Henryk Sławik 1894 - 1944

Born 15.7.1894 in Jastrzębie-Zdró
Died 23.8.1944 in Mauthausen

Biography

In October 2013, 69 years after his murder in Mauthausen, the Viennese embassy of the Republic of Poland brought the memorial ceremonies organised in cooperation with the Hungarian embassy in Vienna for the chairman of the ‘Civic Committee for the Support of Polish Refugees in Hungary’, Henryk Sławik, posthumously declared as ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ by the Yad Vashem memorial in 1990, to a close with a large event. A few months earlier, on 5 May 2013, a memorial plaque for Sławik and his co-workers had been unveiled on the grounds of the former Mauthausen concentration camp in the presence of the Austrian Federal President Heinz Fischer by the President of the Republic of Poland Bronisław Komorowski and the President of Hungary János Áder.

This event included the screening of the documentary film by Grzegorz Łubczyk and Mark Maldis Henryk Sławik – Polish Wallenberg (Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who saved countless Hungarian Jews from deportation and murder in 1944/45 and who was deported to Russia in 1947, disappearing without trace) and a discussion commemorating Henryk Sławik, who was active until 1944, and his institution, as well as others who helped to prevent the deportation and murder of those persecuted during the Nazi era.

Henryk Sławik was born on 16 July 1894 in Jastrzębie-Zdró as the child of smallholders. He graduated from grammar school and took part in the First World War as a volunteer in the Polish army. In 1918 Sławik joined the Polish Socialist Party, worked on the Silesian referendum and began to write as a journalist for the Gazeta Robotnicza, whose editor he became one year later. In 1922 Sławik took over as president of the workers’ youth association Siła. In 1928 he married Jadwiga Purzycka from Warsaw. In 1929 he became a councillor in Katowice. He was a fierce opponent of the politics of Sanacja (‘healing’) introduced in 1926 by the authoritarian government under Józef Piłsudski. From 1934 to 1939 Sławik was president of the Polish Association of Journalists for Upper and Lower Silesia.

After the German attack on Poland on 1 September 1939 and the invasion of the Soviet Union on 17 September 1939, which were to divide Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union, Sławik left Poland and was interned in a Hungarian camp near Miskolc. He was one of those listed on the National Socialists’ ‘Special Wanted List for Poland’. In the internment camp near Miskolc, the authorised agent for supporting civilian refugees in Hungary, Józef Antal (father of the later Hungarian prime minister of the same name) met Sławik and, on the basis of Sławik’s good knowledge of German, found a use for him in his operation. The Komitet Obywatelski ds. Opieki nad Polskimi Uchodźcami (Civic Committee for the Support of Polish Refugees) was founded to find work for the Polish refugees in Hungary, to set up schools and orphanages, and to enable emigration to secure countries of exile. (From 1940 Hungary deported non-Hungarian Jews to the General Government of Galicia, where they were at risk of being seized by the Germans.) Sławik began to issue false passports to his fellow Jewish citizens and helped to establish a home for Polish Jewish orphans in Vác, which was officially an orphanage for the children of Polish officers.

On 19 March 1944 the National Socialists occupied Hungary. Through an agreement with the officer responsible for the camp of Polish Jews, Sławik was able to get the inmates of the camp to safety away from the Nazis. The Jewish children in the orphanage in Vác were also evacuated in time. He could not save himself. On the orders of the Reich Chief of the SS Heinrich Himmler, Sławik was deported to the Gusen I concentration camp (Mauthausen II or ‘Polish camp’) for execution and hanged there on 23 August 1944. At the time of Sławik’s arrival, Gusen I had long been a Grade III concentration camp to which prisoners in the category ‘Rückkehr unerwünscht‘ (‘return undesirable’) were sent.

Henryk Sławik and his organisation were able to save around 30,000 Polish refugees who had fled to Hungary, around 5,000 of whom were Jewish. Both the Communist governments of Poland and Hungary and today’s Poland and today’s Hungary have honoured the extraordinary achievements of Sławik and his organisation.

Jadwiga Sławik, Henryk Sławik’s wife, survived the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp and after the war was reunited with her daughter, who had been hidden from the National Socialists by the Antall family.

 

Gerhard Ruiss

Translation into English: Joanna White

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