Former inmate recalls daring escape from Auschwitz

A wonderful story:

By MONIKA SCISLOWSKA, Associated Press Writer Monika Scislowska, Associated Press Writer

NOWY TARG, Poland – With every step toward the gate, Jerzy Bielecki was certain he would be shot.

The day was July 21, 1944. Bielecki was walking in broad daylight down a pathway at Auschwitz, wearing a stolen SS uniform with his Jewish sweetheart Cyla Cybulska by his side.

His knees buckling with fear, he tried to keep a stern bearing on the long stretch of gravel to the sentry post.

The German guard frowned at his forged pass and eyed the two for a period that seemed like an eternity — then uttered the miraculous words: "Ja, danke" — yes, thank you — and let Jerzy and Cyla out of the death camp and into freedom.

It was a common saying among Auschwitz inmates that the only way out was through the crematorium chimneys. These were among the few ever to escape through the side door.

The 23-year-old Bielecki used his relatively privileged position as a German-speaking Catholic Pole to orchestrate the daring rescue of his Jewish girlfriend who was doomed to die.

"It was great love," Bielecki, now 89, recalled in an interview at his home in this small southern town 55 miles (85 kilometers) from Auschwitz.

"We were making plans that we would get married and would live together forever."

Bielecki was 19 when the Germans seized him on the false suspicion he was a resistance fighter, and brought to the camp in April 1940 in the first transport of inmates, all Poles.

He was given number 243 and was sent to work in warehouses, where occasional access to additional food offered some chance of survival.

It was two years before the first mass transports of Jews started arriving in 1942. Most of the Jews were taken straight to the gas chambers of neighboring Birkenau, while a few were designated to be forced laborers amid horrific conditions, allowing them to postpone death.

In September 1943 Bielecki was assigned to a grain storage warehouse. Another inmate was showing him around when suddenly a door opened and a group of girls walked in.

"It seemed to me that one of them, a pretty dark-haired one, winked at me," Bielecki said with a broad smile as he recalled the scene. It was Cyla — who had just been assigned to repair grain sacks.

Their friendship grew into love, as the warehouse offered brief chances for more face-to-face meetings.

In a report she wrote for the Auschwitz memorial in 1983, Cybulska recalled that during the meetings they told each other their life stories and "every meeting was a truly important event for both of us."

Cybulska, her parents, two brothers and a younger sister were rounded up in January 1943 in the Lomza ghetto in northern Poland and taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Her parents and sister were immediately killed in the gas chambers, but she and her brothers were sent to work.

By September, 22-year-old Cybulska was the only one left alive, with inmate number 29558 tattooed on her left forearm.

As their love blossomed, Bielecki began working on the daring plan for escape.

From a fellow Polish inmate working at a uniform warehouse he secretly got a complete SS uniform and a pass. Using an eraser and a pencil, he changed the officer's name in the pass from Rottenfuehrer Helmut Stehler to Steiner just in case the guard knew the real Stehler, and filled it in to say an inmate was being led out of the camp for police interrogation at a nearby station. He secured some food, a razor for himself and a sweater and boots for Cybulska.

He briefed her on his plan: "Tomorrow an SS-man will come to take you for an interrogation. The SS-man will be me."

The next afternoon, Bielecki, dressed in the stolen uniform, came to the laundry barrack where Cybulska had been moved for work duty. Sweating with fear, he demanded the German supervisor release the woman.

Bielecki led her out of the barrack and onto a long path leading to a side gate guarded by the sleepy SS-man who let them go through.

The fear of being gunned down remained with him in his first steps of freedom: "I felt pain in my backbone, where I was expecting to be shot," Bielecki said.

But when he eventually looked back, the guard was in his booth. They walked on to a road, then into fields where they hid in dense bushes until dark, when they started to march.

"Marching across fields and woods was very exhausting, especially for me, not used to such intensive walks," Cybulska said in her report to Auschwitz as quoted in a Polish-language book Bielecki has written, "He Who Saves One Life ..."

"Far from any settlements, we had to cross rivers," she wrote. "When water was high ... Jurek carried me to the other side."

At one point she was too tired to walk and asked him to leave her.

"Jurek did not want to hear that and kept repeating: 'we fled together and will walk on together,'" she reported, referring to Jerzy by his Polish diminutive.

For nine nights they moved under the cover of darkness toward Bielecki's uncle's home in a village not far from Krakow.

