Czesław Jóźwiak

Czesław Jóźwiak was born on 8 September 1919 in the village of Łażyn in north-central Poland. During his childhood the family settled in Poznań, where he grew up and received his formation as a young Catholic. There he became closely attached to the Salesian oratory on Wroniecka Street, a house of youth ministry in the tradition of Saint John Bosco. At the oratory he formed a lasting friendship with four other young men: Edward Kaźmierski, Edward Klinik, Franciszek Kęsy, and Jarogniew Wojciechowski. The five took part together in prayer, catechesis, music, theatre, and recreation. They were lay youths, not professed members of a religious order, but they were shaped by Salesian spirituality and were remembered for cheerfulness, loyalty to one another, and a serious Christian life.

After German forces occupied Poznań in September 1939, the Salesians were expelled and the oratory was shut down. Jóźwiak and his companions continued to meet privately, to pray, and to encourage one another under occupation. On 23 September 1940 they were arrested by the Gestapo and accused of belonging to an illegal organization and of activity hostile to the occupying authorities. They were first held in Fort VII in Poznań, a detention site notorious for the treatment of Polish prisoners, and were then transferred through a chain of prisons that included Wronki, Berlin, and Zwickau, before being brought to Dresden in Saxony.

More than a year and a half of imprisonment followed, with interrogation and the ordinary hardships of wartime jails. Letters that reached their families, and later testimony, indicate that the five sought to remain faithful to prayer, to support one another, and to accept their situation in a Christian spirit. In the summer of 1942 they were condemned to death in Dresden. On 24 August 1942 Czesław Jóźwiak was executed by guillotine in the Dresden prison together with his four friends. He was twenty-two years old. The group became known as the Poznań Five or the Five Martyrs of Poznań.

Their memory was kept among those who had known the Wroniecka Street oratory and among Polish Catholics who honoured the victims of the occupation. On 13 June 1999, in Warsaw, Pope John Paul II beatified Jóźwiak as one of the 108 Martyrs of World War II, Polish clergy and laity killed under the Nazi regime and recognised as having died in odium fidei. In the liturgical calendar of Poland the 108 martyrs are commemorated on 12 June; the Poznań Five are also remembered on the anniversary of their execution. Their lives are cited in Salesian and Polish Catholic settings as an example of youthful friendship ordered to God and of lay witness under persecution.