Arcybiskup Adam Stefan Sapieha a Holokaust
Archbishop Adam Stefan Sapieha vs. the Holocaust

Summary/Abstract: Kraków Metropolitan Adam Stefan Sapieha was the most important Polish bishop staying in Polish lands during the Nazi occupation of Poland (1939–1945). He was an informal head of the Polish Church at the time. Therefore he was naturally a witness to the Holocaust. He had several official contacts with the German occupying authorities during which the Jewish question was raised. He was not indifferent to the successive stages of the extermination of Kraków's Jews, from the resettlement from the city in 1940 to their imprisonment in the ghetto in the years 1941-43, the deportations to death camps, to the killing of the last survivors in the Płaszów camp. The article contains a detailed review of the Kraków Archdiocese Archives and presents the scale of the drive to baptize Jews, with the names of clergymen subordinated to Sapieha who did most in this regard. It also contains evidence of Sapieha's efforts to get Jewish converts out of the ghetto, to which they were confined by the Nazis on racial grounds, like all other Jews, as well as the Bishop's other initiatives aimed at saving the Jews. The facts presented in the article support the hypothesis that, next to Vilnius Archbishop Romuald Jałbrzykowski, Adam Sapieha has the greatest merits among Poland's Roman Catholic Church leaders in attempting to save the Jews during the Holocaust.

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