In a June 7 ceremony attended by Church and government leaders, the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation named the Church of All Saints in the Warsaw Ghetto a “house of life.”
Father Marceli Godlewski, the parish priest during World War II, “provided shelter and food to Jews within the walls of this church, even though he realized that offering any kind of assistance to Jews was punishable by death,” said Samuel Tenembaum of the Foundation. Father Godlewski also issued hundreds of baptismal certificates to Jewish children.
The ghetto, created by the Nazis in 1940, was destroyed in 1943.
Andrzej Duda, Poland’s president since 2015, described Poles who assisted Jews during World War II as “the nation’s heroes.”