Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy

Lotka [Sternberg] was passing as a Christian in Lvov [Lwów]. The Polish priest who had given religious instruction to the Catholic children in the Polish elementary school before the war, and who had since then sheltered several Jews, had taught Lotka Catholic prayers and liturgy every night for four weeks. He had gotten her “good” Aryan papers—those of somebody who had died—and had made the arrangements for a middleman to take her to live with a Polish couple as their niece in return for money sent with him by Lotka’s parents.

Renata Präminger (later Irena Szczurek) was taken out of the Brody ghetto by her nanny, Maria Hromiak, as a young child. At the request of her father, who continued to visit her, Renata was baptized as Irena Hromiak, with the assistance of two trusted friends. She survived the war as her nanny’s purported daughter.³⁸⁴ According to Yad Vashem’s Database of Righteous Among the Nations (Maria Hromiak, Internet: < http://db.yadvashem.org/righteous/family.html?language=en&itemId=4408662>):

Irena Szczurek was born in Brody in 1938. Her nanny, Maria Hromiak, lived with the Szczurek family for 13 years, dedicating herself to the loving care of Irena. In January 1942 a ghetto was established in Brody, and the Szczureks were imprisoned in it. Maria found a job and took care of her beloved former employers by providing them, and other Jews in the ghetto, with provisions.

In August 1942 the Brody Ghetto was liquidated. Maria managed to rescue Irena from certain transfer to Belsen and sneak her into her own home. She also tried to save Irena’s parents, but eventually they … [Show more]were denounced by an ill-wisher and killed.

Maria Hromiak kept Irena with her throughout the war, despite the vast danger to herself. Even her own relatives threatened her, but she resisted the perpetual fear because of her love for the girl. She gave Irena her own last name and acted for all intents and purposes as her adoptive mother, bribing suspicious policemen, constantly changing her address, and avoiding discovery until the liberation.

After the war Maria remained Irena’s “second mother,” as the girl called her, although life was very difficult. All of the Szczureks’ possessions were gone, and Maria was forced to work as a manual laborer at a cement factory in order to keep herself and her adoptive daughter afloat. She never established a family of her own, dedicating herself to Irena.
Eugenia (Gina) Hochberg of Brody, in Tarnopol voivodship, was able to survive thanks to the help of a number of people, including a Polish railway worker and a Catholic priest, who came to her assistance and nursed her back to health after she jumped from a deportation train headed to the Majdanek concentration camp in May 1943. She managed to return to Brody where she lived in hiding until the liberation. (Bolesław Kulczycki, “Genocide in Brody,” http://www.shtetlinks.jewishgen.org/Brody/boleslaw_kulczycki_memoir.htm)
Crowds of Jews, surrounded by armed guards with dogs, were led out of the ghetto towards the railroad station some two kilometers from the center of town. During this forced march, those who could not keep up with the pace were beaten and bitten by the dogs. Those unable to go on, were shot on the spot. Squeezed into packed freight cars which were directed towards Belzec [Bełżec] and, later on, towards Majdanek near the city of Lublin was the human cargo destined for destruction. In one of them was the family Hochberg. They made a desperate decision to push their daughter Ginia through the narrow bars of the tiny window, imploring her to save herself, crying out: “You have got to survive!” The German guard shot after and hit the escaping girl. She lost consciousness, but fortunately it was a flesh wound. After a while she came to in a pool of blood. Two villagers were in the process of stripping her clothes, thinking she was dead. Realizing she was alive did not prevent them from taking all her clothes. They were going to hand her over to the police when a Polish railroad employee intervened, stating that the area was under the jurisdiction of the railway department and that he would take custody of the girl. He escorted the wounded, chilled girl into a booth, where he dressed her wound, gave her some food and clothing and released her. Ginia made her way to a church in a nearby village, where a compassionate priest helped the unfortunate girl. He gave her shelter until she recovered and provided her with a false birth and baptism certificate.
In May 1943, Eugenia Hochberg (later Gina Lanceter), born in Brody in 1927, jumped from a train carrying her parents to an extermination camp. A German guard shot after and hit the escaping girl. She lost consciousness, but fortunately it was a flesh wound. This was near the village of Zaszków, north of Lwów, in the parish of Kościejów. A Polish railroad employee came across the wounded girl and took her into a booth, where he dressed her wound, gave her some food and clothing and released her. She made her way to a church in a nearby village, where a compassionate priest helped the unfortunate girl. He gave her shelter until she recovered and provided her with a false birth and baptismal certificate. He purchased a ticket for her to return to Brody and escorted her to the nearby train station. She survived in Brody with the help of Christians.³⁸⁵
Anna Heller Stern, a native of Bolechów near Stryj, in Stanisławów voivodship, survived with the assistance of false documents that were supplied to her by an unnamed priest. (Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million [New York: HarperCollins, 2006], p.390.)
She shared, too, her own remarkable story of hiding … she showed the picture of the Polish priest who had saved her life by making false papers for her. … she showed us the false baptismal certificate, the one that had given her the name Anna, which she’d kept ever since. Matt took a picture of the document. ANNA KUCHARUK, it said.
The Roman Catholic church in Mikulińce, in Tarnopol voivodship, was used as a hiding place for a group of Jews who survived in that town with the assistance of Poles.³⁸⁶ (Article by Patt Morrison of the Los Angeles Times (1983), reproduced in Haim Preshel, ed. Mikulince: Sefer yizkor [Israel: Organization of Mikulincean Survivors in Israel and the USA, 1986]; English translation posted at .)
There first furtive handshake, one midnight 40 years ago in a town patrolled by Nazi troops, risked both their lives—the young Polish Jew on the run and the young Roman Catholic with a conscience.

On Tuesday, the Redondo Beach man who once knocked on the right door for help and the Polish man who answered the knock clasped hands again—openly this time—as they were reunited in a ceremony honoring the Pole, Jan Misiewicz, for concealing Leon Kahane and 10 other Jews from Nazi sweeps that sent 6 million others to death camps.

Every night for seven months, as German and Russian troops battled around them, Misiewicz and a friend, Michael Ogurek [Michał Ogórek], carried food and reassuring words to the Jews. Five were hidden in a makeshift room in the cross-tipped spire of a Catholic church where Misiewicz’s father was deacon—and six more, including Kahane, were in a bunker beneath a German soldier’s outhouse.