His mother, who was living at the house, was overjoyed to see him alive, though wasted-away after four years at Auschwitz. A devout Catholic, however, she was dead-set against him marrying a Jewish girl.

"How will you live? How will you raise your children?" Bielecki recalls her asking.

To keep her away from possible Nazi patrols, Cybulska was hidden on a nearby farm. Bielecki decided to go into hiding in Krakow — a fateful choice they believed would improve their chances of avoiding capture by the Nazis. The couple spent their last night together under a pear tree in an orchard, saying their goodbyes and making plans to meet right after the war.

After the Soviet army rolled through Krakow in January 1945, Bielecki left the city where he had been hiding from Nazi pursuit and walked 25-miles (40-kilometers) along snow-covered roads to meet Cybulska at the farmhouse.

But he was four days too late.

Cybulska, not aware that the area where she had been hiding had been liberated three weeks before Krakow, gave up waiting for him, concluding her "Juracek" either was dead or had abandoned their plans.

She got on a train to Warsaw, planning to find an uncle in the United States. On the train she met a Jewish man, David Zacharowitz, and the two began a relationship and eventually married. They headed to Sweden, then to Cybulska's uncle in New York, who helped them start a jewelry business. Zacharowitz died in 1975.

In Poland, Bielecki eventually started a family of his own and worked as the director of a school for car mechanics. He had no news of Cybulska and had no way of finding her.

In her report Cybulska said that she was haunted in the years after she left Poland by a wish to see her hometown and to find Jurek, if he was alive.

Sheer chance made her wish come true.

While talking to her Polish cleaning woman in 1982, Cybulska related her Auschwitz escape story.

The woman was stunned.

"I know the story, I saw a man on Polish TV saying he had led his Jewish girlfriend out of Auschwitz," the cleaning lady told Cybulska, according to Bielecki.

She tracked down his phone number and one early morning in May 1983 the telephone rang in Bielecki's apartment in Nowy Targ.

"I heard someone laughing — or crying — on the phone and then a female voice said "Juracku, this is me, your little Cyla," Bielecki recalls.

A few weeks later they met at Krakow airport. He brought 39 red roses, one for each year they spent apart. She visited him in Poland many times, and they jointly visited the Auschwitz memorial, the farmer family that hid her and many other places, staying together in hotels.

"The love started to come back," Bielecki said.

"Cyla was telling me: leave your wife, come with me to America," he recalls. "She cried a lot when I told her: Look, I have such fine children, I have a son, how could I do that?"

She returned to New York and wrote to him: "Jurek I will not come again," Bielecki recalled.

They never met again and she did not reply to his letters.

Cybulska died a few years later in New York in 2002.

In 1985, the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem awarded Bielecki the Righteous Among the Nations title for saving Cybulska. The institute's website account of the escape and its aftermath is consistent with Bielecki's account to The Associated Press.

"I was very much in love with Cyla, very much," Bielecki said. "Sometimes I cried after the war, that she was not with me. I dreamed of her at night and woke up crying."

"Fate decided for us, but I would do the same again."

Source (with pics).

Falling canonical dominos: from matrimonial form to defection from the Church

Dr Edward Peters writes:

Apparently the Polish bishops have just published a 22-point how-to pamphlet on committing ecclesiastical defection. Until I see a reliable translation of the guide, I will refrain from commenting on it, but I will venture this much: this document is quite likely (1) an overly detailed attempted to apply (2) a skewered official notification concerning (3) a poorly drafted canon (4) that was designed to blunt a nagging problem in the Code of Canon Law. I suggest the canonical dominos fall out thus:

The first domino is Canon 1108 by which canonical form (i.e., a wedding in the presence of an authorized cleric and two witnesses) is still required for valid Catholic marriage, even though canonical form has long ceased to serve its original purpose.

To see how requiring canonical form for marriages can result in defection from the Church, see this

Repairing Fr. Bozek's sacramental blunders (Dr Edward Peters)

Archbishop Burke, once again, is showing us all how it's supposed to be done.

In a remarkable gesture of pastoral concern for his people, St. Louis Abp. Raymond Burke, who for some three years has been trying to effect the reconciliation of a renegade Polish priest named Fr. Marek Bozek, has alerted the faithful who might be approaching Fr. Bozek for sacramental services, that any attempts by Fr. Bozek to celebrate the sacraments of Confession (1983 CIC 966) or Confirmation (1983 CIC 882-883), or to witness the weddings of Catholics bound by form (1983 CIC 1108), are invalid, and that such Catholics may contact his office directly for assistance in securing these sacraments validly and licitly.

