Blessed Józef Kowalski

Blessed Józef Kowalski was a Salesian, a priest, and a martyr. He worked among young people in Krakow and died in 1942 in the German concentration camp of Auschwitz. His martyrdom was hastened by his refusal to trample on his rosary. He is one of the 108 Polish martyrs of the Second World War. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on July 4, the day of his death.

He was born on March 13, 1911, in Siedliska near Rzeszów, into a peasant family. In 1922 he began his studies at the Salesian school in Oświęcim, the town where he would die twenty years later. In his spiritual diary he wrote that he must become a saint. In 1927 he entered the Salesian novitiate at Czerwińsk on the Vistula, and the following year he made his first religious vows.

He studied philosophy and theology in Krakow, and there in 1938 he was ordained a priest. He became secretary to the Salesian inspector, that is, the provincial superior, Father Adam Cieślar. He also worked in the parish of Saint Stanislaus Kostka in Dębniki, run by the Salesians: he preached, heard confessions, led a youth choir, and looked after the most difficult boys. The young Karol Wojtyła then took part in the life of this parish, and years later he recalled that the Nazis had deported the Salesians who ran it to a concentration camp.

On May 23, 1941, the Gestapo arrested him together with eleven other Salesians working in Krakow. After a month in Montelupich prison, on June 26 he was taken to Auschwitz, where he received the number 17350. The next day the superior of the Krakow house, Father Jan Świerc, and Father Ignacy Dobiasz died there. Father Józef, though he himself was beaten, secretly heard confessions, celebrated Mass, led the rosary, and kept up the spirits of his fellow prisoners.

In 1942 he was to be sent with a group of priests to Dachau. During the bath before the transport a rosary was found on him, and he was ordered to trample on it. He refused. He was removed from the transport and assigned to the penal company, where he worked beyond his strength, beaten and humiliated by the kapos. On July 3 he was tormented all day long, and on July 4, 1942, he died from the torture. According to the Salesian postulation, his body was thrown into a barrel of excrement and then burned in the camp crematorium.

The Holy See recognized his martyrdom by a decree of March 26, 1999, and John Paul II beatified him on June 13, 1999, in Warsaw among the 108 martyrs of the Second World War. In Poland they are commemorated together on June 12, and the Salesians keep Father Józef’s memorial on May 29. On June 6, 2026, nine of his confreres, among them Fathers Świerc and Dobiasz, were beatified in Krakow.