Hilary Paweł Januszewski

Hilary Paweł Januszewski was a Polish Carmelite priest and one of the Catholic martyrs of the German occupation of Poland during the Second World War. He was born Paweł Januszewski on 11 June 1907 in Krajenka, a small town in the Prussian partition of historic Polish lands, then under the German Empire. Of Polish Catholic family background, he entered the Order of the Brothers of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel (the Carmelites of the Ancient Observance) in 1927 and took the religious name Hilary. After novitiate and studies in Poland he was sent to Rome for theology, was ordained a priest in 1934, and completed a doctorate in theology before returning to his province.

Back in Kraków he taught Carmelite students and in 1939, still a young priest, was appointed prior of the Kraków Carmelite monastery. After the German invasion of Poland, religious communities were subjected to surveillance and arrests by the Gestapo. In 1940 occupying authorities detained Father Hilary together with other members of the house. As prior he accepted the fate of his community and was taken into custody with them. He passed through prison in Kraków, then the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and was later transferred to Dachau, the camp in Bavaria where the Nazi regime confined large numbers of Catholic priests from Poland and elsewhere.

At Dachau he endured the forced labour, overcrowding, and anti-clerical persecution imposed on priest-prisoners. In the last months of the war a typhus epidemic spread through the camp. Father Hilary volunteered to serve the infected in the isolation blocks, continuing a ministry of presence among the sick. He contracted typhus and died on 25 March 1945, only weeks before American forces liberated the camp. Like countless other Dachau dead, he has no known individual grave.

Pope John Paul II beatified him in Warsaw on 13 June 1999 as one of the 108 Martyrs of World War II, Polish clergy, religious, and laity killed in odium fidei under the occupation. In the liturgical calendar of Poland their collective memorial falls on 12 June. Within the Carmelite Order he is remembered as a prior who shared his brothers’ imprisonment and as a priest who gave his life caring for the sick in the camp.