Prison and Deportation, #6
A French Bishop in the Dachau Concentration Camp
My translation of Msgr. Gabriel Piguet’s memoir Prison and Deportation is now available for purchase, so this excerpt will be the last I post to Substack.
If you would like to read the rest of the book, please buy a copy from The Obolus Press web site: the paperback is $12.85 USD (plus shipping), and the e-book is $8.99 USD (if you buy directly you will get both a PDF and an ePub, without DRM).
As a matter of principle I refuse to deal with Amazon, but if you prefer you can also download a copy from the Apple and Kobo e-bookstores — albeit at a higher price.
I’ll return to Marius Vachon’s biography of William Bouguereau next week.
From Chapter 8
Blocks 28 and 26
Before being assigned to Block 26 on Monday, 25 September I spent a little while in Block 28. It was occupied by 800 Polish priests. These confrères received me with both kindness and veneration. They had endured some terrible times. Several of their old priests, deemed useless, had been sent to the gas chamber.
One of their bishops, His Excellency Msgr. Kosal, had been arrested a few days after his appointment. He died of exhaustion in the Dachau camp after having been worked like a convict. Despite remonstrances from his fellow citizens, his remains were consumed in the crematorium like everyone else's.
One day, a Polish priest dropped his rosary and a guard ordered him to trample on this pious object. He refused to participate in such a sacrilegious act and was killed on the spot.
All of these details were related to me by Polish priests who witnessed these atrocities.
When I reported this last incident to the pope in October 1945, Pius XII raised his arms and exclaimed with fatherly emotion: “But he is a martyr!”
The situation of the Polish priests in September 1944 was not very good, and it never would be, even in the best conditions of a concentration camp, but their lives were nevertheless less tragic than they had been earlier. Right up to the end, there were terrible moments in Dachau; before 1944 they were even more tyrannical in the persecution and humiliation that they inflicted on people.
Little by little, the Poles had managed to organise themselves — as people tend to do with varying degrees of success, even in the absence of freedom. The Polish priests were all gathered together in Block 28, and their fellow countrymen formed a significant portion of the camp's population. They understood and spoke German and therefore occupied quite a few positions, many of them advantageous ones. Only those who have experienced the concentration camps know how many components they had; they worked like a network of strings, and pulling on the right one could yield a result. I myself relied on Polish intermediaries to do favours for some of my friends who were in difficult situations.
However, while the chapel could be used by other priests, the Poles were stilled denied entry. They were reduced to celebrating a single Mass for everyone on Sundays. It was done in secret, without daring to put on liturgical costumes and only once they had protected themselves by putting someone on the watch, who would then raise the alarm should an unexpected visitor arrive. The extent of these precautions show the risk they faced by undertaking these acts, and the seriousness of the sanctions they would have faced if discovered. Everyone feared the threats made by those in positions of power after they saw the executions that followed, and the Poles were certainly not the only ones to be punished for their disobedience.
On Sunday 24 September, the Polish priests did me the honour of inviting me to say Sunday Mass among them. I had not been able to celebrate the divine office since my departure from Clermont on 20 August, and I gratefully accepted the invitation. Everything went smoothly; the vigilant sentries did not report anything unusual that might hinder the ceremony and force me to hide the communion wafers temporarily.
It was the only time in my life that I had stood at an altar — and what an altar it was! — under such conditions. I still remember it vividly. A deported French bishop celebrated Mass in the midst of several hundred Polish priests who had also been deported, and we did so under a repressive regime that had made it a criminal office for a member of the clergy to perform a regular religious act. There was a sharp contrast between the Nazis' hideous and completely abject persecution of religion and their inhuman concentration camps and the unity, faith, and charity of the priesthood, and the unique grandeur and splendour of the Catholic Church.
Looking back, I think I may add that men will never be able to rebuild the world if these accounts and memories of the fall of Nazi tyranny do not open the path to freedom and make room for good conscience and spiritual forces — they alone can change an atmosphere that was poisoned by collapsing materialism, and they alone lay the foundations for social and international structures that are opposed to misguided and murderous ideologies.
In 1949, the Académie Française awarded this memoir the Prix Louis-Paul Miller. Msgr. Piguet was recognized as one of the Righteous Among the Nations in 2001.
This is the first English translation.
Thank you for translating and sharing this.
You’ve sold me. Thank you for bringing this to my attention. This is why I’m here. You’re doing great work.