March 11, 2024

Sainthood cause advances for midwife who delivered babies at Auschwitz

WORLD
By Filip Mazurczak, OSV News

 

KRAKÓW, Poland (OSV News) — Stanislawa Leszczynska, a Polish midwife imprisoned at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Nazi Germany-occupied Poland, delivered 3,000 babies of different nationalities and treated them and their mothers with heroic humanity.

As Poland commemorated the 50th anniversary of her death March 11, the diocesan phase of her sainthood cause came to a close.

“The laity, ordinary and not ordinary, can be the best personal role models for all of us,” Cardinal Grzegorz Rys of Lódz told Polish weekly Gosc Niedzielny (Sunday Visitor) prior to celebrating Mass to finalize the first local stage in the cause of the fearless wartime midwife.

Stanislawa was born in 1896 to Jan and Henryka Zambrzycki in Lódz (pronounced ‘Woodge’) in the Russian partition of Poland. The family was working class in a city known as the “Polish Manchester,” because of the textile industry that flourished there, like its English namesake.

In 1916 Stanislawa married Bronislaw Leszczynski, who was a printer. Their first son, named Bronislaw after his father, was born prematurely in 1917. His miraculous survival made the young mother wonder whether she might be able to serve women and babies in similar circumstances.

She already had two children when she began midwifery school. “This academic endeavor required her to leave her children behind for two years while she attended school in Warsaw — a rather shocking choice in Poland in 1920. After graduating with honors, Stanislawa knelt in a church and consecrated her work as a midwife to the Blessed Mother, vowing that if ever she lost a baby she would give up midwifery,” Church Life Journal wrote in 2023.

On Sept. 1, 1939, the bloodiest war in human history began as Germany invaded Poland from the West; the Soviet Union would follow suit from the East 16 days later. Lódz, renamed Litzmannstadt by the occupying Germans, was among the regions of western Poland that were directly annexed to the Third Reich, or Realm; its Polish and Jewish populations were expelled from their homes to make way for German colonizers.

In Litzmannstadt, the Jews were confined to a ghetto and later destined for annihilation in the crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Non-Jewish Poles, meanwhile, were to become slaves for the Aryan “master race.” In addition to deportations, members of the Polish intelligentsia and resistance were shot in mass executions in forests outside Lódz.

The war was a major blow to Leszczynska’s family. The Leszczynskis were expelled from their home, which became part of the ghetto.

After helping Jews escape from the ghetto and giving them food, Leszczynska and her daughter, Sylwia, were arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Her sons Henryk and Stanislaw, meanwhile, were deported to the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in Austria for their resistance activity. Leszczynska’s husband, Bronislaw, managed to flee to Warsaw, where he would be killed during the Warsaw uprising in 1944. Their eldest son also managed to escape the arrest and survived the war.

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1.1 million people were murdered in the genocidal complex of Auschwitz-Birkenau during the fewer than five years of its existence: 960,000 Jews, 74,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Roma, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war and 10,000-15,000 prisoners of other nationalities.

Killings took place through mass shootings and gassings. Furthermore, many inmates who were not immediately murdered died from overwork, starvation or diseases such as cholera and typhus that flourished amid the camp’s appalling sanitary conditions.

In this inferno, Leszczynska succeeded in not only maintaining her decency but brought hope to many inmates. As an experienced midwife, Leszczynska persuaded camp authorities in letting her deliver babies in Auschwitz-Birkenau’s infirmary. According to her own count, Leszczynska delivered 3,000 babies.

“Although some have been skeptical about this number, it was based on her calculations,” Maria Stachurska, Leszczynska’s grand-niece and a filmmaker who has directed a documentary and is now co-writing the script for a drama film about her relative, told OSV News.

“Every day, she had to give a report on the number of births she delivered to her superiors, so it was easy to extrapolate the total,” Stachurska said.

Among all the babies Leszczynska delivered, not one child died during birth and not a single mother died of a postpartum infection. Her German superiors were shocked.

“One day the Lagerarzt (camp doctor) told me to present a report on the postpartum infections and mortality rate for the mothers and newborns,” Leszczynska wrote in her 1957 account. “I told him that I had not had a single death of a mother or newborn. He looked at me in disbelief and said that even the best German university hospitals could not boast of such a success rate. In his eyes I could see anger and hatred.”

Leszczynska comforted the mothers and newborns, singing and praying with them. Although they were of a different faith, Jewish mothers did not mind praying with Leszczynska.

Until 1943, all children born in Auschwitz-Birkenau were immediately killed by drowning in a barrel. From 1943, only Jewish children were murdered; meanwhile, other newborns were subjected to medical experiments or, if they had Nordic features, like blond hair and blue eyes, they would be stolen from their mothers and sent to German families. While she was instructed to kill Jewish babies, Leszczynska refused. Remarkably, she was never disciplined for not following this order.

“No, never, children cannot be killed,” she reportedly told the notorious Josef Mengele, the camp’s cruel medic, who was her immediate superior.

Tragically, just 30 of the 3,000 children brought into the world by Leszczynska survived to the end of the war. In addition to being drowned or killed by pseudo-medical experiments, other children simply starved to death; due to the starvation-level rations of Auschwitz-Birkenau, many mothers were incapable of producing milk for their infants.

“Everyone has heard of Josef Mengele, but few know of Stanislawa Leszczynska. Even in Poland she’s not as well-known as she should be,” Stachurska told OSV News. “We should stop looking at the war through a crooked mirror and remember not just the war criminals but above all the heroes, the champions of humanity.”

Stachurska was 16 when her aunt died in 1974. She remembers her as a very pious woman filled with Christian charity.

“I saw her pray the rosary every day. She demanded much of others and much of herself and had a disciplined prayer life,” she said. “Today, there is a lot of hate and gossip in the public sphere. When we disagree with someone, we tend to accuse them of the worst things. My great-aunt was nothing like that. After the war, she refused to talk about her time in Auschwitz-Birkenau to avoid spreading hatred towards the German people.”

In the early 1990s, the Catholic Church formally launched Leszczynska’s sainthood cause, giving her the title “servant of God.”

During a showing of her documentary in Barcelona, Spain, in 2023, Stachurska learned from the Israeli consul present at the event that Israeli authorities have initiated a petition to give Leszczynska the medal of Righteous Among the Nations, an honorific title for non-Jewish individuals granted by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, for risking their lives to aid Jews during the Holocaust.

“She loved her professional work very much and delighted in every newborn baby. She told us about the babies with a smile,” noted her daughter, Sylwia.

All her own children survived the horrors of World War II. A few years before her passing, Leszczynska reunited with mothers and babies she helped in the camp. One of her patients described her as an “angel of kindness.”

Filip Mazurczak writes for OSV News from Kraków, Poland.