Blessed Piotr Edward Dańkowski

Blessed Piotr Edward Dańkowski was a priest of the Archdiocese of Krakow, a curate and catechist in Zakopane. He died in the German concentration camp of Auschwitz on Good Friday 1942. He is one of the 108 Polish martyrs of the Second World War. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on April 3, the day of his death.

He was born on June 21, 1908, in Jordanów, into the family of Jan and Anna Dańkowski, who had a small farm; his father was also a shoemaker. Piotr attended the secondary school in Nowy Targ, and after his final examinations in 1926 he entered the seminary in Krakow. He was ordained a priest on February 1, 1931, in the Collegiate Church of Saint Anne in Krakow by Archbishop Adam Stefan Sapieha.

As a curate he worked in Pobiedr, today’s Paszkówka, in Sucha Beskidzka, and finally in the parish of the Holy Family in Zakopane. He taught religion, preached, and was confessor to the Albertine Sisters at Kalatówki. He was known for his zeal and his devotion to people, especially the poor. From his seminary days he kept a diary in which he recorded his struggles to be faithful to God.

After the outbreak of the war he joined the underground resistance under the pseudonym “Jordan.” Together with his brother Stanisław he monitored radio broadcasts and prepared bulletins, and he also helped people who were fleeing abroad through Zakopane to escape repression. He was warned that he would be arrested, but he did not want to leave the post to which his bishop had sent him. The Germans arrested him on May 10, 1941. He was interrogated in the Gestapo torture house in Zakopane known as the “Palace,” and then imprisoned in Tarnów.

In December 1941 he was taken to the Auschwitz camp, where he received the number 24529. In severe frost he dug ditches at the construction site of a chemical plant. He worked there with a friend from the seminary, Father Władysław Puczka, who survived the camp and described his last weeks. According to him, Father Piotr kept his serenity and supported those who were breaking down. In March 1942, already ill, he was sent to the camp then being built at Brzezinka (Birkenau), where a kapo tormented him because he was a priest.

On Palm Sunday the kapo announced to him a way of the cross and death for Holy Week. In the days that followed he was beaten and forced to carry a heavy wooden beam. On Good Friday, April 3, 1942, before dawn, Father Puczka found him dying by the wall of the barrack and gave him absolution. He heard his friend’s farewell: “See you in heaven!” Father Piotr died that same day, at the age of 33. The Holy See’s decree on his martyrdom states that he met his death as a result of torture.

Pope John Paul II beatified him on June 13, 1999, in Warsaw, among the 108 martyrs of the Second World War. In Poland their common memorial is kept on June 12. Blessed Piotr is the patron of priestly vocations in the Archdiocese of Krakow, and a school complex in his native Jordanów bears his name.