A survivor honours Mary - Ed Campion
Henryk Skrzynski
Auschwitz – how did one survive it? The Nazi death camp has become a symbol of 20th century evil whose meanings are still being plumbed. Not everyone sent to Auschwitz, however, died there; and each story of survival carries precious lessons about the human spirit.
Henryk Skrzynski is one such. Facing Auschwitz, he compiled a small anthology of biblical texts which he hid in his clothing. From Our Lord’s own prayerbook, the psalter, he took Psalm 110 with its strong words of trust in the justice of God: ‘His justice stands firm forever … He has sent deliverance to his people.’ Another text was from the epistle to the Romans, chapter 12: ‘Let hope keep you joyful; in trouble stand firm; persist in prayer … Call down blessings on your persecutors—blessings, not curses.’
The prisoner’s ‘mini Bible’ gave him the intellectual strength to withstand temptations to despair. Allied to this was his profound devotional life, especially his devotion to Mary, the Mother of God. Afterwards, Henryk Skrzynski spoke rarely of his experience in Auschwitz (and Sachsenhausen camp in Germany, where he was relocated), but he always said that devotion to Mary was the key to his getting through. He took a vow that, if he survived, he would honour her in some special way.
Son of a diplomat, with one uncle Poland’s foreign minister while another was Polish ambassador in Rome, Henryk was destined for a diplomatic career. He had graduated in law from Warsaw University and had done military service with the reserve officer corps of the Polish cavalry. Although for patriotic reasons he did not use the title, he was a Count of the Holy Roman Empire. In l939, on the eve of war, he married someone he had known in law school.
With their defeat by Hitler’s forces, many Polish officers went east to regroup. Not trusting the Russians, Skrzynski’s wife persuaded him to return to Poland, thus saving him from the massacre of the Katyn forest, when Stalin’s henchmen wiped out the Polish officers—but at the price of being arrested by the Gestapo and three and a half years in the camps.
After the war, reunited in the British sector of Germany, where two sons were born, they applied for admission to Australia as refugees. Their ship arrived in Melbourne on the first Tuesday of November 1950—Melbourne Cup Day—and they had to stay on board because there was no one working the wharves. It was a sudden insight into the culture of their new country.
Other insights would follow. Their law degrees were not recognised here and, anyway, Henryk had to fulfil his refugee contract of two years manual labour. He put his family into migrant camps and went to work for the Water Board. Later he would qualify as an accountant and find employment in the Taxation Office. In some ways his life in Australia would carry lessons as significant as those from his life in the Nazi camps.
Speaking at Henryk’s funeral, in 2008, his son Joseph said: ‘He went from having money, property, status and servants in Poland, to being a slave in concentration camps, a day labourer for the Water Board in tent housing at Hornsby, and then living modestly in Double Bay. Rather than spend his days clawing his way back up the material ladder, he built a life rich in family, faith and intellectual treasures.’
Rich his life certainly was. Once helpless in a kitchen, he became a notable cook. He mixed easily with artists and painted watercolours. He came to love the Australian bush, each year loading up the Kombi van and heading to North Queensland, camping in national parks on the way. He loved opera and filled the family flat with music. His intellectual life remained underpinned by his Catholic faith, in the line of Aquinas, Erasmus and Jacques Maritain, as his son Matthias once said. After Mass he was known to dispute the sermon with the priest.
And the vow to honour Our Lady in a special way? Retired from the Taxation Office, he researched her life for five years then sat down and wrote The Jewish Mary, Mother of Jesus. Biographical details of Mary’s life are sparse yet he quarried his book from her everyday life as a Palestinian woman 2000 years ago, largely by using rabbinical Jewish sources. Published in 1994, this life of Mary is unique in Australian scholarship. Its author had fulfilled his vow nobly.
A Jewish girl named Mary
At first, little Mary, like other girls her age, had dolls (many made of baked clay have been found in excavations), and she played with other children in the streets of Nazareth. But from an early age, while she was growing up. Mary would learn from her mother all the domestic and womanly duties. ‘Like mother—like daughter’ was an old Jewish proverb, dating from Ezekiel’s time.
Mary had to learn how to grind barley and wheat on the hand-mill, a heavy job; to cook, to bake bread, to make the Sabbath cakes, and to separate the dough for the priestly tithe as prescribed in scriptures. She was taught the complicated arcana of the dietary laws which applied to the prepatration of daily meals, about the clean and unclean animals.
In the rural setting of Nazareth, Mary, no doubt, took part in all the work usually performed by the members of her family in the garden and field. She would attend the domestic animals, perhaps milk the house goat, glean in the fields, help with the harvest of grapes, figs and olives. She would learn how to card flax, how to spin and weave, and to make clothes. And twice daily Mary would be sent with a big jug to fetch water from the spring.
Judging from the Magnificat, Mary had a good knowledge of scriptures. As a rule, girls were not given much religious instruction. There was no point, the sages insisted, in teaching girls the Law since women had no part in it, did not participate in the temple ritual, nor in the synagogue service.
(From The Jewish Mary: Jewish Women’s Life in Palestine Two Thousand Years Ago, Henryk Skryznski, Chevalier Press, 2002)
