Holocaust survivor honors Polish priest who aided his family

(OSV News) -- Because of the quiet and heroic intervention of a Polish priest, Andrew Jampoler's life was saved just as it began. Jampoler, 83, feels a strong debt of gratitude to Father Jozef Czapran who protected him as an infant in Eastern Poland by providing lifesaving papers for him and his family.

Just ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day Jan. 27, he spoke with OSV News about his story of survival after he was born in a Jewish family Jan. 15, 1942, in the city of Lwow, Poland, which is now Lviv, Ukraine.

When Soviet control of Lwow gave way to Nazi control in 1941, Jampoler's parents, Hanka and Karol, went into hiding to avoid being forced into a ghetto. They were hiding along with his paternal grandmother, Lucy, who was a neighbor of Father Czapran at St. Anthony's Catholic Church.

Father Czapran counterfeited birth certificates and other documents for Jampoler, his parents and his grandmother as well as his grandmother's niece, his cousin Irena Wilder (later Christine Winecki), whom he calls Irka.

"It is those documents, I believe, that permitted my mother and grandmother to survive in very open hiding in southern Germany during the course of the later years of the war," he said.

Another Catholic parish in Poland played a significant role in Jampoler's survival when his family fled to Warsaw. His father was recognized by an old classmate and forced to go into hiding elsewhere and the family never saw him again. His mother and grandmother were also attempting to hide, but little Andrew had fallen ill and would not stop crying.

When he finally fell asleep, they decided it would be safest to leave him on the steps of a Catholic church and watched until someone found him. He was adopted for the remainder of the war by a childless Polish Catholic couple, Julianna (Julie) and Stanisllaw (Stach) Matysiak.

His mother and grandmother were able to use their false documents to work on a pig farm in Immenstadt, Germany, for the remainder of the war. While his mother was sick in the hospital after the war, his grandmother tracked him down and persuaded the couple to return him, explaining that they had papers now to take him to America where he would have a better life.

Much later in life, Jampoler reconnected with his cousin Irka after coming across a book she had written about her survival story "The Girl in the Check Coat."

"We determined some years ago to nominate Father Czapran to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Israel as one of the Righteous Among the Nations," he said. "The family has a great debt to his memory."

The title of Righteous Among Nations is an honorific used by Israel to describe non-Jews who risked their lives during the Holocaust to save Jews.

Irka, now 98 and living in Melbourne, Australia, wrote of Father Czapran's critical aid in her book, which includes a period of time in which she was in hiding with her Aunt Lucy -- Jampoler's grandmother -- alongside him and his parents.

"The Jews of Lwow were prepared for the worst. They knew their days were numbered and that those who could still save themselves had no time to lose," she said, writing that her Aunt Lucy took her to "Saint Anthony's Church in the suburb of Lyczakow, where the local vicar, Father Czapran, issued me with a birth certificate from the parish registry of births, marriages and deaths for the year 1930."

In her testimony nominating Father Czapran for Yad Vashem's Righteous Among the Nations title, Irka wrote of how she sat in the priest's office with her aunt when she was 11 years old and he "called in a nun, Sister Benedykta, and gave her a task to teach me prayers, songs and some Catholic customs I need to know to survive the war."

In her book, she recalled how "every morning now I would go to church, where the good Sister Benedykta taught me the words of the Catholic prayers. In the quiet, semi-dark atmosphere of the church permeated with the smell of incense, I felt safe and I could cry uninterrupted."

The instruction she received in Catholic prayers came in handy when she was later taken in for questioning by police in Warsaw. "I faced a barrage of questions from two policemen," she wrote, "'What's your name?', 'Can you pray?', 'Say Hail Mary', 'What is your mother's maiden name?', 'Say Our Father', 'Cross yourself.' I was petrified but I knew I would make Sister Benedykta proud with the way I remembered all her teachings."

When Father Czapran was recognized as one of the Righteous Among Nations on July 3, 2022, three generations of the Jampoler family went to Yad Vashem "to honor him and his memory and the contribution he had made to our lives."

Jampoler said Father Czapran was ordained in 1917 in Lwow and served as a parish priest at St. Anthony's Church there from 1941 to 1946, during the war. He was a priest and pastor at a cathedral in the Zielona Gora-Gorzow Diocese after the war and died in 1972.

He noted that Yad Vashem recently transferred the medal and diploma awarded posthumously to Father Czapran for permanent display in the Diocesan Museum of the Zielona Gora-Gorzow Diocese. Jampoler is grateful that he "remains a part of the memory of not just my family and others like us," but also for the priest's parish and community where he served.

"We are the beneficiaries of Father Czapran's great courage and kindness," he said.
One of those beneficiaries includes Jampoler's daughter, Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., who spoke at the ceremony honoring Father Czapran.

"I am certain that he believed that each and every person he saved was, and is, fundamentally worthy of grace," she said at the time, "and for that belief he risked his life for all of ours. We are all here today to give thanks to the generosity and bravery of a man whom none of us ever knew."

Jampoler reflected on "the great kindness of strangers and how fortunate I was to be the innocent beneficiary of those great gifts." One recent gift in his family is his new great granddaughter, Lucy, "a bright light in our lives," he said. Her name is in honor of her brave great-great-grandmother whose family was protected by the actions of her neighborhood parish priest all those years ago.