May marked the 130th anniversary of the birth of Stanisława Leszczyńska, a Servant of God and midwife at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The unveiling of a monument in her honour was preceded by a solemn Mass at the Visitationist Church in Warsaw.
Cardinal Grzegorz Ryś, the Archbishop of Kraków, presided over the liturgy, joined by the Archbishop of Warsaw, Adrian Galbas. Among the large congregation was Ewa Machaj-Antosiewicz, one of the children delivered by Stanisława in the concentration camp.
Cardinal Ryś noted that “after the war, she did not want to speak about the camp because she did not want to incite hatred toward the Germans. And when she did speak of those she encountered there, she saw them more as victims of a system than as executioners.” The cardinal emphasized that Leszczyńska was fully aware that she was saving lives that could be taken—murdered or gassed—the very next day.
ARREST
When the Germans invaded Poland, the Leszczyński family began covert work to help Jewish families in their neighbourhood. Moreover, the men were members of the National Armed Forces (NSZ). Following a denunciation, the entire family was arrested in February 1943. Stanisława and her daughter were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau after enduring brutal interrogations and torture. She was remarkably fortunate to have secured—and, more importantly, smuggled into the camp—credentials as a midwife.
“Her apartment served as a transit point for smuggling goods from the Łódź Ghetto to the ‘Aryan side.’ One of her accounts also mentions a girl from the ghetto who found temporary refuge in the Leszczyński home,” noted historian Fr. Prof. Gliński.
According to historian Dr. Robert Derewenda “the Germans were fully aware that Poles were helping Jews. That is why they announced the harshest penalties against any Pole who had contact with Jews, refused to hand them over, or otherwise tried to help them. Under German occupation, Poles faced the death penalty for such actions, and yet some still helped Jews.”
A GLIMMER OF HOPE
Until 1943, every child born in the German concentration camp was killed immediately, often by drowning in a barrel. From 1943 onward, only Jewish infants were murdered; the others were subjected to medical experiments or, if they had so-called Nordic features such as blond hair and blue eyes, were taken from their mothers and sent to German families.
Upon arrival, Stanisława and her daughter were assigned to the most gruelling labour. Each day, they were marched beyond the camp gates to dig ditches and haul clay. Under the strain of this backbreaking slave labour, their strength waned with each passing day. All around them lay the bodies of women who had already succumbed to sheer exhaustion.
Yet, after only a few days, the miracle they had prayed for happened. In the maternity block, the camp authorities began a desperate search for anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of medicine. For Stanisława, this was a singular opportunity—not only for the survival of herself and her daughter, but also to return to the profession she loved.
In the beginning I was alone in my work. In difficult situations, when a specialist doctor was necessary, I had to handle it myself. German camp doctors, Rhode, Koenig, and Mengele could not “lower” themselves to treat non-Germans, so I had no right to ask for their assistance. Later, I was helped several times by a doctor working at another barrack and totally devoted to her patients, Janina Wegierska. (The Report of a Midwife from Auschwitz)
A MATERNITY WARD IN HELL
The camp block was a place of relentless infection, stench, and vermin. It swarmed with rats as large as cats, which gnawed at the ears, noses, fingers, and heels of the gravely ill women, too emaciated to move. Whenever possible, Stanisława drove them off, taking turns with the woman on night watch. Even the convalescent women helped, dividing their few hours of sleep to keep the rodents at bay. The vermin were drawn by the scent of the women, who had no way to wash or change their clothes.
The midwife had to secure the water needed to wash both mother and newborn herself. Fetching a single bucket took twenty minutes. She delivered babies on the brick chimney flue that ran the length of the barracks; since it was heated only a few times a year, icicles hung from the ceiling in winter. Instead of sterile sheets, she had only a filthy blanket teeming with lice.
DEFIANT MIDWIFE
The orders were clear: every newborn infant was to be drowned in a barrel immediately after birth. Fluent in German, Stanisława made it clear to Dr. Mengele that she “would not kill any child.” At first, the German could not believe that anyone would dare oppose him; after all, everyone around him trembled at the mere sight of him. “What?” he asked, raising his voice. “You are to kill all newborn children immediately. Do you understand?” She raised her head and looked him in the eye. “No, never,” she replied. “Children must not be killed!”
A MIRACLE OF LIFE
Before every birth, Stanisława prayed for the health of the children and their mothers, and after they were born, she baptized them, commending them to God’s care. When—using modern language—complications arose, she did not turn to the Virgin Mary with a plea, but with an alarm that sounded like a command: “Come, even in one slipper!” And indeed, help always arrived!
On one occasion, the camp physician, Dr. Josef Mengele, demanded to see the data on perinatal mortality. When Stanisława presented him with the figures, he refused to believe them. “He remarked that even the most impeccably run German university clinics could not boast such success,” she later recalled. “In his eyes, I read only anger and hatred.”
Of the three thousand deliveries she attended, not a single mother and not a single child died in childbirth. About five-hundred of the babies were sent away to be Germanized. Only about thirty infants survived in the care of their mothers after liberation. She delivered the final infant on the very day the Germans fled before the Soviet advance.
Such a record was unmatched by the physicians of the Third Reich, and it remains unsurpassed by modern maternity wards today. Even more surprising, many of the women she looked after said they felt little or no pain during childbirth, even though almost all of them gave birth without any medication.
A WITNESS TO FAITH
After the war, she continued to work as a midwife in Łódź, a city associated with the great Polish saints St. Faustina Kowalska and St. Maximilian Kolbe.
She died of cancer in 1974. In the final stage of her illness, she consistently refused to take painkillers. Thousands attended her funeral.
When Pope St. John Paul II visited Łódź in 1987, he said that Stanisława Leszczyńska is an example of Christian heroism. She is also an example of an extraordinary way of life, one marked by trust in God, hope, and serenity. She saw goodness where many would not have had the courage to look for it.
In the early 1990s, the Catholic Church formally opened Stanisława’s sainthood cause, giving her the title “Servant of God.”
Let these reflections end with the following prayer:
O God, Creator of all life, who in Your omnipotent goodness blesses human families with the gift of new life, grant that Your Servant Stanisława, whose profound love for mothers and children led her to protect many from death, may find many women to join her cause and, in God’s grace, be swiftly raised to the Altars. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Photo by Frederick Wallace on Unsplash
