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The Zone of Interest, the Academy Award-winning film that pictures the murderous hatred which eliminated several million Jews and others in Auschwitz by focusing on the commandant Rudolf Höss, his family and his home, has brought back memories of a wonderful Polish friend. Arrested on November 10, 1939, Anton Mruk (November 21, 1914–June 20, 2009) was among the first prisoners confined in what was to become the extermination camp of Auschwitz. He was tattooed with the number 898. At the time he belonged to the Jesuit order, but had not yet completed his studies and been ordained a priest.
In May 1940, Höss himself, after an apprenticeship served at the camp in Dachau (in Bavaria), arrived at Auschwitz (in Poland) for his first term as commandant (May 1940 to November 1943). One of Mruk’s prison duties now became cleaning Höss’s office.
This tribute appeared in a recent Quadrant.
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Mruk took the opportunity to switch on the radio and catch the BBC news. The SS commandant kept to a precise timetable and could be relied on to return exactly at the usual time. Listening to his radio was not unduly risky.
What took courage was sharing the news with other prisoners. One Judas could have sent Mruk to his death. In the end, what probably saved his life was being transferred from Auschwitz to Dachau. There the killing of inmates was widespread, but incidental. Before the end of the Second World War and the liberation of the 33,000 prisoners on April 29, 1945, ten Jesuits were murdered in Dachau. In all, the Nazis killed 868 Catholic priests there, but sabotage prevented the construction of functioning gas chambers. A total of 2720 clergy were incarcerated in Dachau; 2579 of these were Catholic priests and 1780 were priests brought there from Poland.
Mruk lined up with the other prisoners at Auschwitz on August 14, 1941, when the deputy commander allowed Maximilian Kolbe to die as a substitute for a layman, Franciszek Gajowniczek, who pleaded for his life and the chance to take care of his wife and children once the war ended. The Franciscan priest Kolbe stepped forward to take the place of Gajowniczek and die of starvation in a sealed bunker. In 1982 one of my Polish students at the Gregorian University looked after Gajowniczek when he came to Rome for Kolbe’s canonisation.
Mruk emerged from Dachau in 1945 starving but remarkably intact as a human being and Jesuit. He decided not to return to Poland but went to Rome, where he completed his studies for the priesthood between 1945 and 1949 and was ordained. After graduate studies in the history of moral theology, he began a lifelong stint as teacher and administrator at the Gregorian University in Rome. I arrived there in 1974 to become a professor of fundamental and systematic theology. I left the Gregorian in 2006.
Each November, to mark the anniversary of the day on which Mruk was arrested in 1939, I would invite him to my room and drink to his good health. He could indulge a streak of grim humour. “When the American General George Patton liberated me from Dachau in April 1945,” he recalled, “I once again could live in a Jesuit community. It was just outside Munich.” He added: “I noticed one difference at once. They rang bells throughout the day. In the camp the guards blew whistles and shouted at us.”
Occasionally Mruk asked me to help him with letters to the British consular authorities requesting visas for Jesuit students from Poland who wanted to spend a summer studying English in Oxford. Mruk was always ready to give a hand to anyone, and anyone included the Polish bishop and then cardinal, Karol Wojtyla. Over the years, Mruk’s jobs for him included advice when buying shoes on his visits to Rome.
After they met in Rome in 1946, Wojtyla asked Mruk to take on the task of being the official for the Vatican to “promote the cause” of a Polish nun, Faustina Kowalska. After she died from tuberculosis in 1938, her spiritual diary, which has now been translated into over twenty languages, spread devotion to the divine mercy revealed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Mruk had the satisfaction of seeing Kowalska declared “Blessed Faustina” in 1993 and then a canonised saint in 2000.
Two months after Wojtyla became Pope John Paul II in 1978, Mruk went up to the papal apartments in the Vatican for the first Christmas party in the new pontificate. The other Poles present included priests, seminarians and some nuns. The sing-song reached a number where, during his former days as a student chaplain in Poland, Karol Wojtyla would ask everybody to join hands in a circle. He invited his Roman guests to do the same. After Mruk hesitated to take the hand of the nun next to him, the Pope quipped: “I see Fr Mruk is not quite used to this.”
