Fr. Marceli Godlewski supported the views of the National Democracy and was active in groups related to the Polish national movement. He was not favourably disposed towards Jews, seeing them as economic competitors. However, when the Germans started the Holocaust, he radically changed his attitude towards people of Jewish nationality.
In 1915, the clergyman became the parish priest in the All-Saints parish in Warsaw. In 1940, less than a year after the invasion of Poland, the Germans established a ghetto for Jews in the occupied capital of Poland, where several hundred thousand people were crammed into a small space. There was hunger, disease and death in that place.
The parish priest from the ghetto
The parish area of Fr. Godlewski also included the Jewish ghetto. Seeing the suffering of the Jews, he could not stand doing anything when the Germans persecuted and exterminated them. He decided to help.
The clergyman obtained false documents. As the parish priest, he had access to church records. So, he used false names for hiding Jews. The names corresponded to false documents, and the entry in the birth certificate made the identity credible.
He gave his private house to the Congregation of the Franciscan Sisters and changed it into an orphanage building for Jewish children hiding there. Fr. Godlewski together with another Catholic priest, Antoni Czarnecki, also ran an eatery for Jews from the ghetto who were suffering from hunger. The Germans banned it in 1941, when the death penalty for helping Jews was introduced in occupied Poland. It is worth emphasizing that the area of Poland conquered by the Germans was the only place where such punishment existed. But the clergy, thanks to their passes, could enter and leave the ghetto. They used it to smuggle food and medicine for Jews.
How many people did he save?
Fr. Godlewski died in 1945, after the end of World War II. Historians estimate that up to 3,000 Jews could have benefited from his help. In 2009, the Yad Vashem Institute awarded him the “Righteous Among the Nations” medal. On June 7, 2017, the Church of All Saints, where Fr. Godlewski was the pastor, received the title of the House of Life, awarded by the Raoul Wallenberg’s Foundation.