Henryk Sławik

Henryk Sławik

Henryk Sławik (* 1894 in Bad König Dorff-Jastrzemb , Upper Silesia ; † 23 or 24. August 1944 KZ Gusen I ) was a Polish politician, diplomat and social worker who during World War II wrong by issuing Polish passports 5000 Hungarian and Polish Jews from Saved Budapest from the Holocaust .

Henryk Sławik was born in Timmendorf (Polish: Szeroka ) (district of Bad Königsdorff-Jastrzemb) in Upper Silesia as the fifth son of a poor family of small farmers. His mother sent him to high school . After graduating, Sławik volunteered for the Polish army. Then he went to the police and worked as a police officer in Silesia until 1939. At the same time, Sławik was an active member of the right wing of the Polish Socialist Party .

After the German attack in 1939 , Sławik joined a mobile police department belonging to the Armia Kraków. He fought in the retreat battles along the northern Carpathians . His department was assigned to the 2nd Mountain Fighters Brigade, with which he defended the mountain passes leading into Slovakia .

On September 15, Sławik and his men were ordered to withdraw to the newly formed border with Hungary . On September 17th, after the Soviet Union declared war on Poland, Sławik crossed the border and was interned as a prisoner of war. József Antall Senior , the father of the future Hungarian Prime Minister ( József Antall Jr.) and responsible for the civilian refugees in the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior, discovered Sławik in one of the camps. Thanks to his excellent knowledge of German, Sławik was brought to Budapest and allowed him to found the “Citizens Committee to Help Polish Refugees” (“Komitet Obywatelski ds. Opieki nad Polskimi Uchodźcami”). Together with József Antall Senior, he organized work for the exiles, founded schools and orphanages. He also secretly built an organization whose aim was to enable the emigrated Poles to travel to France or the Middle East . They were supposed to join the Polish army there. Sławik was also a member of the Polish parliament in exile.

After the Hungarian government passed the race laws and separated the Polish refugees of Jewish origin from their compatriots, Sławik began issuing them false documents attesting to their Polish origin and Catholic faith. He also helped hundreds of Polish Jews to join the Yugoslav partisans. The establishment of an orphanage for Jewish orphans (official name: orphanage for the children of Polish officers ) in Vác went back to his initiative . To keep up appearances, the children were visited by Catholic church leaders, the most notable being Angelo Rotta .

After the Germans occupied Hungary in March 1944, Sławik went underground and asked most of the refugees under his command to leave Hungary. Thanks to an agreement with the officer in charge of the camp for Polish Jews, all camp inmates were able to flee and leave Hungary. The Jewish children from the orphanage in Vac were also evacuated. However, the Germans arrested Sławik on March 19, 1944. Despite brutal torture, he did not betray his Hungarian comrades. After all, he was in the concentration camps Gusen I brought, where he and some of his aides were hanged on the orders of the Reich SS on August 23 1944th His wife survived the Ravensbrück concentration camp and found her daughter after the war, who had been hidden in Hungary by the Antall family. Henryk Sławik's grave is unknown.

Henryk Sławik helped an estimated 30,000 Polish refugees in Hungary. About 5000 of them were Jews. After the liberation, the communist regimes of Poland and Hungary kept the memory of his heroic deeds alive and honored him. In 1990 the Yad Vashem Institute posthumously awarded Sławik the title of Righteous Among the Nations .

Web links

• Dr. Henryk Slawik - a Polish Raoul Wallenberg? (English)
• Henryk Slawik - a Polish Wallenberg (English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Polish Embassy in Vienna, commemoration of the 70th anniversary of death in Mauthausen and Gusen on August 23, 2014
2. ↑ Henryk Sławik on the website of Yad Vashem (English)