Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy

When the front passed, I went back to the nuns (those at the orphanage, not with the elderly), and in 1945 I went to school. I had never gone to school before …
Sister Romualda Józefa Kuliberda, who was the head of the convent, offers an additional perspective on this rescue. In 1943, the nuns at St. Michael’s parish, who included Sisters Hermina Helena Jaskulska, Wincenta Wiktoria Klęk, and Innocenta Janina Skowrońska, opened an orphanage for homeless children in Międzyrzec Podlaski. As a result of a denunciation, the Gestapo from Lublin arrived at the mayor’s office to investigate. The mayor, Franciszek Majewski, quickly sent a confidant to the convent warning of the Gestapo’s impending inspection of the convent; ultimately, he succeeded in convincing the Gestapo that the denunciation was fabricated. For a time, Irena Likierman was hidden in the church belfry. The mayor also warned Rev. Stanisław Nosek, the pastor and dean, that he was sought by the German authorities for issuing false baptismal certificates to Jews. During the deportation of Jews from Międzyrzec, two Jewish families, originally from Żyrardów and resettled in Międzyrzec, escaped from the train to the Treblinka death camp and made their way to the convent, which was located near a palace occupied by the German authorities. The nuns sheltered the Jews for a short period of time, providing them with food and treating a Jewish child who had injured his leg when he jumped from the train. Afterwards, dressed as peasants, they were taken by a neighbour in a cart to the forest.⁴²⁴
The Sisters of Divine Providence also sheltered Jews, mostly children, in their convents in Przemyśl, Rodatycze near Gródek Jagielloński, Rzeszów, Skole near Stryj, and Sterdyń near Sokołów Podlaski. Three of the girls rescued in their convent in Przemyśl went under the assumed names of Maryla Lewkowicz, Anna Mikołajczyk, and Czesława Wolska. The most actively involved nuns were Mother Laurencja Szwandrok of Przemyśl, Sister Aurelia Prokop of Rzeszów, Sister Małgorzata Filak of Skole, Sister Jolanta Puchałka of Sterdyń, and Sister Kamila Kadłubkiewicz of Radotycze.⁴²⁵
After her escape from the ghetto in Łosice, Stella Zylbersztajn took shelter in several villages in the vicinity of Łosice. In total, 25 Polish families helped her survive the war. The attitude of local priests proved to be beneficial in assuring her survival.⁴²⁶ (Bartoszewski and Lewin, Righteous Among Nations, pp.288–89, 295–96.)
Having been taught by experience, we gave our most valuable belongings to Poles for safekeeping and they were all we had later. O the day that the ghetto was destroyed several women stood on the boundary in front of our window in order to help us out in some way. Out of the window we threw things that we had no hope of carrying off and we did not lose any of them. …

I left my mother and fled to the garden of Mrs Piotrowska. This was only 200 metres (650 ft) from the market square where everyone had been assembled.

At noon Mrs Piotrowska’s sister-in-law brought me milk and bread. But too many children knew o my hiding place so in the evening I went to Świniarków [Świniarów]. Along the way I had to ask where Mr Śmieciuch, our customer, lived. Village patrols showed me the way but guessed I was a refugee abd asked Śmieciuch to send me on further. So, after spending the night and eating a good breakfast I moved on towards Wyczółki. There I knew the head of the hamlet and his family. People were already returning from Church after High Mass. I avoided large groups but joined a peasant who was walking alone. I asked him the way and he asked me about myself, where I was from, and so forth. He quickly guessed the truth and put his whole heart in simple words:

‘You still have time to get to Wyczółki; the Kalickis will take you in later, too. In the meantime come to my place; in the bay of my barn I have a hiding place for pigs, and no one will find you there, you can hide there.’

He was moved to pity at the thought of my pampered childhood and compared me with his daughter. [Her benefactor, a complete stranger, was Wacław Radzikowski of the village of Szańków. At the mass he attended in the church in Łosice, the pastor, Rev. Stanisław Zarębski, had spoken of the terrible fate of the Jews and urged his parishioners to assist them:“All people are brothers and you should help everyone.”] …

Whenever I went my hosts always guessed [that I was Jewish] but we got on well together and they kept me as long as they could. Only when the entire village started frightening them [about the danger and possible repercussions for the entire village] did they pay me for my work and advise me where I should go further. I was looking after children in Kornica where once again my hostess was ‘advised’ to send me away for I would bring misfortune down on the village. Shortly after that I heard at the Sunday sermon: ‘Fear the Lord more than people. When they tell you to turn over your pigs, you know how to conceal them though you could give them up without a sin. But when they tell you to give away Jews, the Germans must not be obeyed for God said “Thou shalt not kill” and we must help them, give them food and shelter’ …, etc. I do not know whether or not the priest already knew something about me or whether he saw me under the organ loft but I do know that talk about me in the village died down. (And I know that he gave a lead by way of example more than by word—a female catechumen of the family of Abraham came to the presbytery daily for lessons in the catechism. [She later learned that Rev. Czesław Chojecki, the vicar, had informed the pastor of Radzików, Rev. Zygmunt Wachulak, that a Jewish woman was hiding in the area, and the pastor appealed to the congregation to extend help to Jews.]