For many years John Paul II used to go to weekly confession to another Pole. But when that priest became incapacitated, the Pope asked Mruk to be his confessor. Every Saturday, Mruk would go across the old centre of Rome, past the Pantheon, the Piazza Navona and the Castel Sant’Angelo, and into the papal palace at the Vatican, and hear the Pope’s confession.
On the last Saturday of John Paul II’s life, he had lapsed into a coma. Mruk phoned the Pope’s personal secretary, who insisted that Mruk come all the same. He was there in the papal apartments on Saturday April 2, 2005, and shared an absolution and blessing before John Paul II died on the eve of Divine Mercy Sunday.
Four years later the soft-spoken, courageous Anton Mruk himself died—at the end of a pilgrimage that had taken him from the commandant’s office in Auschwitz to Vatican City and the papal home on the banks of the Tiber. I have never met anyone else whose daily experience of horrendous evil lasted for the entire Second World War and played itself out in only two infamous camps, Auschwitz and then Dachau. Being confronted every day by a systematic and total denial of human dignity and rights had the opposite effect on Mruk. It served to strengthen his desire to be an instrument of divine mercy and peace. For myself, I want to borrow from W.B. Yeats, and say my glory was I had such a friend.
Professor emeritus of theology at the Gregorian University in Rome, Gerald O’Collins, SJ, served as the Gregorian’s dean of theology from 1985 to 1991. His recent publications include Letters to Maev (Connor Court), Illuminating the New Testament (Paulist Press), The Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola (Paulist Press) and The Beauty of Jesus (Oxford University Press).
A beautiful and inspirational life story. Anton Mruk was a very brave man. The deaths of so many Polish priests in concentration camps demonstrates a commitment to saving of Jewish lives by the Catholic church clergy at the coalface so to speak. More significant than one speach by a Vatican spokesman.
This article has reminded me of a young lad, Joseph Ratzinger, from a staunchly Catholic family in Bavaria, a family that did not willingly support the administration of the Third Reich. Young Joseph is said to have been kicked out of the Hitler Youth for lack of enthusiasm, but eventually defended his Fatherland as part of a flak battery (Flugabwehrkanone). I don’t know what his attitude was whilst manning the guns, but perhaps he did see some logic in defending his family and nation from being reduced to rubble, mainly by the nocturnal carpet bombing of the Brits.
After the war, young Joseph took to the Church, becoming in order; Priest, Cardinal and eventually Pope Benedict XVI!
Four days since the last WW2 anti-German article at Quadrant.
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Mruk SJ, like so many interned as a risk to the Reich or employed in labour camps, survived the war and the “liberation”. Millions of Germans, under threat of annihilation from the satanic Morgenthau Plan and the unconditional surrender demand of the Allies, were not so lucky.
That’s Karma for you Joseph – including for your beloved Hitler – ha ha ha
The article is about escape from evil Nazi’s (not Germans per se – unless your argument is the to are inseparable) – something Quadrant should seriously consider in its dealings with you. Only a Neo Nazi would truly consider a plan to disarm Germany in the immediate aftermath of WW2 as ‘satanic’. God bless the glorious defeat of Nazi Germany – the greatest story of human triumph to ever unfold. We celebrate it in this country every year on April 25. Can’t wait until that date comes around again next year.
You’re sick. The proposals were to starve the Germans and remove their industrial capacity which is what happened until the Western powers cottoned on to Stalin’s potential to overrun the rest of Europe. By that stage several million had died.
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Anzac Day is a commemoration of those Australians who sacrificed in war for this country, irrespective of the success of their efforts. It is in no sense a celebration of anything except perhaps those halcyon days in this land before the Great War stole a generation. The same applies for Remembrance Day.
