You Shall Be My Witnesses Lessons Beyond Dachau Archbishop Kazimierz Majdanski Translation by Maria Klepacka-Srodon

ISBN: 978-0-7570-0233-6 Length: 194 Pages Size: 6 X 9-inch Format: Quality Paperback Full-color • Illustrated Category: Biography/Religious Price: $17.95 US Availability: In Print Click below for: Synopsis • Contents Introduction • Reviews

Synopsis

In the aftermath of World War I, Polish independence was revived after decades of struggle. As a modern sea harbor was built and schools were founded, both spiritual and material culture flourished. Then in 1939, Adolf Hitler attacked Poland, signaling the start of World War II. Most people know that the Polish Jews were quickly gathered for the purpose of extermination, but few are aware that a similar fate awaited the Polish clergy. Among these clergy was Kazimierz Majdansk, who later would become an Archbishop of Poland.

You Shall Be My Witnesses is intended as a witness to the author’s own prison experiences during the years of World War II. But this book does more than detail Hitler’s war against the faithful. You Shall Be My Witnesses also asks us to look forward to see where civilization is headed. Most important, it prompts us to choose not the civilization of death, but the blessing of the God of life.

Contents

Translator’s Notes

Introduction 1. Witness
2. A Diabolical Ideology
3. The Attack
4. The Gate Slammed Shut Behind Us
5. Where Important Decisions Were Made
6. Into the Unknown
7. Attack on Polish Culture
8. The Troop Changes
9. Winter
10. The Experimentation Wards
11. Yet Another Epidemic
12. My Power is Made Perfect in Weakness (2 Cor. 12:9)
13. Summertime
14. In the Service of Evil
15. Dreams of Freedom
16. You’re Free!
17. Phases of Freedom
18. Witness or Confession?
Epilogue

Photographs
Endnotes
About the Author
Index

Introduction

The scale of horror that took place in the Nazi death camps is literally overwhelming. The Nazis denied their prisoners’ humanity in many ways, and ruthlessly executed millions of men, women, and children. Because we so often focus on the startling numbers of people that were murdered in these death camps, we are in danger of thinking of these victims as a faceless mass. But each victim was a human being, and while some are known to many of us--Anne Frank, Sopie Scholl, Elie Weisel, and Maximilian Kolbe, to name a few--the vast majority have been forgotten.

Forgotten too, in most of the world, is the Nazis’ attempted obliteration of the cultures of occupied countries, and their paranoid reaction to any organized group perceived as constituting an ideological threat. In Poland, one of the groups the Nazis feared most was the Catholic Church. Because the Church was embedded in Polish society, with clergy well educated and respected by the people, the Nazis could not tolerate this institution in a country that they planned to radically redesign. Their goal, therefore, was to destroy it.

In his extraordinary memoir You Shall Be My Witnesses, Archbishop Kazimierz Majda´nski gives a voice and a face--his own--to the sufferings of the Polish people and the Polish clergy. Few things could be more terrifying than being a prisoner in the infamous Dachau concentration camp. And in that camp of horrors, little could have raised the level of terror more than assignment to the medical experimentation section, where people--already given numbers and denied names--were further dehumanized and given less regard than animals. Yet as a young seminarian, Kazimierz Majda´nski experienced all of this--and survived. This book gives witness to his suffering.

The Archbishop’s story chronicles what is--outside of Poland--an almost universally unknown element of the Nazi occupation of that country: the attempted destruction of Polish culture on a wholesale basis, and the systematic attack on the Polish clergy, who were seen as a threat to the Nazis’ absolute totalitarian control. Through it all, Archbishop Majda´nski, as well as the priests and seminarians around him, never lost sight of the Christian’s call to build a Civilization of Love. He never forgot his own humanity or that of those around him.

This memoir also chronicles Archbishop Majda´nski’s close association with Karol Wojtyla, later Pope John Paul II, who also lived through this difficult period of Polish history. Through the Archbishop’s words, we come to understand how Karol Wojtyla’s own experience in the 1940s may have made him extraordinarily mindful of the dignity and value of each human person. From the depths of Nazi dehumanization, rose one of the greatest defenders of the dignity of every man, woman, and child.

One lesson stands out more than any other in Majda´nski’s story: his forgiveness of the men who cruelly incarcerated him, callously experimented on him, and hated him for no reason other than his birth and faith. His ability to forgive--even more than his ability to physically survive--may well be the most remarkable aspect of this very unique story.

I will always remember my meetings with Archbishop Maj-da´nski, not only because he spoke of his own experiences and those of so many of his colleagues, but also because of the joyful and determined way in which he worked to better the lives of all those around him. Until his death, he remained a shining example of the vocation of the Christian--a vocation that at its heart testifies to the admonition of Saint Paul: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” (Rom. 12:21).

That element of forgiveness in the face of such incredible circumstances demonstrates the best of Christianity in action. As Archbishop Majda´nski ’s witnesses, we should all be motivated to follow his example of charity and forgiveness, so that the words “never again” will have a truly lasting meaning.

--Carl A. Anderson, Supreme Knight, Knights of Columbus, New Haven, Connecticut

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