Though I looked like a baited hare, the photographer took my picture and the community [county office] issued me a Kennkarte without any document of previous registration. Someone who wished me well brought me the card so that I would not have to show myself without need. I felt I was saved.

At Christmas the priest went around but he deliberately did not ask me about the catechism. On Christmas Eve, C.G. gave me verses of his sister and Renia X [Regina Hądzyńska]. She was 13 years old. Father [Henryk] Sulej [from the Marian monastery in Bielany, a suburb of Warsaw] saved her and got her a Kennkarte and guardians. Since my hostess was too poor to keep me through the winter I got myself other work. It is with emotion that I recall that the poorest paid me best and showed me the most affection. How delicately Halina warned me not to tell anyone that ‘Mother used to bake chała [plaited white bread]’ or pretended that she did not notice my ignorance about the Catholic faith! They probably all knew who I was but they didn’t let me feel it.

It happened that a woman known to have a long tongue recognized me to be the daughter of ‘that sweater maker’ … I told the priest [the vicar] about it. He became gloomy for a moment, but then he immediately comforted me: ‘I’ll take care of that.’ And the woman did not let the cat out of the bag.

During the bombing in 1944 a family I knew from Siedlce took shelter in the home of my host. They had previously concealed a small Jewess but she took ill and died, so they asked me to come to their home. After the war I gladly took up their offer because thanks to them I was able to resume my interrupted schooling. My former hosts and the priest [the pastor] continued to help me materially and gave me whatever I needed when I asked for it.

After so much proof of people’s goodness I come back to what I started from. Was that relative correct when she said that ‘If they could, the Poles would murder us all?’ I know that there were such persons, although they were exceptions for me. But there were more true human beings …

I once heard of a charge made by Mr. T., an engineer, that ‘Catholics concealed us in order to convert us to Catholicism.’ Though I passed through many homes which I could not even list here, I never ran across this. I was taught my prayers and how to behave in church so that I might not give myself away; the rest was left to God and His mercy.

