From Judaism To Catholicism And Back Again

Friday morning, March 16, we traveled to Kraków to visit the Jewish Community Centre (JCC) of Kraków. It was there that we met Olga, who told us a little about herself and her Jewish ancestry. She also gave us information about the JCC itself, which is a Jewish cultural and educational centre that opened in 2008 as the result of an initiative by His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales. The JCC is the de facto Jewish visitors center for Kraków, Poland and provides social, educational, and community oriented services to the Jewish community of Kraków. After hearing from Olga, we got a chance to meet with a Jewish woman who survived World War II and she was kind enough to share her story with us. Although she herself had not been confined to a concentration camp, her father did perish at Auschwitz. She and her mother were forced to move to a new town after being blackmailed twice and it was there that she was baptized as a Catholic to hide her Jewish roots. After the war ended she eventually converted back to Judaism and went on to further her education, studying law and becoming a professor. Today she is an active member of the JCC in Kraków and was present for Shabbat dinner Friday evening at the JCC, a dinner in which we were also in attendance for.

Throughout this semester I have heard the personal stories of a few survivors of the Shoah but this story was the first in which the survivor converted to Catholicism in order to survive. Prior to meeting the survivor at the JCC, I had only encountered such a situation in Alexander Donat’s The Holocaust Kingdom: the author and his wife had decided to smuggle their son Wlodek out of the ghetto and sent him to the home of Stefan and Maria Magenheim, friends of the family. Before doing so, however, Wlodek’s parents had to prepare him for life on the Aryan side where he could no longer be Jewish: “Lena had, in the interim, been teaching Wlodek the Catholic prayers. ‘Now remember’, she told him, ‘you have never lived in the Ghetto and you must never use the word Ghetto. You’re not a Jew. You’re a Polish Catholic...We were bitterly aware of the tragic spectacle of a mother teaching her only child to disavow his parents, his people, his former life…” (Donat, 114-115).

A few weeks after Wlodek’s arrival at the Magenheim home, they were betrayed by one of their neighbors. With the help of Magdalena Rusinek, a seventeen-year-old member of the Polish Underground who collected, cared for and escorted Jewish children to their places of refuge with Polish families or in convents, Wlodek was brought to an orphanage near Otwock, Poland, where he remained for two years. During that period, Maria would come to the orphanage whenever she could, bringing Wlodek cakes and other delicacies. Although Wlodek was safe by being away from his parents and denouncing his Jewish heritage, during his time away he was brainwashed by the nuns at the orphanage. In his own words, Wlodek explains in The Holocaust Kingdom that “Miss Krysia told me that Jews were very bad. They drank the blood of Catholics on their holidays. They kill a young boy or girl, suck out their blood and put it in jars…she said if Auntie Maria tried to take me back to my Mommy, I should run away to the woods. I prayed that my parents would not come back for me. I believed in Jesus very much.” (Donat, 302). To think that a nun would say these things to a child is unimaginable but it occurred and wasn’t uncommon.

Wlodek 's parents both survived the Shoah and were reunited with their son and although the reunion was rocky at first, with Wlodek’s mind full of anti-Semitic thoughts, he eventually returned to the religion of his family. Although Wlodek and the survivor we heard speak at the JCC had different stories, both accounts had one thing in common, which is the title of this blog: from Judaism to Catholicism and back again. This is what it took to survive the horrors of the Shoah but this approach did not always work. Luckily for Wlodek and the JCC survivor, however, it did and we were lucky enough to hear their stories.

Pictured here is the JCC survivor (green sweater) sitting next to Olga.