka cared for the baby as best she could, but after she returned home the Germans demanded that she give up the Jews she was hiding. This happened on the eve of the liberation and only the entry of the Red Army into the city saved her life.
A young woman from Brzeżany, identified as “Anna Herzog,” was born in 1922 into an affluent and culturally assimilated Jewish family. During the German occupation, she was sheltered by a Polish priest who was a friend of the family. She posed as a Catholic Pole and played the church organ. She met and fell in love with a Pole whom she married after converting to Catholicism. She survived the war, as did her parents. They settled in Western Poland where they lived as Catholics. (Shimon Redlich, Together and Apart in Brzezany: Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians, 1918–1945 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002), pp. 126–27.)
Anna Herzog was saved by a Polish priest. The priest, who came from a poor Brzezany [Brzeżany] family, had studied in a theological seminary before the war, and Grandpa Herzog has helped subsidize him. When the situation of the Jews in the ghetto became desperate, Anna travelled under an assumed Polish name to the village where the priest lived and preached. He was ready to help, and Anna played the organ in his church. That’s where she met Lech, with whom she fell in love. Before marrying him, Anna was converted to Catholicism by the priest. “I revealed my identity to Lech and he was moved to tears. Lech came from a rather poor mixed Polish-Ukrainian family. His mother told me to consider myself her daughter.” Anna, her mother, and her father, not knowing the whereabouts of each other, survived the German occupation and were later reunited. Her mother, too became a Catholic, and although the father never converted officially, they lived as a devout Catholic family in postwar Poland.
Rev. Michał Kujata of Liczkowce near Czortków, in Tarnopol voivodship, sheltered Anita Helfgott (later Ekstein).³⁷¹ (Gilbert, The Righteous, p.42.)
Throughout Eastern Galicia, individual churchmen protected Jews. In the small town of Liczkowce, Father Michael Kujata hid eight-year-old Anita Helfgott, a fugitive from the ghetto at Skole, in his parsonage. Later a Catholic couple, Josef [Józef] and Paulina Matusiewicz, gave her sanctuary. She survived the war.
Rev. Stefan Ufryjewicz, the pastor of Budzanów, located between Trembowla and Czortków, in Tarnopol voivodship, came to the assistance of a Jewish family. (Gilbert, The Righteous, p.56.)
Not far from Trembowla, in the small town of Budzanow [Budzanów], a Roman Catholic priest, Father [Stefan] Ufryjewicz, saved a whole Jewish family by baptizing them and giving them baptismal certificates, and forging his parish register in such a way that he created for them a complete set of Christian forebrearers. With the false identities that he had created they were able to move from place to place, away from those who might know their real identities, and thus to survive.
From the fall of 1942 until the entry of the Soviet army in March 1944, Szymon Löffelholz was sheltered in a village about 4 kilometres from Budzanów, by a villager named Milanowski, at the urging of Rev. Ufryjewicz. Milanowski worked in the local mill that belonged to the priest.³⁷²
The Budzanów Memorial Book provides additional information about the rescue activities of Poles from that town, which was located in a largely Ukrainian populated area. Budzanów was home to a convent of the Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, where Sister Stanisława (Teresa Rusinek) sheltered two Jewish teenagers who survived the war.³⁷³ (I. [Itzhak] Siegelman, Sefer Budzanow [Haifa: Irgun Yotzey Dudzanow in Israel, 1968], p.313.)
Only a handful managed to escape. And many of these Jews were caught by Ukrainians and murdered. A few managed to return to Budzanow [Budzanów] and hid in the homes of their Polish friends, or in the Klashtor [klasztor] (monastery).
Rev. Franciszek Bajer, vicar of the parish in Załoźce near Zborów, Tarnopol voivodshop, extended help to Schorr family. (Iżycka Family, The Righteous Database, Yad Vashem, Internet: .)
When war broke out, 12-year-old Sophie Schorr was living with her parents, Otto (a physician) and Mary, in the town of Załoszce [Załoźce]. … In 1941, the Nazis invaded Poland and the Schorrs were forced to move into a small apartment in the “old town.” Their landlady was Maria Szawłowska.