The Polish Angels Who Saved Jewish Children in WWII| National Catholic Register
“Wartime Poland was the closest thing to Hell on this earth,” Father Jan Januszewski, a Dachau survivor, told me shortly before he passed away in Key Largo, Florida, in 1987.
When the Germans defeated and occupied Poland during World War II, they subjected the Jews to a distinctly evil genocide, known as the Holocaust.
Simultaneously, the Germans unleashed a policy of exterminatory violence against Christian Poles and other ethnic and religious groups in Poland who, according to the great historian, Norman Davies, “have reason to view their own particular sufferings as meriting the label of a ‘holocaust.’”
Once Jews became the primary targets of the Nazis, Poles of all social strata began offering aid to the Jewish people. Diocesan priests, monks and nuns were also determined to assist as many Jewish children and adults as possible.
What made the Polish rescue efforts of Jews so unique is that, despite the terror visited on them by the Nazis, Poles courageously took actions that jeopardized their own lives. Poland was the only German-occupied country where helping a Jew carried an automatic death penalty.
To save a Jew in occupied Poland was a monumental task not only because of the ubiquitous presence of the Nazis but also because of the huge cultural divide between Jews and Poles.
Most Jews were unassimilated, preferring to distance themselves from the Polish community around them. Approximately 80% of Polish Jews declared Yiddish as their mother tongue. Few of them spoke Polish well, if at all.
Little wonder that most Poles, preoccupied with Nazi terrorism aimed against them, did not know the Jews any more than the Jews knew the Poles. They were strangers who inhabited the same land.
Enemies are an obvious necessity to ethnic, religious and national myths. Poles stereotyped Jews, and Jews did the same to Poles. Both Poles and Jews believed myths about each other to fan the flames of misunderstanding, suspicion and even hatred at a time when they desperately needed each other.
Despite these massive obstacles, it is extraordinary that so many Poles aided and saved such a large number of Jews during the German occupation of Poland.
Zofia Lewin, an assimilated Polish Jewish lady who had been aided by many Polish families, including those with children, summed up the Polish response by saying, “The overwhelming majority of the people with whom I came in contact — and they belonged to all strata of the population, to various social and political circles — expressed, by their attitude towards me, their protest against this stand adopted by the Nazi occupants. … They did not let me feel that my presence was dangerous; they also treated me as one of themselves.”
Among the Poles who helped the Jews were Polish nuns, sometimes referred to as “Polish angels” by the children they saved.
For many reasons, Polish nuns were in the best position to care especially for Jewish children on a prolonged basis. There were three times as many nuns as monks in Poland, and a larger number of monks and priests than nuns died at the hands of the Germans. In 1939, there were 84 female congregations with 2,289 houses in Poland.
To be sure, nuns lost many of their houses when the Germans annexed western Poland to Germany. Organized religious life in that part of Poland ceased to exist. However, in the central portion of Poland, designated the General Government, the German policy aimed at control, not liquidation, of the Catholic Church and its activities.
Polish nuns saw their most important work as caring for children, the most helpless and vulnerable victims of war. They looked after Jewish, Polish, Gypsy and Ukrainian children. Later in the war, they looked after German children.
There were 189 convents that hid Jewish children during the war. Almost one-third of them were in the Warsaw region. Four orders accounted for almost 25% of Polish nuns: the Sisters of Charity (Grey Sisters), the Little Servant Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, the Franciscans of the Family of Mary and the Order of St. Elizabeth. All of them were involved in hiding Jewish children and adults. Probably as many as two-thirds of the religious communities in Poland were involved in hiding Jewish children and adults.
During the early phase of the German occupation of Poland, nuns gathered Jewish children and brought them to their convents. However, in many cases, the “Judenrats” (Jewish Councils) of the ghettos demanded the return of the children.
The situation changed dramatically in 1942 and 1943 when the Germans began the liquidation of the ghettos. Some Jewish parents and guardians brought their children to the nuns. Sometimes Jewish orphans wandered into convents by themselves. Polish men and women, who had hidden Jewish children, left them at convents because of the pursuit of the Gestapo. Polish members of “Żegota” (Council for Aid to Jews), devoted entirely to saving Jews, often escorted Jewish children and their families to convents, especially those in more remote areas of the country. Often, Polish priests found Jewish children and brought them to the nearest convent because rectories were under constant Gestapo surveillance.
There are many heart-wrenching stories of Jewish families, forced to flee from the Germans, who left their children at the door of a convent. One Jewish dentist brought his son to a convent in Turkowiec. He told the mother superior, “I will live as long as I am useful to the Germans, but I will surely not survive. I have brought my son. If you can, I ask you to take him in.”
In Ostrowiec, an elderly Jewish man ran up to a window of a convent and hurled a baby boy through it. He said, “Hide him! He’s yours now!”
