Bronisław Kostkowski

Bronisław Kostkowski was a Polish Roman Catholic seminarian and martyr of the Second World War. He was born on 11 March 1915 in Słupsk in Pomerania. He belonged to a Polish family and later followed a vocation to the diocesan priesthood, entering the Major Seminary of the Diocese of Włocławek. He was still a cleric in formation, not yet ordained, when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. Surviving sources on his childhood, family circumstances, and personal character are sparse; he is known to history primarily through his identity as a Włocławek seminarian and through the record of his arrest, deportation, and death under the Nazi occupation.

The German occupation of Poland brought an early and systematic assault on the Polish Catholic Church, which the occupiers treated as a mainstay of national life and a barrier to Germanization. The seminary at Włocławek was suppressed. In the autumn of 1939 Kostkowski was arrested by the Gestapo together with other members of the seminary community. He was among the large number of Polish bishops, priests, seminarians, and religious who were seized in the first months of the occupation. After local imprisonment he was deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp north of Berlin.

From Sachsenhausen he was transferred to the Dachau concentration camp in Bavaria. Dachau became the principal camp in which the Nazi regime concentrated clergy from occupied Poland and from other countries. Polish priests and seminarians there were subjected to forced labor, starvation rations, epidemic disease, medical abuse, and continual brutality. Kostkowski died at Dachau on 6 September 1942, at the age of twenty-seven. The precise medical cause is not firmly established in readily available sources; like many prisoners in that camp he perished as a result of the conditions of imprisonment. No verified burial place is recorded; remains of those who died at Dachau were commonly cremated.

On 13 June 1999, during a liturgical celebration in Warsaw, Pope John Paul II beatified Kostkowski as one of the 108 Martyrs of World War II, a group of Polish bishops, priests, men and women religious, and lay faithful killed out of hatred for the faith during the German occupation of Poland. The group is commemorated collectively on 12 June. Kostkowski has not been canonized. He is venerated in the Catholic Church as a blessed martyr, a diocesan seminarian of Włocławek whose brief life ended in the concentration-camp system created by the Nazi regime.