Blessed Grzegorz Bolesław Frąckowiak

Blessed Grzegorz Bolesław Frąckowiak was a religious brother of the Society of the Divine Word, that is, a Divine Word Missionary. During the Second World War he took on himself the blame for distributing an underground newspaper in order to save others, among them fathers of families. He was beheaded in Dresden. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on May 5, the day of his death.

He was born in July 1911 in Łowęcice near Jarocin in Greater Poland and was baptized Bolesław. He was the eighth of twelve children in a farming family. When the Divine Word Missionaries took over the house in nearby Bruczków in 1927, his parents sent him there to the minor mission seminary. Studies came hard to him, however, and he was advised to follow his vocation as a religious brother.

He was accepted at the Divine Word house in Górna Grupa near Grudziądz, which had the postulancy and novitiate for brothers. After a year of postulancy, on September 8, 1930, he received the habit and the religious name Grzegorz (Gregory). At the house’s printing press he learned bookbinding and bound books for the whole community, and at the door he received the poor with great care. He made his perpetual vows on September 8, 1938.

After the outbreak of the war the Germans set up an internment camp for clergy in the house at Górna Grupa, and Brother Grzegorz eventually had to leave. During the occupation he taught children the catechism, prepared them for First Communion, and visited the sick. When the Gestapo arrested the local priest, he took care of the Blessed Sacrament left behind. The faithful kept watch before it all night, and in the morning Brother Grzegorz gave them Communion.

He was assigned to work at a printing house in Jarocin. For a time he passed on the underground newspaper “Dla Ciebie, Polsko” (For You, Poland), but on the advice of a confrere, Father Paweł Kiczka, he stopped. When the Gestapo tracked down those distributing it and began making arrests, he had had nothing to do with the paper for almost a year and could have gone into hiding. Instead he asked Father Kiczka whether he might offer himself for those imprisoned, went to confession, received Communion, and the next day, in 1942, he was in prison. He took the blame on himself, and some of those detained were released. He explained to his brother that he had taken everything on himself because he had no family, while his uncle, also implicated, had a wife and children.

He was held in Jarocin, in Środa Wielkopolska, and in Fort VII in Poznań. He was beaten and tortured, and when the guards found a medal sewn into his cap and learned that he was a religious, they abused him with particular cruelty. His fellow prisoners remembered that every day he led them in the rosary. In Dresden he was sentenced to death, and on May 5, 1943, he was beheaded. A few hours earlier he wrote a letter to his family, asking for prayer and forgiveness.

John Paul II beatified him on June 13, 1999, in Warsaw among the 108 martyrs of the Second World War, whose common memorial he assigned to June 12.