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Biography

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Edward Grzymała was a Polish Roman Catholic diocesan priest and martyr of the Second World War, later numbered among the 108 Blessed Polish Martyrs beatified by Pope John Paul II. He was born on 29 September 1906 in the village of Kołodziąż in the Siedlce region of eastern Poland, then under the Russian Empire. He belonged to the Latin-rite clergy of the Diocese of Siedlce (Podlasie), not to a religious order. After studies that included the diocesan seminary at Janów Podlaski, he was ordained a priest on 14 June 1931 by Bishop Henryk Przeździecki.

In the interwar Polish Republic he served as a parish vicar, including in Żelechów and in Siedlce. Accounts of his ministry describe ordinary pastoral work in that diocese and a particular involvement with young people; he is recorded as a chaplain to Polish scouts (harcerze). His life as a priest thus unfolded in a Church still rebuilding after the partitions and the First World War, in a borderland region of mixed population and earlier Tsarist pressure on Catholicism.

After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, the Nazi occupation pursued a systematic assault on the Polish clergy and intelligentsia. Grzymała was arrested by the Gestapo on 6 April 1940. He was imprisoned at Lublin Castle, then held at Sachsenhausen, and on 14 December 1940 transferred to the Dachau concentration camp in Bavaria, where a large number of Polish priests were confined. He died at Dachau on 9 August 1942, at the age of thirty-five. The precise medical or camp circumstance of his death is not independently established in the sources used here; like other clergy prisoners he was subject to forced labor, hunger, and epidemic disease. No verified burial place is recorded; camp dead were commonly cremated.

Pope John Paul II beatified him in Warsaw on 13 June 1999 together with 107 other Polish victims of the occupation, collectively styled the 108 Martyrs of World War II. He has not been canonized. The group is commemorated liturgically on 12 June. No distinct list of individual patronages separate from that group cult is well documented.

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