Edward Kaźmierski

Edward Kaźmierski was a Polish Catholic layman, born on 1 October 1919 in Poznań in the newly restored Polish state, and one of five young men from that city who were put to death by the Nazi German occupation authorities in 1942. He grew up in modest, working-class circumstances and, after the death of his father, helped to support his family. He received a basic schooling and trained for manual work. His religious formation took place above all at the Salesian oratory of St John Bosco on Wroniecka Street in Poznań, a centre of youth apostolate in the tradition of St John Bosco. Among companions there he was remembered for musical gifts, including singing and playing instruments, and for a cheerful and devout character. He was not a professed member of the Salesian congregation, but a young layman of the oratory circle.

Together with Czesław Jóźwiak, Franciszek Kęsy, Edward Klinik, and Jarogniew Wojciechowski, he belonged to a group of Catholic youths formed in Salesian spirituality. After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, the Poznań region was annexed to the Reich, Polish institutions were dismantled, and Catholic youth associations were suppressed and treated as politically suspect. In September 1940 the Gestapo arrested Kaźmierski and his companions. They were held first at Fort VII in Poznań, a Gestapo prison notorious for brutality, and were later moved through a succession of prisons, including Wronki, Berlin, and Zwickau, before being taken to Dresden.

The young men were accused of belonging to an illegal organization. In the logic of the occupation, their continued Catholic association and Polish identity were treated as a form of resistance. They were condemned to death. On 24 August 1942, in the prison at Dresden, Edward Kaźmierski was executed by guillotine together with the four other Poznań youths. He was twenty-two years old. Accounts preserved from prison chaplains and fellow inmates describe the group as remaining steadfast in faith through interrogation, trial, and the approach of death. After execution their bodies were disposed of according to the prison’s ordinary practice; no verified grave is known.

Their memory was kept especially among the Salesians and in the Archdiocese of Poznań. On 13 June 1999 Pope John Paul II beatified Edward Kaźmierski, with his four companions and many other Polish victims of wartime persecution, at a ceremony in Warsaw. They are numbered among the 108 Blessed Polish Martyrs of the Second World War, whose collective liturgical commemoration in Poland is 12 June; the Poznań five are also remembered on the anniversary of their execution. They have not been canonized. Kaźmierski is venerated as a blessed martyr of the Catholic Church and as a lay witness associated with the Salesian family.