The martyrdom of Polish Catholic priests at Dachau.

Warsaw--In April each year, the Catholic church in Poland observes the Day of the Martyrdom of the Polish clergy during World War II. The day recalls that twenty percent of the total 10,017 Polish clergy, including five bishops, died at the hands of the Nazis during the years 1939-1945.

In an interview on May 2, 2004 with Zenit news service, Archbishop Kazimierz Majdanski, who had been incarcerated at the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau in Bavaria, Germany, recalled the horrors he experienced during that ordeal. They had to work in inhuman conditions in the camp, with insufficient rations of food, accompanied by verbal and physical abuse. The Catholic clergy were on the receiving end of hatred toward Christianity and all that Christianity represented. Catholics were singled out for abuse, the Catholic Church was denigrated, the Pope was vilified and on occasion, some priests were ordered to desecrate the cross or the rosary.

The Archbishop recalled that they prayed in secret, and heard confessions in secret, offering up the humiliations and sufferings of the camp and "rendering an account of it all to Our Lady at 9 o'clock every night."

Dachau was the camp where the Nazis sent most arrested priests from across Europe, including Germany itself. Half of the Polish priests who were imprisoned in Dachau--1800 out of 2100 in 1941--died, many in a heroic way.

Among priests of other nationalities who perished there are the now beatified Titus Brandsma, a Dutch Carmelite priest who died in 1942, and the beatified German priest Karl Leishner, who died shortly after World War II.

The interview concluded with a plea that the veil of silence which has surrounded this Polish holocaust be lifted, so that all may know of the suffering and death of Polish and other Catholic clergy at the hands of the German Nazis. [For Catholic Insight's earlier mention of Dachau, see Notes on the Polish-Jewish controversy, pp. 18-19, attached to the articles Following Edith Stein to Auschwitz and Crosses at Auschwitz, C.I., July-August 1999.]

Pope John Paul II has done his best to make the suffering better known. On June 13, 1999, he beatified 108 Polish martyrs, from 18 Polish dioceses and 22 religious orders, who died at Nazi hands during the war years 1939-1945. The list included 15 victims from the Auschwitz camp and 43 from Dachau, as well as Archbishop Julian Nowowiejski of Hock, who died of maltreatment elsewhere.

The 108 martyrs also include three seminarians, eight nuns, nine lay people, and 33 religious orders men. The June 1999 ceremony more than doubled the existing total of 95 Polish blesseds already on record.