Alojzy Liguda

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Alojzy Liguda SVD (born January 23, 1898 in Winau as Alois Liguda ; † December 8/9, 1942 in Dachau concentration camp ) was a Polish religious priest who was murdered by the National Socialists . He is recognized as a martyr in the Roman Catholic Church and is venerated as a blessed .

Life

Origin and career

Alois Liguda was born in Winau in Upper Silesia as the youngest of the seven children of Adalbert (Wojciech Liguda, 1854–1922) and Rosalie. Przybilla (Rozalia Przybyła, 1859–1945) was born. The family belonged to the Polish part of the population of the then Prussian province of Silesia . At the age of 15 Alois, who was a good student and was interested in foreign countries and continents, entered the little seminary of the Steyler missionaries in Neisse . During the First World War , he had to interrupt his training and from 1917 he had to serve as an artilleryman in the Prussian army on the western front . In the course of the war he was promoted to NCO . His brother Johann (Jan), who owned a shoemaker's shop in the center of Opole , had died in May 1915 as a reservist in a reserve infantry regiment; his brother Emanuel (1890–1923) was seriously wounded in the same year as a medical sergeant .

After his return from the war, he graduated from high school in Neisse in 1920 and then went to the novitiate in the St. Gabriel mission house in Mödling near Vienna , at that time the most important center of the Society of the Divine Word , as the Steyler missionaries officially call themselves. While he was in Austria, the Silesian uprising broke out in his homeland , which his father reported to him in letters and which upset him greatly. Wojciech Liguda was attacked in Upper Silesia for opting for Poland.

Religious life

Alojzy Liguda took his first religious vows in September 1921. He then taught Latin and mathematics in the boys' seminary of the Steyler missionaries in Pieniezno in East Prussia and completed his theological studies. In September 1926 he made his perpetual profession and was ordained a priest in St. Gabriel on May 26, 1927 , together with his brother Stanisław Kubista (1898–1940), who was later deported with him to the concentration camp. Liguda celebrated his primacy in the Holy Cross Church in Opole. Contrary to his wish to be sent overseas to remote mission areas, his superiors judged him to be particularly suitable for the teaching profession due to his “good intellectual abilities” and sent him to the religious province of Poland, where there was a shortage of qualified teachers at the time. There he took on Polish citizenship and first had to take examinations to recognize his Abitur in order to be able to study at the Polish University of Poznan, which was newly established in 1919 . From 1930 to 1934 he studied Polish Philology and Contemporary History at the University of Poznań and completed his studies with a thesis on the literary work of Gallus Anonymous . During his studies, he worked as a school clergyman and religion teacher at the Poznań Ursuline School .

Then he was transferred to the Steyler Mission House St. Joseph in Górna Grupa , where the Provincialate of his order was located. He taught history and Polish at the school there, gave catechesis and was a sought-after preacher and retreat leader in the house and in the surrounding parishes . The Polish soldiers in the nearby barracks in Grupa were also looked after by Father Alojzy as pastors . On July 24, 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II, he was appointed Rector of the Mission House.

Persecution and death

After the attack on Poland , the mission house in Górna Grupa was occupied by the Wehrmacht and turned into a collection camp for Polish clergy by the SS and Gestapo . The school was closed. In addition to the priests of the Steyler Missionaries' own convent , which at that time comprised 64 fathers and brothers , about 80 diocesan priests and seminarians from the dioceses of Chełmno , Włocławek and Gniezno were arrested there on October 28, 1939 . As head of the house, Liguda tried to give his fellow prisoners courage and consolation and appeared self-confidently towards the guards; He protested unsuccessfully against the evacuation of individual prisoners who - as the inmates later learned - were shot in the surrounding forests. On February 5, 1940, a group of priests, including Alojzy Liguda, were brought to the Neufahrwasser civilian prison camp in Nowy Port near Danzig and a few days later assigned to the Stutthof concentration camp . Liguda spent Easter here . His insistence is said to have contributed to the fact that Holy Mass was celebrated in the camp on Maundy Thursday 1940 and that Easter Communion was distributed to the prisoners , for many for the last time in their lives. On March 28, 1940 Liguda was transported with a large group of prisoners to Grenzdorf bei Sztutowo ("Stutthof"), on April 6 to the main camp in Stutthof and on April 9 to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp . Among the fellow sufferers was Alojzy's consecrated colleague of the same age, Stanisław Kubista, who collapsed almost three weeks after arriving in Sachsenhausen and was slain by the guards.

