In a concentration camp, in that darkness of blackness, scorched human flesh, rats grown fat from a constant feast on dead human bodies, mice gnawing at ears, fingers and nails, a person is powerless to defend herself. Her body is exhausted from starvation and exposure to filth and various diseases. In such an earthly hell there are angels. There are always angels in human form - people whose gaze brings calm and comfort, people you can rely on. One of them is, without doubt, Stanislawa Leszcynska, who was deported to Auschwitz in 1943 and remained there until its liberation in 1945. The prisoners called her "mother" and "the angel of goodness".

The suffering in concentration camps that we hear and learn about from history, sometimes with one ear and closed eyes in school desks and lecture halls, whether out of fear and an inability to face Evil at work, or out of a personal psychological powerlessness within a culture of indifference and abundance (a disguised culture of death) that sets limits on that suffering, must still, regardless of our deafness and blindness, touch most of us deeply. A surge of bitterness, vindictiveness and disgust awakens in us that primal human astonishment at what one human being can do to another, and where the end of human cruelty and savagery lies. 

Stanislawa Leszczynski was born in 1896 in the Polish town of Lodz. At the age of 12 she went with her parents to Rio de Janeiro, where she was educated and learned Portuguese and German, which would later save her life. In 1916 she married Bronislaw Leszczynski, with whom she had four children: Sylvia, Bronislaw, Stanislaw and Henryk. They lived in Warsaw, where Stanislawa enrolled in and completed midwifery school. It was there that the Leszczynski family was overtaken by the Second World War, and the couple immediately joined the resistance movement and helped Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. The Gestapo discovered their activity, and the whole family was sentenced and sent to camps. Two children were deported to Mauthausen-Gusen, while Stanislawa and her daughter were sent to Auschwitz –Birkenau.  She never saw her husband again, as he died during the Warsaw uprising, the first  armed Jewish rebellion in the then Reich.

In one of her memories, Elizabeth Solomon, a mother who survived childbirth in Auschwitz, writes of Stanislawa: "in the midst of death, misery and filth – Mary, in a striped shirt, brought the light of Jesus." For washing the newborns, Stanislawa had to walk twenty minutes for a bucket of water from the barrack known as the "maternity ward". Other prisoners were not allowed to move about. They were shot if they appeared outside the barracks. The mothers giving birth knew their midwife would come back, because they felt there was a soul beside them in their endless loneliness and helplessness. She brought them water for washing and drinking, and it was also water for baptism. Surviving witnesses say she was extremely devout. Her faith shows that with her whole being she lived for Life. Like Mary, she carried it beneath her heart and returned it to where it belonged. To Heaven. The rosary was her support, without which she entered no battle for life.

When the sisters were woken at night and urgently called out to help, in their haste they could not find their slippers, and would turn up to the delivery wearing only one. "My mother prayed the same way," recalls Bronislaw Leszczynski - "Come, Virgin, and hasten to my aid, even with just one slipper on. Mum used to say she always felt her help and intercession." Of the 3,000 children she delivered alive in that death camp, 1,500 were killed right after birth, more than 1,000 died from the effects of camp life, several hundred were taken from their mothers and had their nationality changed, and only around 30 children survived to see liberation.

                Every child she delivered in these inhuman conditions she baptised, and where possible returned to its mother's arms, mostly to non-Jewish mothers, Polish and Russian women. And even those children who could stay with their mother, exhausted to the utmost limits, when the body had nothing left from which to produce the milk it needed (the most common illness was dysentery, and mothers literally lay in their own excrement), died of hypothermia and hunger.

There was an order from the notorious Dr Josef Mengele that every child born without the umbilical cord being tied off was to be drowned before its mother's eyes and thrown into rubbish bins as food for the rats. She bravely stood up to him, saying she did not want to be a Herod over the innocent, and that it was her duty to keep the Hippocratic oath and not kill children. Her son Bronislaw says that once, on Christmas Eve, she received a parcel of bread from her parents. Cut into slices, she placed it on a piece of cardboard and gave it as a communion host to the prisoners. Suddenly the doctor Mengele, "the angel of death", walked into the dormitory.
"My mother sought his gaze. And he lowered his eyes and said that for a moment he thought he felt more human. And who had said that to him? To a prisoner, a Polish woman. He left immediately, and there was no reprisal. People knew she had power over him."

One of the camp prisoners, Maria Saloman, shares her impressions of Stanislawa: "For weeks she had no chance to lie down. Sometimes she would sit close to a patient on the stove, doze off for a moment, but would soon jump up and run to some woman who was crying out in pain... When Stanislava first came close to me, I knew everything would be all right. I don't know why, but it was so. My baby managed to survive three months in the camp, but it seemed to me she was condemned to die of hunger. I was completely without milk. "Mother" somehow found two women who could nurse my baby, an Estonian and a Russian. To this day I don't know at what price she did it. My Liz owes her life to Stanislava.

Among the surviving newborns is also Zofia Wareluk, who was born in January 1945, the day before the camp was liberated. Mrs Zofia is one of the witnesses in the beatification process, which began in 1992. She carries in her memory her mother's words, who called the midwife Stanislawa a "hero". "Where many people, regardless of their education, in their desire to survive the suffering of the camp, ceased themselves to be human beings,  one frail, thin woman was the embodiment of goodness."

A Christian soul has a particular attitude towards the perpetrators of violence. It does not diminish their crimes or personal responsibility. Such souls are not immune to the personal feelings tied to the trauma they went through. But it is as if their wounds bleed differently. Stanislawa used to say of her enemies, "they are just wretched people".  This kind of heroism is exactly what the "devil's advocates" investigate with particular care in a beatification process. They look for heroism in the imitation of Christ. And they find it. It is not possible, by human strength alone, to live a life in darkness unless faith is kindled and reshapes all human feelings, thoughts and deeds. Viktor Frankl, the founder of logotherapy and a famous psychiatrist of the last century who himself survived Auschwitz, writes of the faith in meaning that helped prisoners survive. What meaning did Stanislawa find? The desire to see her husband and some of her four children again? Three of them were deported with her to the death camps, while her husband and eldest son escaped deportation. Humanly speaking, we can understand her struggle up to a certain point.  But how are we to understand that the survival rate of children born alive, in such inhuman conditions, matched that of today's most modern hospitals? How are we to understand the influence she had on the "angel of death", as they called the aforementioned Dr Mengele, unless we consider that this woman's inner life was rich and full of grace. The fact that as a girl she learned German, and that only as a married woman did she complete her training as a midwife, are part of the Divine Providence and Wisdom that guided her to discover meaning, and then to come to know Meaning with a capital letter, and to bring it where, humanly speaking, there is no meaning.

An individual crime easily becomes part of a constructed criminal plan of destruction. In the same way, an individual good deed is part of God's redemptive plan for the whole human race. Her faith in God was so strong that her very presence undermined the criminal design of destruction. Let us also recall the saints of that era – Maximilian Kolbe, Edith Stein and our own Ajozije Stepinac, and many others, known and unknown.  

Stanislawa Leszczynska died in March 1974 from the effects of bowel cancer. In 1992 her beatification process began. God's grace works unceasingly in the Church to make her more perfect through the growing number of her saints, who are added to those who came before, and the crown of saints is enriched daily with new diamonds.

Stanislawa Leszczynska concludes her short but terrible memoir with these words: "All the children were born alive. Their purpose was to live."