In Konstantynów, east of Łosice, Rev. Aleksander Kornilak, the pastor and dean, had a good relationship with the Jews and helped the Jews in the ghetto. (The Polish police would often look the other way, thus helping the Jews to leave the ghetto and smuggle goods into the ghetto.)⁴²⁷
After escaping from the Warsaw ghetto, Lily Fenster (née Lubaskurka) took refuge in Łuków north of Lublin, where she passed as a Pole with the help of Poles. She happened to witness the execution of a priest who assisted Jews. (Testimony of Lily Fenster, November 8 and 10, 1994, Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive, University of Michigan at Dearborn, Internet: .)
If they caught her, they would kill her and burn her like, that’s what they did to a lot of Gentiles. I’ve seen they killed a priest … He saved a couple of Jews … in the parish there. They took him out. I was going with … [to] put flowers on the grave [of her mother] … in the cemetery … So we hid under the stones … The whole city was crying that they killed [the priest] … Shot on the cemetery because he saved some Jews.
Frieda Cukierman (later Halina Bartosiak) was born in Warsaw in 1921. She left the Warsaw ghetto shortly before the uprising in April 1943. She made her way to Łuków, but soon had to leave that town during the liquidation of the ghetto. She was sheltered by a priest, who “helped her a lot,” in a nearby village. She stayed in the rectory for several weeks where she rested and was cared for by the priest’s housekeeper, who gave her a peasant skirt. It appears that the priest provided her with a false birth and baptismal certificate in the name of Halina Chruścicka, which she used to pass a Pole. Frieda Cukierman survived the war with the help of a number of Poles.⁴²⁸
Lea Starowiejska, a young girl from Warsaw with Semitic features, somehow managed to make her way to Żeliszew Podkościelny, a village lying between Mińsk Mazowiecki and Siedlce. She was taken in by Rev. Julian Borkowski, the local pastor, who taught her Catholic prayers so that she could play the part of a Polish orphan. The appeal for a Polish family to take her in was answered by the Górzyńskis, who cared for her like a daughter. They lived in the hamlet of Łęki. Everyone there was aware that the child was Jewish. No one betrayed them.⁴²⁹ (Gutman, The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust: Supplementary Volumes (2000–2005), volume II, p. 557.)
On a summer day in 1944, in the village of Leki [Łęki] near Siedlce (Lublin District), Aleksander and Genowefa Gorzyński [Górzyński] were attending a memorial prayer service in the village church. At the end of the service, they learned that there was a Jewish orphan girl in the village in need of a home. Her situation touched their hearts. Aleksander was particularly moved since he himself had been orphaned at the age of four. The Górzyńskis, the parents of one child, decided to take in the Jewish orphan. The Górzyńskis renamed the little orphan girl “Halinka.” She had dark hair and Jewish features, but so did Aleksander and his son, which made it easier for her to blend in to the family. Despite the risk, they decided to leave her with them. Her real name was Lea Strowieska [Starowiejska] and she was from Warsaw. After her parents died, she had wandered through the villages, until she finally ended up in the village of Leki, where she came to the home of the priest. It was the priest who was the one to hand her over to the Górzyńskis. Aleksander and Genowefa treated her warmly and at once she began to call them “Mama” and “Papa.” She played with their little son and helped look after him, and they grew to love her. She remembers how lovingly they cared for her. After the war, her aunt came and took her; they also found her younger sister. She immigrated with the two of them to Israel.
Rev. Szczepan Zasadziński, a priest of the Old Catholic Mariavite Church and Home Army chaplain, prepared a hideout under the church in the nearby village of Żeliszew Duży, which was used by members of the Polish underground and fugitive Jews. Rev. Zasadziński also arranged for a shelter for Karolina Mantel, the aged mother of a Jewish convert to Catholicism. She was housed in the rectory in the village of Wiśniew near Mińsk Mazowiecki, where she was known by the name of Maria. A Jewish boy (born in 1930) who came to the Mariavites’ orphanage before the war, and whose his Semitic appearance betrayed his origin, lived openly in Wiśniew throughout the entire German occupation without being betrayed by the villagers. The parish in Wiśniew, which was under the care of Bishop Wawrzyniec Rostworowski (Father Maria Franciszek), extended help to many Jewish fugitives who came there begging for food.⁴³⁰ (Gutman and Bender, The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations, volume 4: Poland, Part 1, p.489.)
Dr. Maria Mantel was the wife of a Polish officer of Jewish ancestry who was murdered at Katyn in the [1940 Soviet] massacre of Polish prisoners of war. Mantel, who lived in Warsaw and ran a private medical clinic in her home, invited her mother-in-law, Karola Mantel, 70, who until then had been hiding in various places in and around the city, to come live with her. Despite the danger to her life, Dr. Mantel took care of her mother-in-law, nursed her, and provided for all her needs. Because of the many patients that visited her clinic in the house, Dr. Mantel feared that the elderly woman’s identity would be revealed. After a few months, Dr. Mantel moved her mother-in-law to an institution run by priests in the city of Minsk-Mazowiecki [Mińsk Mazowiecki], where she remained until the Red Army liberated the area in August 1944.
Members of the numerically small Mariavite clergy were instrumental in rescuing a number of Jews in other places as well. In his memoir, Simcha Guterman describes how he, his wife, Ewa, and young son, Yaakov (Jakub), were sheltered in Warsaw by Mariavite nuns as well as other members of that city’s Mariavite congregation.⁴³¹
Kitty Felix (now Hart-Moxon) was 12 years old when the war broke out. She fled from her hometown of Bielsko near the German border with her parents and younger brother, and took refuge in Lublin where they were confined in the ghetto. While in Lublin her mother made the acquaintance of a priest, identified as Rev. Krasowski,⁴³² possibly Rev. Aleksander Krassowski, pastor of St. Nicholas’ parish, who later provided them with false identity documents identifying them as Catholic Poles and devised a rescue plan. Kitty and her mother joined a group of Poles being sent to Germany for forced labour. The priest found a hiding place near Tarnów for Kitty’s father, Karl Felix, but he did nor survive.⁴³³ (Account of Kitty Hart-Moxon in Wendy Whitworth, ed., Survival: Holocaust Survivors Tell Their Story [Lound Hall, Bothamsall, Retford, Nottinghamshire: Quill Press in association with The Aegis Institute, 2003], pp.204–205; Internet: .)

My mother, who was a qualified English teacher, made contact with a Catholic priest whose vicarage was opposite the Gestapo headquarters. She gave him English lessons in return for food. Crawling through the city sewers, she too risked her life, but without our endeavours we would have died of starvation [in the Lublin ghetto]. …

We hid in the forest some three weeks, living mostly on berries. Eventually [in September 1942] we made our way back into Lublin—not to the ghetto but to the vicarage of the Catholic priest, who had obtained non-Jewish documents for us that were to help save our lives. I now had a new identity. My name was Leokadia Dobrzynska [Dobrzyńska], born in Lublin.

The priest had worked out a survival plan, but we would have to part, as together we were unlikely to survive. My father was to go to Tarnow [Tarnów] to be employed in a sawmill. My mother (now my aunt with a different name) and I would go into a Lublin collection centre where the SS were holding non-Jewish Poles they had grabbed off the streets to dispatch them to work in German factories. We got to the centre and soon found ourselves in a train, on our way with a group of Poles into the German Reich.