Mother Matylda Getter

Mother Matylda Getter could just lock the gate and return to her prayers, but kids were dying all around, and for her, helping others was as natural as breathing.

➡️She had a big experience in aiding the poor, the orphaned and the persecuted, dating back to the previous century. Why, the order of the convent she chose to join, Franciscan Sisters of the Family of Mary expressly defined its mission as relieving the pain and helping the needy. This is what Mother Getter did, first under the Tsarist rule, then in free Poland, and finally, under German occupation.

➡️It was the years 1939 to 1945 which posed the biggest challenge: never before had hundreds of thousands of people been doomed to destruction, and turned into the needy overnight. The Jews of Warsaw were fenced off like cattle, confined to a small area, banned natural human rights, starved and exploited through hard labour, to be finally murdered en masse. 

➡️Mother Superior and other Sisters were no strangers to defying the law – God be their witness they’d bent and broken enough Tsarist regulations – but this time was different. German orders were clear: anyone extending any form of assisstance to the Jews would be punished with death. Yet the nuns didn’t care and got involved in smuggling children out of the ghetto.

➡️This is how Lila Goldschmidt remembered her first meeting with Mother Superior, “Mother Getter was in this small garden in Hoża Street. I approached her. I said I had nowhere to go, being Jewish, and therefore an outlaw. To which she answered, and I am quoting her words, ‘My child, whoever comes to our yard and asks for help, in the name of Christ, we must not refuse.’”

➡️That, however, was just the beginning: the kids needed to be "legalized” as Catholics, which meant issuing false baptismal records and birth certificates. Mother Getter and Żegota, the Council for Aid to Jews, contacted dozens of parishes throughout occupied Poland and got hundreds of priests procure the necessary papers and doctor birth and marriage records. 

 

➡️Some children remained with the congregation, and others went to orphanages or trusted families across the country. Most of them survived the war, but life was not the only thing they were offered by the Sisters. Their parents had been slaughtered, the world they knew stamped to dust, so in addition to food and shelter, they needed support. And support is what they received. 

 

➡️“I am grateful to God for the fact that in this tragic period I had the chance to meet a congregation of Sisters who not only saved my life, but also gave me a home, a sense of being loved and a moral backbone.” (Lidia Kleinmann)

➡️Mother Superior Matylda Getter, who saved hundreds of Jewish children from the Holocaust, was born exactly 150 years ago.◾️

Yad Vashem: World Holocaust Center, Jerusalem United States Holocaust Memorial Museum The Jewish News Muzeum Historii Żydów Polskich POLIN Ambasada Izraela w Polsce Haaretz.com From the Depths Franciscan Media