Józef Cyrek


Józef Cyrek was a Polish Jesuit and writer who shortly after the Nazi invasion of Poland was arrested by the Gestapo, imprisoned at several places of detention, and lastly deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp where he was murdered.
He has in recent years been accorded the title of Servant of God and is in the process of being beatified by the Catholic Church.

Life and death

Józef Cyrek was born in Bysina, a village some south of Kraków, on 13 September 1904 – when the area was under Austrian occupation – to the family of Józef Cyrek, a farmer, and his wife Barbara née Sobal who died when Cyrek was 18-months' old. Cyrek was thus from his earliest years inured to physical work having been obliged to help out with the agricultural work of the family. He went to school at Bysina and at nearby Myślenice, continuing secondary education in Kraków and in Pińsk in Poland. During his secondary studies he entered the Society at Stara Wieś on 6 December 1924. He studied in Kraków at Jagiellonian University and in Belgium at Louvain, where he also took holy orders on 24 August 1934. After his return to Poland in 1935 Cyrek worked for the religious publisher, the Wydawnictwo Apostolstwa Modlitwy of Kraków, the oldest Catholic publishing house in Poland. In 1938 he became the editor of the periodical Hostia, an organ of the Eucharistic Crusade, becoming the chief secretary of the movement. In May of the same year he participated in the 34th Eucharistic Congress in Budapest.
As a writer Cyrek authored two biographies, one of Piotr Skarga, a Counter-Reformation figure whose sermons have been compared with those of Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet ; and another of Stanislaus Kostka, a Polish saint of the sixteenth century who at the age of 16 fled from his boarding school to pursue a religious vocation and died of malaria two years later : Cyrek's biography of Kostka was published in 1937. It is however the simple catechism that Cyrek wrote for children in 1938 that has been most widely praised, and awarded with a prize by the government of the Second Polish Republic. He was also a prolific contributor to such periodicals as Przegląd Powszechny, Wiara i Życie, Misje Katolickie, Młody Las, and Posłaniec Serca Jezusowego, an organ of the Apostleship of Prayer movement.
On 6 November 1939, just sixty-six days after the Nazi invasion of Poland, the Gestapo carried out the so-called Sonderaktion Krakau, an operation in which virtually all of the professors of the Jagiellonian University of Kraków were arrested and imprisoned in the ulica Montelupich as part of the larger plan of Nazi Germany to eliminate all Polish intelligentsia.
Four days later, on 10 November 1939, Cyrek was arrested by the Gestapo together with 24 other Jesuits of the Jesuit College of Kraków – eight of them employees of the Jesuit publishing house Wydawnictwo Apostolstwa Modlitwy – and likewise imprisoned in the ulica Montelupich Prison. Although the Jesuits were never informed of the reasons for their arrest, it was clear that they opposed the vision of the Nazis and for that reason were treated as the enemies of the Third Reich.
After a detention of days in duration at Montelupich, Dembowski was transferred on or about 23 December 1939, together with the other arrested Jesuits, to another notorious Gestapo prison at Nowy Wiśnicz, in reality a Nazi extermination camp in which prisoners were worked to death. On 20 June 1940, after six months at Nowy Wiśnicz, Cyrek, together with the other Jesuit prisoners, was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, then in the process of being formed.
At Auschwitz Cyrek was accorded a particularly brutal treatment in a penal company, the so-called Straf­kompanie consisting of several prisoners whose gruelling tasks in­clud­ed pushing an enormous road roller with which they had to level the Appellplatz. In addition, he was singled out for special tortures associated with the taunts directed at his Christian faith described in a recent book by Iwona Urbańska. Cyrek died in the camp's Revier or infirmary – as a result of exhaustion, starvation, and the beatings he had received – on 2 Sep­tem­ber 1940, that is, seventy-four days after arrival. He was the first of the group of 25 Jesuit prisoners arrested on 10 November 1939 to die in captivity. Cyrek was 35-years' old – just eleven days short of his thirty-sixth birthday. His personality has been described in his Auschwitz memoirs by a fellow prisoner, Adam Kozłowiecki, the future cardinal, who speaks of Cyrek's "extraordinary goodness and his delicacy in his engagement with his social environment". The Belgian magazine Lumen Vitae sums up his life by observing that:
The fate of Fr. Cyrek is rather symptomatic of the plight of the Church in Poland all through the long dark years of the war and of the Nazi occupation.

Józef Cyrek is currently one of the 122 Polish martyrs of the Second World War who are included in the beatification process initiated in 1994, whose first beatifica­tion session was held in Warsaw in 2003. A person nominated for beatification receives within the Roman Catholic Church the title of "Servant of God"; once he is ac­tu­al­ly beatified he is accorded the title of "Blessed", a prerequisite for sainthood conferred in a process known as canonization.
Cyrek's name is incorporated in the bronze plaque that hangs on a courtyard wall outside the Finucane Jesuit Center at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Missouri, commemorating 152 Jesuit victims of the Nazis during the Second World War.

Works

  • Wielki sługa Boży ks. Piotr Skarga Towarzystwa Jezusowego
  • Twój wzór św. Stanisława Kostka: dla młodzieży polskiej
  • Katechizm dla polskich dzieci
  • Adoracje dla Krucjaty Eucharystycznej
  • ''Katechizm: wydanie nowe katechizmu Józefa Cyrka dostosowane do wymagań Soboru Watykańskiego II''

Works by others edited by Józef Cyrek

  • Józef Bok, ''Przewodnik Krucjaty Eucharystycznej czyli Rycerstwa Jezusowego''