During the German occupation, Reverend Adam Sztark and Sister Ewa (Bogumiła Noiszewska) and Sister Marta (Kazimiera Wołowska) helped Jews in Słonim in Polesie (now in the territory of Belarus). The priest gave shelter to Jews in his parish and found hiding places for them in private houses, and the nuns cooperating with him hid Jewish children in the convent of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. On 18 December 1942, the priest and the sisters were arrested by the Germans for helping Jews, and then shot on the Pietralewicka Mountain near Słonim.
“Before the execution, the victims were ordered to strip naked. Father [Adam] Sztark obeyed the order, while the sisters [Ewa and Marta] lingered, embarrassed. Then the priest [...] said: ‘Lord Jesus was also exposed’ [...]”, reported the witness, Zofia Poczebyt.
Reverend Adam Sztark, Jesuit
He was the oldest of five children of Teresa Gałecka and Władysław, a small merchant and craftsman. In his youth, he lived in Kalisz, where 1/3 of its inhabitants were Jews. Due to a hand injury, he had to give up his plans to study at an officers' school. On 6 September 1924, he entered the Jesuit Order in Stara Wieś.
From 1939, Adam Szark administered the Marian shrine in Żyrowice in Polesie (now in Belarus). He was a chaplain in the convent of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Słonim, founded in 1907. About 28,000 people lived in the city – mostly Jews, as well as Poles and Belarusians.
In August 1939, sister Marta became the superior of the Congregation. The function of the doctor on duty in the hospital operating at the monastery was performed by sister Ewa.
Sister Marta of Jesus (Kazimiera Wołowska) and Sister Ewa of Providence (Bogumiła Noiszewska)
Kazimiera Wołowska was born in Lublin on 12 October 1879, in a family of gentry and intelligentsia. Her father Józef worked in court and was a social activist. Mother died when Kazimiera was thirteen years old. The girl received a private education. Religion was taught by a well-known theologian – rector of the theological seminary, Fr. Antoni Noiszewski.
The Wołowscy House, due to the cooperation with the local church, gained the name of the “Lublin Vatican”. Kazimiera entered the Order of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception in 1900 and took the name of sister Maria Marta of Jesus.
Bogumiła Noiszewska was born on 11 or 24 June, 1885 in Osaniszki (Vilnius Governorate) as the eldest of eleven children of Maria Andruszkiewicz and Kazimierz Noiszewski, an ophthalmologist. Her maternal and paternal grandparents were exiled deep into Russia for participating in the January Uprising. Bogumiła spent her childhood and the first years of her youth near Daugavpils (today Latvia), and then in Tula (Russia). She graduated from medical studies in St. Petersburg. During World War I, she treated in field clinics and hospitals. In 1919, she entered the Congregation of the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception and took the name of Sister Maria Ewa of Providence. She taught in gymnasiums in Jazłowiec and Słonim, and worked as a school and convent doctor.
Soviet (1939-1941) and German (1941-1944) occupations
After the outbreak of World War II, Słonim found itself in the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union. The sisters were forced to leave the convent, lived with befriended families, and the building was turned into a children's hospital. The wearing of habits was forbidden. A few sisters stayed in the hospital, working as laundresses or wardens.
On 24 June 1941, the town was taken over by the Germans. They began brutal persecution of Jews. They imprisoned them in the ghetto, demanding huge contributions. They assigned the men to forced labor, and in July 1941 they shot about 1,200 Jews in the suburbs of Słonim, in a wilderness near the village of Pietralewicze. In November, they murdered another 8,000 Jewish men, women and children. At the end of June 1942, those who remained in the ghetto attempted armed resistance. The Germans set fire to the closed district and murdered those in hiding in a bloody raid that lasted two weeks.
Just before the deportation from the ghetto began, several hundred young people escaped to the surrounding forests, where they formed partisan units. The last group of Jews left in Słonim by the Germans, who were forced to bury the murdered and clear the area of the former ghetto, perished in September 1942.
Activities of priest Adam and sisters Ewa and Marta during the occupation
With the outbreak of the war, sister Marta opened the monastery in Słonim for refugees; she organized secret education, help for the hungry, especially for the families of imprisoned and murdered people. She worked in the city gardens and fields digging potatoes.
In April 1940, the Soviet authorities removed Sister Ewa from the hospital as suspected of illegal activities. Fearing deportation to Siberia or Kazakhstan, the sister left Słonim. She returned in 1941, after the city was captured by the Germans. She treated patients privately, and in September she became the new director of the Słonim polyclinic. In agreement with Sr. Marta, she hid Jewish children, sometimes entire families, in the convent. She provided medicines and wrote prescriptions for Jews. With her knowledge, one of the doctors, Dr. Orlińska, when her husband joined the partisans, smuggled medicines for them from the polyclinic.
The sisters collaborated with Father Adam Sztark, who was hiding Jews in his parish and in private homes. Together with the parishioners, he gave the golden cross, making up the tax appointed by the Germans to the Jews.
The sisters were rescued despite the German priest's warnings that the monastery was under surveillance and denunciations were being made. Sister Marta, followed, interrogated by the Gestapo, did not stop the aid activities. The Jews were hiding in the attic, in the orangery and in the cowshed.
Help given to Jews in the presbytery and in the convent of the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception
Jakub and Helena Glikson found a job in the Słonim polyclinic after escaping from the Germans in Warsaw. He was a bacteriologist, she a pharmacologist, they were educated at the University of Warsaw. Jakub was brought to the east by his brother Józef, an actor of the Yiddish theatre. Józef and his wife Cypora, also an actress, got a job in the Yiddish theatre in Vilnius.
