They Were Just People: Stories of Rescue in Poland During the Holocaust

Father Romuald Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel

Batia Weksler and her husband, Jakub, were frantic. Already they had given away one son, Samuel, to save him from the Germans. They had sent Samuel to live with a Lithuanian family in their town of Stare Swieciany, just northeast of Vilna.63 And now she was ready to deliver another Jewish child who would need to be hidden, too. But just before the second son’s birth, the people taking care of Samuel brought him back to the Weksler home in the ghetto. These people went back on their word to keep the child, but they returned none of the valuables the Wekslers had given them to cover the cost of hiding, feeding, and housing him. When Samuel’s brother was born, Batia decided to try to find a non-Jewish family who would at least take Samuel’s brother and bring him up as their own. The Wekslers elected, at least for now, to keep Samuel and hope for the best. So Batia spoke to a couple she knew through contacts at Jakub’s thriving tailor shop, Emilia and Piotr Waszkinel. Piotr was a metalworker. Father Romuald Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel 150 Emilia Waszkinel (photos of mothers courtesy of Fr. Weksler-Waszkinel) Reverend Romuald Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel (photo by Jacek Pokrzycka) Batia Weksler Sister Klara Jaroszynski 151 152 The Stories Batia knew she had to be convincing. Romuald said that his adoptive mother later told him Batia looked her in the eyes and said,“You believe in Jesus Christ. You told me you believe in God. You know Jesus Christ was a Jew, so please save my Jewish child because you believe in Jesus Christ. Please take care of this child.” Then she suggested to Emilia that when Romuald grew up, he could become a priest. As frightened as Emilia was to say yes, she agreed. Today that baby is the Reverend Romuald JakubWeksler-Waszkinel,a Catholic priest who teaches philosophy at Catholic University in Lublin. We interviewed him, using a translator, at his Lublin apartment, in the same room where he finally learned the truth about his Jewish background. He has been a priest since the 1960s and a teacher for much of that time. So his Jewish mother’s prophesy came true, though of course she had no way of knowing the remarkable path this man would travel to get from being a Jewish baby to being a Catholic priest who did not learn about his Jewish background until twelve years after his ordination . The story of that journey involves a nun, whom we interviewed near Warsaw on her ninety-sixth birthday in 2007, the late Pope John Paul II, and countless other people whose lives intersected with Romuald’s as he sought to discover the mysteries of his origin. Romuald refers to Jesus as “my rabbi,” and when he met Pope Benedict XVI at Auschwitz in May 2006, he knelt before him wearing both a priest’s collar and a yarmulke. So he has sought to use the discovery of his Jewish background and the reality of his priestly calling to be a bridge between two related religions that often have been at odds. He reminds Christians that their faith “started with Judaism.” For Romuald himself, everything started with Germany’s persecution of the Jews and what it would mean for his life. Romuald said he was not sure just when he was born, though he believes it may have been February 28, 1943. In 1978, when Romuald finally got Emilia Waszkinel to tell him the facts about his birth, she said this to him: “You had a wonderful, good, wise mother. I was afraid, so afraid. The punishment for saving Jews, even infants like yourself, was death. As you know, we didn’t have our own apartment. We rented a room. I explained all of this to your mother. . . . She listened, but didn’t seem to hear. She looked at me, and her sad eyes—you have your mother’s eyes—said more than words.”64 Romuald told us that his Catholic “mother eventually said to me, ‘I was not able to say I didn’t want you because if I did say that I would be saying I don’t believe in Jesus Christ.’” So the Waszkinels took him in, pretending to their neighbors that someone had simply abandoned the baby on the balcony of the house where Emilia and Piotr lived...