Aleksy Sobaszek

Blessed Aleksy Sobaszek was a Polish Roman Catholic diocesan priest and martyr of the Second World War. He was born on 17 August 1895 in the village of Przygodzice in Greater Poland, then under Prussian administration in the German Empire during the partitions of Poland. He was the son of Wojciech Sobaszek and Marianna, née Nowak. After secondary studies at the gymnasium in Ostrów Wielkopolski he entered seminary and prepared for the priesthood in Poznań and Gniezno. On 8 February 1920 he was ordained a priest by Cardinal Edmund Dalbor, Primate of Poland and archbishop of Gniezno and Poznań.

In the restored Polish Republic he served as a diocesan priest in Greater Poland. He was a curate at the parish of Saint Nicholas in Krotoszyn and later at the Church of the Holy Spirit in Gostyń. He then became administrator and parish priest of the parish of Saint Michael the Archangel in Siedlec. His ministry was that of an ordinary pastor of the interwar Church: sacramental life, catechesis, and care of rural and small-town parishioners in the Gniezno–Poznań ecclesiastical province.

After the German invasion of Poland in 1939 the occupying authorities waged a systematic campaign against the Polish clergy, whom they regarded as bearers of national and religious identity. Father Sobaszek was arrested by the Gestapo on 6 October 1941 and, at the end of that month, deported to the Dachau concentration camp in Bavaria, where large numbers of imprisoned Polish priests were concentrated. He was registered as prisoner number 28032. Starvation, forced labor, disease, and camp brutality marked the imprisonment of the Polish clergy at Dachau.

He died at Dachau on 1 August 1942, at the age of forty-six. On 13 June 1999, during a Mass in Warsaw, Pope John Paul II beatified him together with 107 other Polish victims of Nazi persecution, known as the 108 Martyrs of the Second World War. Their collective liturgical memorial is kept on 12 June. He has not been canonized. Place of burial is not recorded in the usual sources; many Dachau dead were cremated.