I'll be discussing Fr. Bozek's situation, who as of today is officially careening toward laicization, with Al Kresta on WDEO AM 990 in Detroit / Ann Arbor, or listen live here.

Wish I could have heard this...

Posted at Dr Peters' blog here.

Exorcism Undergoes a Revival

From the WashPo:

...Exorcism -- the church rite of expelling evil spirits from tortured souls -- is making a comeback in Catholic regions of Europe. Last July, more than 300 practitioners gathered in the Polish city of Czestochowa for the fourth International Congress of Exorcists.

About 70 priests serve as trained exorcists in Poland, about double the number of five years ago. An estimated 300 exorcists are active in Italy. Foremost among them: the Rev. Gabriele Amorth, 82, who performs exorcisms daily in Rome and is dean of Europe's corps of demon-battling priests.

"People don't pray anymore, they don't go to church, they don't go to confession. The devil has an easy time of it," Amorth said in an interview. "There's a lot more devil worship, people interested in satanic things and seances, and less in Jesus."

The devil is alive and doing quite well these days.

Archbishop Trusts ‘God’s Grace’ for Priest’s Reconciliation

Archbishop Raymond L. Burke said Feb. 5 that he is "safeguarding the unity of the Church" by insisting that a suspended and excommunicated priest associated with the St. Stanislaus Kostka Corp. meet with him.

Father Marek Bozek was suspended in December 2005 by the bishop of the Diocese of Springfield-Cape Girardeau for abandoning his assignment and his diocese. The St. Stanislaus Kostka Corp. hired him for the position of pastor of their church, which had served people of Polish heritage but is no longer a part of the Roman Catholic Church.

Archbishop Burke said he has been hearing from Catholics who are concerned about the sacraments they are receiving from Father Bozek. Because of the priest’s status, any sacraments of Penance and Confirmation he performed or any marriages he has witnessed are considered invalid.

In addition, Father Bozek participated in the attempted ordination of two women and has been making statements contrary to Church teachings, according to archdiocesan officials. The purpose of Feb. 5 meeting with him was to urge him to return to his home diocese and seek reconciliation.

And everyone is, by now, aware of Marek's Bozek's tendered offer to the Archbishop...

As it stands now, Father Bozek does not represent Catholic teaching and practice, Archbishop Burke said.

"I can’t imagine that lifelong Polish Catholics who are associated with the former St. Stanislaus Kostka Parish agree that their priest, for instance, should take part in the attempted ordination of two women to the priesthood. Or accept that their priest believes that divorce and remarriage without a declaration of nullity should be accepted. Or are pleased that their priest is rebelling against Church authority in general."

Indeed, it is difficult to imagine this - yet over 100 people showed up to support this man...Incredible!

Father Bozek’s failure to seek reconciliation with the Church "would necessitate my taking further canonical action in order to keep him from continuing to bring spiritual harm to his own soul and to the soul of others," the archbishop said. That step would be the process for dismissal from the clerical state.
[...]
He said he trusts in the help of God’s grace that "the situation will be rectified and also there will be a healing."
[...]
The archdiocese is offering assistance to those who have invalidly received the sacraments of Penance or Confirmation or had their marriage invalidly witnessed by Father Bozek.

Catholic Church numbers in Norway swell with arrival of Poles

Oslo (ENI). Norway's government has praised the country's small Roman Catholic Church for its role in supporting more than 100 000 labour migrants from Poland and other eastern European countries. "We have become increasingly aware of the crucial role the Catholic Church is playing in responding to this challenge," Bjarne Haakon Hansen, the government minister for labour and social inclusion told Oslo's Catholic Bishop Bernt Eidsvig earlier in January, the Vaart Land newspaper reported....

Polish Church Reports Secret Police Ties

A special commission of Poland's Roman Catholic Church said Wednesday that documents in secret police files showed "about a dozen" living bishops had ties to the communist-era secret services.

But a top bishop warned that the former secret police documents may not be an accurate guide.

[snip]

After six months of work, the commission said that among Poland's 132 bishops "about a dozen were registered by the security services of communist Poland as 'secret collaborators' or 'operational contacts,'" while one was registered as an "agent" of the intelligence service.

And the report will be sent to Vatican "for further evaluation."

How many people suffered at the hands of the communists because of "collaborators" or snitches may never be known.