Father Jan Gielarowski was the parish priest in Michałówka near Radymno (now Podkarpackie Province). During the war, he was actively involved in helping his parishioners.

He was born on June 13, 1888 in Nienadówka near Sokołów Małopolski (Podkarpacie) as the son of Paweł and Katarzyna née Krzanowska. He was ordained a priest in 1913 by the then diocesan bishop of Przemyśl, Józef Sebastian Pelczar (1842-1924). His first parish was Boguchwała, then he stayed as a vicar in various towns in the Podkarpacie region.

In the first half of the 1930s he became the parish priest in Michałówka, where he dealt with organizing parish life, establishing a local branch of Catholic Action – an organization associating lay Catholics, to promote Christian values in the life of Polish society. This movement involved Zofia Kossak Szczucka (1889-1968) – a well-known and popular Warsaw writer, author of “Protest”, that is, a proclamation in which she called on Catholics to help Jews during the German occupation.

After the outbreak of the war, in September 1939, when Michałówka was occupied by the Soviets, Gielarowski supported his parishioners, trying to protect them against deportations to Siberia. The operating conditions were very difficult, because at the beginning of 1940, mass resettlement of people to neighboring towns began. The Soviet occupier started to “clean” the border zone, dismantling almost all the buildings in Michałówka, and the parish church was turned into a stable with NKVD unit stationing at the presbytery.

In June 1941, new German occupiers appeared. This time, Fr. Gielarowski decided on an even more risky undertaking and saved Jews, for which Germans punished with death. He issued Jews false baptism certificates and hid them in the local presbytery. At least one of the Jews survived the war thanks to the priest.

In December 1942, Gielarowski was arrested by the Gestapo on the charge of helping the Jewish population. Initially, he was imprisoned in Jarosław, and then transferred to the prison in Tarnów. From there he was sent to KL Auschwitz, where in March 1943 he was murdered. His official death certificate stated the false cause of death. It was allegedly Versagen des Herzens und Kreislaufes, i.e. heart and circulatory failure. The Germans provided false information in the medical records to blur the traces of their crimes.