A Polish midwife who delivered thousands of babies to fellow inmates while imprisoned in the Nazi-German camp of Auschwitz has moved a step closer to being beatified – a stage in the process of canonisation – by the Catholic church.
Following the outbreak of the Second World War, Stanisława Leszczyńska and her family were involved in the Polish underground resistance to German occupation, including helping Jews imprisoned in the Łódź Ghetto.
She was captured by the Gestapo in 1943 and sent to Auschwitz. Though the camp is now best remembered for its role in the murder of Jews, it was initially created to house ethnic Polish prisoners, who over the course of the war were its second-largest group of victims behind Jews.
Leszczyńska, who had qualified as a midwife in the 1920s, was assigned to the camp’s medical wing, where the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele performed experiments on prisoners.
Stanisława Leszczyńska, brought to German KL Auschwitz around the same time as Josef Mengele, became his exact opposite.
While the German doctor, Angel of Death, was killing babies, the Polish midwife, Angel of Life, was delivering and saving babies.
She died #OTD in 1974. pic.twitter.com/lnMnIds0ua
— Institute of National Remembrance (@ipngovpl_eng) March 11, 2024
Leszczyńska did what she could to subvert the brutal conditions at the facility, where she not only delivered an estimated 3,000 babies but sought to ensure they and their mothers were properly cared for.
According to Poland’s Institute for National Remembrance (IPN), while Leszczyńska managed to ensure that no babies died during childbirth, only thirty survived in the care of their mothers until the liberation of the camp in 1945. Most others died, while those considered “Aryan” were abducted by the Germans.
Leszczyńska also survived until the camp’s liberation, and in 1965 published an account of her experiences in Auschwitz. She died in 1974 at the age of 78. Some of the children she had managed to save in Auschwitz attended her funeral.
In the 1990s, Poland’s Catholic church launched a process of beatification, by which Leszczyńska’s entrance to heaven and capacity to intercede on behalf of those who pray in her name would be officially recognised. Beatification is also a step on the possible path to sainthood.
Over 30,000 pilgrims and Poland’s most senior officials attended a ceremony to mark the beatification – a step on the path to possible sainthood – of a Polish family murdered by the Nazi German occupiers for hiding Jews in their home during the Holocaust https://t.co/QhsQBG51R3
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) September 10, 2023
On Monday 11 March, the 50th anniversary of Leszczyńska’s death, the archdiocese of Łódź, the city where she was born and died, completed the process of gathering evidence for the beatification process.
It involved interviewing 56 witnesses, including 18 who knew Leszczyńska personally and among whom were “eyewitnesses to her heroic work in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp”, Dominik Sujecki, who oversaw the process, told the Polish Press Agency (PAP).
They also gathered around 1,200 pages of archival material, including letters Leszczyńska had sent from the camp. The findings of the archdiocese will now be forwarded to the Vatican, which will decide whether to name her a venerable servant of God.
After that, the next step is to pray for a miracle through Leszczyńska’s intercession, which would confirm her holiness, Sujecki told PAP.
The path to sainthood of Jerzy Popiełuszko – a priest murdered by the communist secret police – has reportedly been delayed after a miracle attributed to him could not be proven https://t.co/4h2n2SSUuW
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) January 24, 2023
Yesterday also saw a ceremony in Łódź to mark the anniversary of Leszczyńska’s death. “Her attitude is a loud cry in defence of the life of every human being, especially the unborn,” said the city’s senior archbishop, Władysław Ziółek.
“Her uncompromising attitude becomes today, in times of the ubiquitous ideology of the culture of death, a simple and clear sign that human life is sacred, a great gift of God,” he added, quoted by the Catholic Information Agency (KAI).
Last year, the Ulmas – a Polish family murdered by the German occupiers during the war for hiding Jews in their home – were beatified by the Catholic church. In 2021, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński – who led the Polish church under communism – received the same honour.
The son of Witold Pilecki – a Polish officer who deliberately had himself imprisoned at Auschwitz to organise resistance there – is seeking 26 million zloty (€5.5m) compensation for his father’s postwar death at the hands of the communist authorities https://t.co/ftCKeanLrt
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) November 9, 2022
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Main image credit: iwona_kellie/Flickr (under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.
