Karol Darmoros – Heschel Center News
Family memory
For Sylwia Sztark, the figure of Father Adam Sztark, her grandfather’s brother, took on new meanings over the years. “For me, above all, he was a Righteous Among the Nations,” she says. When he was honored by the Yad Vashem Institute in 2001, she was in high school. “I was very moved and proud at the same time when I learned that Adam had been awarded this medal,” she recalls.
Only later, after reading documents from the Jesuit archives, personal notes, and witness accounts, did she see him not only as a Righteous person, but also as a clergyman, a candidate for sainthood, and a hero. “I try to think of him as a specific person who simply lived in terribly difficult times,” she emphasizes.
A decision, not a gesture
In Słonim, Polesie, occupied by the Germans, Father Sztark hid Jews on the parish grounds, organized shelter, and cooperated with Sisters Ewa Noiszewska and Marta Wołowska, who rescued Jewish children and families. Together with parishioners, he donated a golden cross, helping to raise the ransom imposed by the Germans. One of those saved was Jureczek Glikson, today Jerry Glickson, a professor of radiology at Pennsylvania University.
“Adam was simply tireless,” Sylwia Sztark notes. She adds that her great-uncle, the only Polish Jesuit Righteous Among the Nations, also did other risky things. “He would enter the hospital in disguise to hear confessions or go to prison to encourage those condemned,” the Heschel Center News interviewee lists.
As she points out, these were not one-time gestures, but a conscious and consistent decision to help people. On December 19, 1942, Father Adam Sztark was shot by the Germans near Słonim.
Memory that obliges
“I think these two dimensions beautifully complement each other,” Sylwia Sztark says about the title of Righteous and the beatification process. Currently, it is being conducted under the title “The Cause for the Beatification of the Servants of God Fr. Adam Sztark and XVI Companions.”
Asked about the message of this story for young people, Sylwia Sztark first points to family memory: she encourages talking to loved ones, asking about ancestors, and not letting people and their stories fall into oblivion. She emphasizes that “there is no return from oblivion.” In Father Adam’s testimony, she also sees a lesson in courage, understood not as an absence of fear, but as a decision to act for the good of another person despite fear.