Because of his impeccable knowledge of German, Liguda received significant relief from other concentration camp inmates in the camp. He was used to serve the SS personnel and was allowed to teach German to other inmates. He used the preferences partly to give his students encouraging presentations or to allow certain breaks for relaxation. However, he was also a victim of harassment and brutal punishment. In the late autumn of 1940, there was increasing evidence that Alois Liguda could be released. In fact, the general government of the Steyler Missionary Order, together with Liguda's family, had tried hard to get his release through the Berlin nunciature . She had asserted that his relatives had German citizenship , that he had fought on the German side in World War I and that his brother had died as a German soldier in the war. The fact that at the beginning of the conflicts in Upper Silesia in 1919/1920 Alois had protected Germans from riots by Polish residents was also mentioned. The discharge plans seemed so advanced that he had already been taken to a doctor to check his health. Ultimately, the diplomatic efforts failed because of the refusal of the Gestapo, which after closer examination of the case, on the contrary, caused Liguda's treatment to be more severe. The prisoner had declared that he was a Pole and that he intended to continue working in Poland in the future. Thereupon it was decreed that the priest should be separated from his previous fellow prisoners and imprisoned as part of the “ Polish intelligentsia ”.

On December 14, 1940, he was transported to the Dachau concentration camp , his prisoner number there was 22604. Surviving fellow prisoners describe him as courageous, justice-loving and humorous, even joking even under adverse circumstances. In January 1941, shortly after his arrival, the camp was hit by a scabies epidemic. As a steward in the prisoner barracks, Liguda repeatedly drew the anger of the kapos and block leaders . After a tuberculosis infection, which he was able to cure in the hospital ward and also received mail from acquaintances and friends there, he no longer returned to his previous group, but was transferred to the disabled , which in everyday life in the camp amounted to a death sentence. He was killed on the night of December 8th to 9th, 1942. According to an attendant's testimony, the group of victims, which Liguda belonged to, were brutally drowned. This happened in connection with cruel medical experiments on hypothermia by Sigmund Rascher . In a letter to his 84-year-old mother, the cause of death was incorrectly stated to be “pulmonary tuberculosis”. Shortly before his death, Alojzy Liguda had told the camp secretary that if he died, they should know that a healthy person had been killed. He had wished his old mother wouldn’t survive him.

Commemoration

Tomb in Winów

According to official information, his body was cremated on December 12, 1942 in the Dachau crematorium. The ashes from Dachau were sent to the mother in an urn marked with Liguda's prisoner number and buried in the family grave in Winów, where his father and brother Emanuel are also buried. A grave slab reminds of Alojzy Liguda there.

Alojzy Liguda was beatified on June 13, 1999 in Warsaw together with the three Steyler missionaries Grzegorz Frąckowiak , Stanisław Kubista and Ludwik Mzyk (1905–1940) as one of 108 Polish martyrs of the German occupation regime by Pope John Paul II , who himself came from Poland . His ecclesiastical feast day is December 8th.

In Winów, the street where he was born is named after Alojzy Liguda.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ From October 1, 1912 in ulicę Mikołaja 20 near Töpfer-Gasse, cf. Nowiny No. 125 (PDF; 4.3 MB), October 22, 1912, p. 3; located in the vicinity of today's Opole Cathedral (part of the Katedralna or ulicę Kardynała Bolesława Kominka ), cf. Daniela Pelka: The German street names of Opole (PDF; 223 kB). In: Journal for Central European German Studies , 2nd year (2012), Issue 1/2, pp. 17–43, here: pp. 19, 28, 35.
  2. ^ German loss lists of the First World War: Edition 511 of May 31, 1915 (Prussia 236), p. 6617: Liguda Johann (Winan, Oppeln) .
  3. ^ German loss lists of the First World War: Issue 535 of June 12, 1915 (Prussia 247), p. 6922: Liguda Emanuel (Winau, Oppeln) .
  4. ↑ Henryk Kałuża SVD : Wiodące znamiona duchowości BL. Alojzego Ligudy SVD (1898–1942) (=  University of Opole , Theological Faculty [Hrsg.]: Opolska Biblioteka Teologiczna = Theological Collection of Opole . Volume 113 ). Opole 2009, ISBN 978-83-61756-18-7 , pp. 227-232 .
  5. ^ Teresa Sienkiewicz-Miś: Opolscy męczennicy. In: Wiara.pl , June 10, 2009, accessed June 10, 2020.
  6. ↑ Apostolic Journey to Poland: Sermon of John Paul II in Warsaw on June 13, 1999. Accessed December 8, 2018 .
  7. ↑ ul. Księdza Ligudy - Mapa Winów, plan miasta, ulice w Winowie - E-turysta. Retrieved December 8, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Liguda, Alojzy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Liguda, Alois (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish religious priest, victim of National Socialism, beatified in 1999
DATE OF BIRTH January 23, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Winau
DATE OF DEATH December 8, 1942 or December 9, 1942
Place of death Dachau concentration camp