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Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy. The Testimony of Survivors and Rescuers. Volume 1. Volume 2
Tyndorf, Ryszard; Zieliński, Zygmunt (Wydawnictwo KUL, 2023)
This is a pioneering study of the rescue activities on behalf of Jews carried out by the Catholic Church and its clergy in German-occupied Poland during the Second World War. The study relies primarily on the testimonies of Jewish survivors and Polish rescuers, supplemented by Church records. The current state of research, which is not exhaustive, has identified 66 religious orders of women at some 450 institutions (mostly convents), 25 religious orders of men at some 85 institutions, and more than 700 diocesan priests in at least 580 localities throughout the territory of interwar Poland, as having provided various forms of assistance to Jews. The number of Jews who benefitted from those efforts is not known, but probably runs into the thousands. This is the first English-language monograph that encompasses the participation of all branches of the Catholic clergy and canvasses the extensive Polish-language scholarship on this topic. As such, it constitutes an important addition to the scholarship and calls for a reassessment of the historical record of the Polish Catholic Church in rescue, at a time when its own clergy was subjected to persecution not experienced by any other clergy in occupied Europe and the mandated punishment for helping Jews in occupied Poland was death.