One Jewish boy, thrown out of a train headed for Auschwitz, was rescued by a Polish couple and remained with them until they found a permanent home for him with the nuns in Pruszków.
There is a touching story of an older Jewish boy, named Icek, and his younger sister, Lola, who had escaped from a ghetto and found their way to the Samaritan Sisters in the town of Henrykow. Icek knocked on the door and asked, “Will I get something to eat?” After the nuns fed him, he confided that his sister Lola was hiding outside. He, followed by several nuns, yelled to Lola, “Come on over here. There’s bread and sausage as well, and it’s warm in the house. It has white walls and ladies in funny clothes.” Tragically, Lola had already died of hunger and cold. Icek stayed with the nuns and other Jewish children and adults who enjoyed the safety of the convent. Icek survived the war.
One of the most active orders of nuns in rescuing Jewish children was the Franciscan Sisters of the Family of Mary. Mother Superior Matylda Getter, who headed the Warsaw branch of the order, was a legend in her time. Known as “Matusia” (Mommy), she radiated love for everyone. Active in the Polish Underground in caring for orphans and political prisoners, and running soup kitchens for the needy, Mother Getter declared, “I will not send away any Jewish child.” Mother Getter’s congregation saved the lives of at least 500 children and 250 adults. In addition, at least 500 other Jews received help.
Another remarkable nun was Sister Cecylia Maria Roszak, a Dominican, who was in a convent in Vilna, where she sheltered more than a dozen Jewish members of the Jewish youth group, “Hashomer Hatzair.” Her convent became a base for Jewish resistance against the Nazis. Believed to be the oldest nun in the world, she died at 110 years of age in 2018. Before she died, she observed, “Life is wonderful; however, it is too short.” At her funeral, a huge spray of flowers arrived from Israel. It was from Wanda Jerzyniec, who was saved, along with her brother, by Sister Roszak.
The reputation of the Little Servant Sisters of the Immaculate Conception for saving Jewish children was well known. Their convent in Turkowiec, located in the Polish countryside, was ideally suited to shelter Jewish children. Mother Superior Stanislawa Polechajło, a Pole of Tatar background, was strongly committed to saving lives. A fearless, determined lady, she treated Gestapo officials with polite contempt when they appeared at the convent’s door. Her convent saved 33 Jewish children. Another 31 Jewish children were saved at other centers of the order. In the order’s convent at Łaźniew, Sister Witolda Wielgus saved the life of Marian Marzynski, a Jewish boy who considered her to be his second mother, and probably several other Jewish children.
The Ursulines also helped Jewish children. A prominent Jewish physician, Dr. Sofia Szymańska, was sheltered at a convent school in Ożarów when a Jewish girl, Jasia, had been left at the door. “I’m Jasia. I have no one,” she declared. Sister Wanda Garczynska replied, “You are not alone, child. You have me.” Jasia, who looked Semitic, had to be hidden when the Nazis made their periodic visits to the convent. On one occasion, Sister Wanda dressed Jasia and another Jewish girl in white robes and hid them in a wardrobe before a German search. German soldiers, who suspected there were Jewish children in the convent, repeatedly jabbed their bayonets into the closet. Fortunately, the girls emerged unscathed.
Although Polish children in the school and their parents knew Jasia and the other girl were Jewish, no one betrayed them. Dr. Szymańska said, “The children were under the protection of the entire convent and village. Not one traitor existed among them.”
Dr. Szymańska’s comments apply with equal force to scores of convents, monasteries, rectories and the homes of thousands of Poles who sheltered Jews during the German occupation of Poland.
There are no definitive statistics concerning how many Poles aided Jews during the German occupation, let alone how many specifically aided Jewish children, and it is unlikely there ever will be. After all, aiding a Jew had to be a clandestine operation, and in activities of this sort, the fewer the files and records, the better for all concerned. Moreover, saving one Jew, whether a child or an adult, almost always involved many Poles. It was not unusual for one Jewish child to live with 25-35 Polish families during the war because of the evil determination of the Nazis to find and kill Jews, along with their Christian protectors.
If one accepts the usual estimate of 100,000-200,000 Jewish survivors in Poland (excluding those who fled to the Soviet Union and returned after the war), then a reasonable estimate of the number of Poles who aided Jews would be at least 1 million. Yet because tens of thousands more Jews were sheltered by Poles than survived the war, the number of Poles who aided Jews could have been closer to 3 million.
The best source for the number of Jewish children saved by Polish nuns is Stefan Korboński, who headed civil resistance activities in the Polish Underground. He told me in a lengthy telephone interview before his death that his estimate of Jewish children saved by Polish nuns was closer to the thousands than the hundreds.
The role of Polish people in saving Jewish lives during World War II is an extraordinary story of living the teachings of the Gospel regarding the profound act of risking one’s life for another.
As for Polish nuns in this magnificent drama, never have so few saved so many.
