Józef Jankowski

Józef Jankowski was a Polish Roman Catholic priest of the Society of the Catholic Apostolate (the Pallottines) who died in the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Second World War and was later beatified as a martyr. He was born on 17 November 1910 in the village of Czyczkowy in Pomerania. At the time of his birth the locality belonged to the German Empire; after the First World War it became part of the restored Polish state. He came from a large, devoutly Catholic farming family and entered Pallottine formation as a young man, completing novitiate and studies for the priesthood in the congregation’s houses.

He was ordained a priest in 1936. In the following years he was assigned especially to the Pallottine community at Ołtarzew near Warsaw, where he worked as an educator and formator of seminarians and undertook an active apostolate among young people. His ministry reflected the Pallottine charism of reviving faith and rekindling charity. After the German invasion of Poland in 1939 he remained at his post and continued priestly work under occupation.

In 1941 he was arrested by the Gestapo together with other Pallottines, imprisoned in Warsaw, and deported to Auschwitz. In the camp he was subjected to forced labor and the camp’s regime of terror. Fellow prisoners later recalled that he tried to support others spiritually and materially and to remain faithful to his identity as a priest. On 16 October 1941 he was killed in the camp at the age of thirty. Period accounts attribute his death either to a fatal beating by a prisoner-functionary or to phenol injection, methods then commonly used against clergy and other prisoners. Like the great majority of Auschwitz victims, he has no known grave.

On 13 June 1999 Pope John Paul II beatified him in Warsaw as one of the 108 Martyrs of World War II, Polish clergy, religious, and laity killed in odium fidei under the Nazi occupation. He is remembered by the Pallottines and by the Church in Poland as a youthful priest-martyr and a witness of fidelity under persecution. He has not been canonized.