In June 1941, Helena Glikson was seven months pregnant. Józef and Cypora fled from the Germans to Uzbekistan. In mid-August, Helena gave birth to their son – Jerzy. The birth was delivered in the polyclinic by Dr. Henryk Kagan. The parents did not circumcise the boy.
The Gliksons joined the partisans. They probably died in 1942 in a German raid. Their son, through the polyclinic, was taken to an orphanage in the monastery, where he spent a year. Then, Father Sztark placed him in a family running a forest nursery on the outskirts of Słonim. According to the records of the Immaculate Sisterhood, he visited the Mikuczyn family in the middle winter, took the child out from under his coat and handed him to Mrs. Mikuczyn, saying:
“I took care of his soul, take care of his body”.
Dr Henryk Kagan, who delivered Helena Glikson, also entrusted his son to the care of the sisters, before joining the partisans himself. There was also another family in the monastery called Kagan – two dentists with a nine-year-old daughter, for whom Father Sztark prepared false baptism certificates.
Arrest and death. The course of the execution on Mount Pietralewicka near Słonim
On 18 December 1942, the Gestapo arrested Father Sztark in his parish in Albertine. They took him to Słonim. About eleven o'clock in the evening the prisoner was taken to the convent, where German officers demanded to see Sr. Marta. One of the nuns held back the officer, pretending that she did not understand German. However, he entered Sister Marta's cell and forced her to get dressed. Sister Ewa has just returned from the polyclinic. She announced to the Germans that she would like to accompany Sr. Marta. They checked her identity and found that the arrest warrant was against her as well. The sister's activity was revealed when the Germans found a prescription signed by her on a captured Jew.
Both sisters and Father Sztark were taken to the Gestapo station. Around two in the morning, the German gendarmes carried out a check and demanded that any valuables be overturned. According to the sisters' notes, Sr. Marta asked to be allowed to keep her cross – the gendarme snatched it from her hand, threw it on the ground and kicked the sister.
Around five in the morning, the arrested were loaded onto trucks and taken to Mount Pietralewicka, 2 km from Słonim. Zofia Poczebyt, an inhabitant of Słonim, recounts years later:
“Before the execution, the victims were ordered to strip naked. Father Sztark obeyed the order, while the sisters lingered, embarrassed. Then the priest said: »Lord Jesus was also exposed« the sisters obediently undressed. The local people had the above information from eyewitnesses who were local policemen assisting in the execution”.
There were 84 other people with them. Among them, the dentists Kagan with her daughter.
A firing squad fired at the naked victims and their bodies fell into a previously prepared pit. One of the policemen, Jan Poważyński, who was present at the execution itself, said that the sisters were offered a chance to escape. They thought they should stay with the condemned. The witnesses to the execution, who brought the sisters' clothes to the convent, recounted the course of the event.
Jerzy (Jerry) Glikson. The life of a Jewish child in hiding and his fate after the war
“My memory goes back to the time when, when I was about two years old, I lived on the Mikuczyn farm and hid in the attic when the Germans came”, Jerry Glickson wrote.
Słonim was liberated from German occupation in July 1944. Józef Glikson came to Słonim in April or May 1945. In the polyclinic, he found a woman who worked in the laboratory with his brother Jakub. Before joining the partisans, Jakub and Helena had left her a microscope, a wedding ring and a contact list, if they had not returned. She told about the fate of their son, she knew that he had been adopted by the Mikuczyn family.
“I had no idea that I was a Jew, […] I had no idea what a Jew was and I used to go to church with Mr. and Mrs. Mikuczyn on various occasions and prayed. […] One day a stranger appeared in the farmyard [...]. He gave me chocolates and said he was my father. It was my uncle Józef Glikson, brother of my real father Jakub, who survived the war in Tashkent with his wife Cypora. I was scared and ran away. [...] But with time my mother and I had to go to the city, where the care of me was transferred to Józef and Cypora Glikson. [...] I was shocked to be taken away from my mother and cried incessantly”.
The new Glikson family, via Moscow, Tashkent, Warsaw and Stockholm, reached the United States in 1948, where they settled in New York. The boy born in the polyclinic is today a professor of radiology, biochemistry and biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania. He runs the Molecular Imaging Laboratory, which is involved in research into cancer and heart disease.
“I didn't know about my real parents until the age of eighteen, when I had to be formally adopted to obtain US citizenship. I did not know about the role of Father Sztark or the Sisters Ewa and Marta in saving me until 2005, when I was sixty-four years old and decided to return to Słonim to find my roots. […] The mother [adoptive mother, Cypora Glikson - ed.] Wrote diaries in 1992, shortly before the death of Józef's father [Glikson, Jakub's brother - ed.]. […] When father died, mother became depressed and attempted suicide. She probably didn't want the diaries to be read before her death”.
Honoring the priest with the title of Righteous Among the Nations, beatification of the sisters
During his visit to Poland in 2005, Jerry Glikson gave the Immaculate Sisterhood in Szymanów a commemorative plaque dedicated to those who died in 1942. On the board, in the centre of the six-pointed star, there is an inscription:
“They sacrificed their lives to save me and others. The inscription is golden because it symbolizes the deed of Father Sztark and his parishioners who gave their golden crosses to help Jews collect the ransom demanded by the Germans. The entire Jewish community of Słonim was murdered. On behalf of the murdered, I pay tribute to Marta, Ewa and Father Adam”.
On 15 January 2001, the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem posthumously honoured Fr. Adam Sztarek with the title of Righteous Among the Nations. In 2003, his beatification process began.
Sisters Ewa (Bogumiła Noiszewska) and Marta (Kazimiera Wołowska) were beatified by Pope John Paul II in a group of 108 martyrs of World War II, on 13 June 1999. A few years later, Jerry Glikson made efforts to award them the title of Righteous Among the Nations.
