Michał Kozal

Michał Kozal was born on 27 September 1893 in the village of Nowy Folwark near Krotoszyn, in the Prussian Province of Posen of the German Empire, into a Polish Catholic family of modest rural means. He received his secondary education at the gymnasium in Krotoszyn and then entered the seminary that served the archdioceses of Poznań and Gniezno. He was ordained a priest on 23 February 1918. In the years immediately after ordination he worked in parish ministry as a vicar in Greater Poland, during the close of the First World War and the restoration of an independent Polish state.

From the early 1920s Kozal was assigned to the seminary in Gniezno, where he taught and served as spiritual director of the seminarians. He spent much of the interwar period in the formation of clergy and was known for personal austerity, doctrinal seriousness, and attention to the spiritual life of future priests. On 10 June 1939 Pope Pius XII appointed him auxiliary bishop of Włocławek and titular bishop of Lappa. He was consecrated bishop on 13 August 1939 by Bishop Karol Mieczysław Radoński, only weeks before the German invasion of Poland. When war began and Bishop Radoński left the country, Kozal remained in Włocławek and took charge of the diocese under occupation, trying to keep pastoral life and clerical ministry in being despite the anti-Church policy of the German authorities in the Wartheland.

The Gestapo arrested him on 7 November 1939 together with other clergy. He was held first in the prison at Włocławek and then moved through further Nazi prisons. In 1940–1941 he was sent into the concentration-camp system; in 1941 he arrived at Dachau, which the SS used as a principal camp for imprisoned priests. There he lived under forced labor, hunger, and camp brutality, yet continued a clandestine pastoral ministry among the many Polish and other clergy interned with him, encouraging them to remain faithful and to support one another.

Typhus spread in Dachau in the winter of 1942–1943, and Kozal fell ill. On 26 January 1943 camp personnel killed him with a lethal injection of phenol; he was forty-nine years old. His body was cremated in the camp crematorium, and no burial place is known. Pope John Paul II beatified him in Warsaw on 14 June 1987 as one of the 108 Martyrs of World War II, Polish Catholics killed for the faith under German occupation. The Catholic Church commemorates him on 26 January. He has not been canonized.