Just see a reflection of yourself in the mirror did you Joseph? It was not a plan to ‘starve’ the German population- simply to de-industrialise it, including its concentrated military industrial complex.
‘Anzac Day is a commemoration of those Australians who sacrificed in war for this country’ – exactly Joseph, in the case of the European theatre of World War 2, sacrificing in order to wipe Nazi’s s such as yourself off the face of the earth so this countries freedoms and peace loving character could remain intact. Having largely, but obviously not completely succeeded, I as an ex-Serviceman utilise Anzac Day to honour the fallen and to celebrate the destruction of Nazi’s like you (amongst other tyrannies). I am however, forever vigilant.
As I said the greatest example of human triumph in human history. Boo hoo little Goebbels boy.!
‘….unless your argument is that they are inseparable…’
only “anti-German” if you equate Germany with the third reich. Enough said.
“God bless the glorious defeat of Nazi Germany – the greatest story of human triumph to ever unfold.”
Yes. The Jewish Holocaust represents the nadir of all that was civilized in the West, with its technological and industrial supremacy and its Christian and humanitarian philosophies. That is why the Holocaust holds a special place in historical memory. It is not just in the numbers killed but in the doing of it, that it ever happened, which is the issue – that civilized people proposed and then organised and completed this murderous system founded on a spurious set of concepts about biological and cultural superiority: the Master Race and those considered ‘sub-humans’.
‘The Zone of Interest’ film is gruelling piece to watch, but it is an important way of reminding us that ordinary people, quite banal indeed in their everyday acceptance of close-by horrors, did these deeds.
Anzac Day is about all remembrance of war as necessary and just, when war attempts to bring peace through justice, and is used to protect one’s country from those who would injure it, in intent or in deed. War takes its terrible toll on all combatants. No-one denies that poor decisions can be made that harm soldiers and citizens of one side or the other. But the Morgenthau plan was simply about destroying Germany’s post-war military capacity. In fact, Germany soon found that creative destruction of old plant produced a productivity boom due to new plant. If there was initial hardship, even starvations, it was happening all over Europe.
There is no perfection in war, so there is also remembrance of this on Anzac Day, of the failures of war and the sacrifices that individuals made in spite of the odds against them or the morality or otherwise of the causes that drew into battle. Germans too rightly remember their patriotic dead, as do many countries, for people’s love of their country and its culture is embedded and often admirable. The Berlin Holocaust Museum shows how very much Germans today regret their past during a very dark period under Hitler. They express sorrow for that, and don’t hesitate to recognize and apologise for it. Berlin also has a nearby memorial to the Romany ‘gypsy’ people who were also slaughtered as sub-human. Hitler was not just a misunderstood patriot. That some Germans were brave enough to try to kill him suggests that too.
Superbly put Elizabeth. There are people in this world who cannot open their mouths without reducing the total store of human knowledge. When I think of the suffering of my relatives in their different battles against Nazism my disgust is almost boundless.
All this shows is the extent to which control over the education of the young, combined with unopposed multimedia propaganda can successfully destroy a people’s self-worth. This is a lesson that White nations are now learning to their cost.
Not to mention the fact that we wouldn’t be commemorating Anzac Day had we lost either war. The victory is implicit within it, even though the day itself reminds us of the cost of failure.
The Jews became a useful scapegoat for Germany’s total military defeat in 1918, part of the myth that it was sedition at home that lost Germany the war. I doubt that even Churchill envisaged the monster that was to be unleashed.
As Sindri said, superbly put!
A very gracious account of the life of Anton Mruk, which has got rather lost in other matters.
I have never know much about the Jesuits, having no Roman Catholic background, but was interested to find out more about their history, and the European and South American Jesuit Expulsion in the tumultuous mid-to-late eighteenth century, and then renewal in the nineteenth century. I read up on this after visiting Cordoba in Argentina recently, which was Jesuit Central for that country and its ongoing influence in world Catholicism, as seen by the current Pope, an Argentinian Jesuit with Franciscan influence. Both strands of religious theology were apparent in Cordoba.