Henryk Krzysztofik

Henryk Krzysztofik was a Polish Conventual Franciscan priest who died as a martyr in the Dachau concentration camp during the Second World War. He was born on 22 March 1908 in the village of Zachorzów in central Poland, in territory then under Russian imperial rule in the partitioned Polish lands. He entered the Order of Friars Minor Conventual, completed religious formation and theological studies in the interwar Polish province of the order, and was ordained a priest. In the 1930s he served in Franciscan pastoral ministry in Poland.

The German occupation of Poland that began in September 1939 was accompanied by a systematic assault on the Polish Catholic clergy, whom the occupiers treated as a pillar of national and religious identity. Krzysztofik was arrested by the Gestapo and, after detention in occupied Poland, was deported to Dachau in Bavaria. Dachau served as the principal concentration camp for Catholic priests from German-occupied Europe, and thousands of Polish clergy were imprisoned there. As a prisoner he endured forced labor, hunger, disease, and the camp’s brutal discipline.

He died in Dachau on 4 August 1942. After the war he was remembered among the Polish religious who had perished under National Socialism. On 13 June 1999 Pope John Paul II beatified him in Warsaw as one of the 108 Martyrs of World War II, a group of Polish bishops, priests, religious, and laypeople killed for their faith between 1939 and 1945. The group is liturgically commemorated on 12 June. Krzysztofik has not been canonized.

Surviving biographical notices of Krzysztofik are relatively brief, as is typical for many of the lesser-known members of that large beatification. The securely attested outline of his life is that of a Conventual Franciscan priest from rural central Poland who was caught up in the wartime destruction of the Polish Church and who died in Dachau. He is honored as a blessed of the Catholic Church and as a martyr of the Franciscan family.