Jarogniew Wojciechowski

Jarogniew Wojciechowski was a Polish Roman Catholic layman, scout, and youth of the Salesian oratory who was executed by the Nazi German authorities during the Second World War. He was born in 1922 in Poznań, in the Second Polish Republic, and grew up in a Catholic milieu in that city. As a boy and adolescent he frequented the Salesian oratory on Wroniecka Street in Poznań, a centre of pastoral care for young people run by the Salesians of Don Bosco, and he belonged to the Polish scouting movement. With several close companions from the same oratory—later remembered together as the Poznań Five—he received a formation that combined Catholic faith, patriotism, and service to others. He held no ecclesiastical office and was not a member of a religious order.

After the German invasion of Poland in 1939 and the occupation of Poznań, which was annexed to the Reich, clandestine education, scouting, and small-scale resistance continued among the oratory youth. In September 1940 Wojciechowski and his four friends were arrested by the Gestapo and accused of illegal organizational activity and anti-German conduct. The prisoners were held first in Fort VII in Poznań, then moved through a succession of prisons, including Wronki and facilities inside the Reich, before being brought to Dresden.

In 1942 a German court condemned them to death. On 24 August 1942 Wojciechowski, then nineteen years of age, was put to death by guillotine in Dresden together with Czesław Jóźwiak, Edward Kaźmierski, Franciszek Kęsy, and Edward Klinik. Catholic tradition presents the young men as having faced imprisonment and execution with religious faith. Their bodies were not returned to their families, and the precise place of burial remains unknown.

Wojciechowski was beatified by Pope John Paul II on 13 June 1999 in Warsaw as one of the 108 Martyrs of the Second World War, a group of Polish clergy and laity killed under the Nazi occupation and honoured for dying in odium fidei. The 108 are commemorated collectively on 12 June. Devotion to the Poznań Five has been cultivated especially in Poznań and among Salesian and scouting circles in Poland, where they are remembered as models of youthful fidelity. He was unmarried and had no children.