From Dachau to Oak Ridge

OAK RIDGE  April 29 marked the 75th anniversary of the U.S. Army’s liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. Less than two weeks before World War II ended in Europe, U.S. soldiers took over the camp, on the outskirts of Munich, only to find more than three dozen railroad cars full of corpses and a camp full of dying prisoners. For a long time, because American troops had freed Dachau (unlike Auschwitz, liberated by the Red Army) that concentration camp had epitomized Nazi brutality in the American mind.

But did you know Dachau had some connection to the Diocese of Paterson?

In the Oak Ridge section of Jefferson Township, on the border of Passaic and Morris counties, stands St. Stanislaus Bishop and Martyr Friary. It was founded by Polish priests freed from Dachau.

Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp, was a special destination for priests: more than 2,700 were interned there. Most of those prisoners were Polish.

After World War II, some of those priests stayed in the West, either to avoid returning to a Poland upon which the Iron Curtain was descending, to pick up their educations again, or to raise funds to rebuild churches destroyed in Poland.

Among them was a group of Polish Capuchins. Father Alexis Lechanski was asked by his superiors to go to the United States to collect money for devastated Capuchin monasteries in his home country. He arrived in New York in 1947.

While at St. John the Baptist, Manhat­tan’s Capuchin parish next to Madison Square Garden, he met Bishop Eugene McGuinness, soon to become Bishop of Oklahoma City-Tulsa. McGuinness needed priests, specifically for a parish in Broken Arrow. Not far from Tulsa, St. Anne’s was in an area where Catholics were few and the Ku Klux Klan active. Father Alexis took the assignment. Eventually, five other priests from “the Class of Dachau” would pass through Broken Arrow: Fathers Hyacinth Dabrowski and his brother Robert, Wacław Karas, Jan Salwowski, and Rafal Nienal­towski. The Capuchins eventually handed the parish back to the Diocese of Tulsa in the 1990s.

Oklahoma has few Polish Americans, and the Polish Capuchins also wanted to minister to their fellow countrymen. Eventually, they made their way back East, primarily to New Jersey, which had numerous Polish parishes in the then-Dioceses of Paterson and Trenton (including what is now Metuchen).

To understand how the Capuchins arrived in Oak Ridge, however, requires a detour in history. In the early 20th century, Alfred T. Ringling (of circus fame) began building a manor for himself in Oak Ridge, where he could retire in the winter when the circus was not on tour. Built during World War I, Ringling Manor was designed as a bunker, with 20-inch stone walls, sitting astride a substantial plot of land.

Ringling lived there until 1919. In the late 1940s, the house came into the possession of the Spes Foundation, a Polish American organization engaged in resistance to the communist regime in Poland. The Capuchins, as religious with a community charism, were looking for a common home and, by the late 1950s, the Spes Foundation made Ringling Manor available to them. They bought the property outright in 1967 and it was canonically erected as St. Stanislaus Friary in 1973.

The Polish Capuchins of St. Stanislaus helped staff Polish parishes in New Jersey. Among the places they served in the Diocese of Paterson were Holy Rosary and St. Joseph’s parishes in Passaic. Capuchin Father Zygmunt Klimowicz, Dachau Prisoner No. 22461, served in both parishes. Born June 22, 1914, he arrived in Dachau in December 1940, after a previous stay in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin. He spent four years and four months in Dachau, until American soldiers liberated him April 29, 1945. Father Klimowicz was an expert in Esperanto, a language devised in 1887 as a possible universal tongue to foster communications between people. Despite his expertise, however, his humility was greater: when he died in 1997, he refused a headstone. Buried in the Capuchin plot at Sacred Heart Cemetery in Manville, his grave is covered in grass.

Capuchin Father Waclaw Karas, Dachau Prisoner No. 46505, also served in both Passaic parishes as well as St. Hedwig’s in Trenton and St. Adalbert’s in Philadelphia.

Other places where the Polish Capuchins served in the Garden State outside the Paterson Diocese include Bayonne, in the Archdiocese of Newark; Manville, New Brunswick, and Perth Amboy in the Diocese of Metuchen; and Trenton. (One, Father Rafal Nienaltowski, was a faculty member at Fordham University in the Bronx, N.Y.)

As the world notes end-of-war anniversaries, recalling the liberation of Dachau, we should not forget that the priests of Dachau also helped build the Church in New Jersey.