Edward Kaźmierski

Edward Kaźmierski (born October 1, 1919 in Poznań , † August 24, 1942 in Dresden ) was a Polish resistance fighter from among the Salesians of Don Bosco . During the German occupation of Poland, along with other young Poles, he was sentenced to death by the Nazi judiciary and executed in 1942. He is venerated as a martyr in the Roman Catholic Church and was beatified by Pope John Paul II .

Life

Memorial at the New Catholic Cemetery in Dresden

Born into a poor shoemaker family, Edward Kaźmierski had to work in a shop after finishing elementary school and later in a mechanic's workshop. Later he attended the oratory of the Salesians Don Bosco in Poznań , a church recreational care facility for boys. There his extraordinary musical talents were promoted. He wrote his own compositions at the age of 15 . He eventually became head of the Don Bosco group of the oratorio. With his friends Czesław Jóźwiak , Franciszek Kęsy , Edward Klinik and Jarogniew Wojciechowski , who knew each other from the oratorio, he was during the German occupation on 23/24. Arrested September 1940 and initially held in the infamous Fort VII in Poznan . After various other stations in prisons and penal camps, he was brought to Zwickau in May 1942 and sentenced to death on July 31, 1942, together with the other four boys, for alleged preparation for high treason by the Higher Regional Court in Poznan on the basis of the Polish Criminal Law Ordinance . The judgment was carried out on August 24, 1942 in the Dresden execution site on Münchner Platz . The prison chaplain, Father Franz Bänsch OMI, accompanied the group of convicts, consisting of eight young Poles, with pastoral care to the scaffold . They are among the victims of the extremely harsh Germanization policy pursued by National Socialist Germany in the so-called Warthegau , which not infrequently also turned against church groups and intellectuals.

Commemoration

The place of execution in Dresden became a memorial to the anti-fascist resistance in the GDR . Because of their ecclesiastical background, the names of the five friends from the Poznan Oratory were not mentioned there. “The Five”, as they are called in Poland, were beatified on June 13, 1999 by the Polish Pope John Paul II, together with 103 other Polish martyrs of the German occupation regime. Their feast day is August 24th, and June 12th in the Salesians' own calendar. In the same year the grave was rediscovered in the New Catholic Cemetery in Dresden; a monument of the Catholic parish of St. Paulus in Dresden-Plauen reminds of Kaźmierski among other things. Together with the Polish friar Grzegorz Frąckowiak SVD , who was executed in the same place eight months later , the five boys are also grouped together to form the group of six blessed martyrs from Münchner Platz in Dresden , whose joint commemoration will be celebrated on June 12th. This group of martyrs was consecrated on June 1, 2020 in the diocese of Dresden-Meißen newly established Roman Catholic parish .

literature

• Johannes Wielgoß SDS : Blessed Franciscek Kęsy and Blessed Edward Clinic. In: Helmut Moll (ed.): Witnesses for Christ. The German martyrology of the 20th century. Volume I. 7th, revised and updated edition, Schöningh, Paderborn et al. 2019, ISBN 978-3-506-78012-6 , pp. 221-224.

Web links

• Edward Kaźmierski in the Ecumenical Lexicon of Saints
• Antonio Borrelli: Beato Edoardo Kazmierski Martire. Short biography on santiebeati.it (Italian)