Polish Priest Spared Encino Man 47 Years Ago : Jew, Delivered From Holocaust, Lauds Catholic Hero

Eugene Winnik spent most of World War II tending cows in a Polish forest to avoid discovery by the Nazis and deportation to a concentration camp.

After the war ended, Winnik, now a 53-year-old Sherman Oaks furrier, did his best to forget the cold dawns when he left the village--and the terror of being Jewish in German-occupied Poland.

But he never forgot Father Josef Gorajek, a Roman Catholic priest who risked his life to help Winnik and his mother. It was Gorajek who arranged for the boy to tend the cows in the relative security of the forest. And it was Gorajek who provided Winnik and his mother with false papers, gave him Communion over villagers’ objections and insisted that villagers keep the Winniks’ heritage secret.

Gorajek will be honored for his heroism tonight at the synagogue Winnik attends, Valley Beth Shalom Temple in Encino. The 80-year-old priest was flown to the United States last week for the ceremony by the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies in Los Angeles.

Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis, of the synagogue, said the Foundation to Sustain Righteous Christians is also sponsoring the ceremony. The foundation honors those who saved Jewish lives during World War II and, if necessary, provides them with financial aid and companionship, said Schulweis, who helped establish the organization in 1986.

“To hide a Jew, to give him a meal or to help transport him in those days was to be exposed to the threat of death, but there were many unsung heroes,” Schulweis said.

“The Holocaust left a legacy of despair, hopelessness and cynicism. We need to search out the good as much as we have correctly hunted down the evil,” he said.

Gorajek, a short man with a beak nose and alert eyes, said through an interpreter that he was overcome with joy last summer when Winnik and his wife, Jo-Ann, visited the village of Wawolnica, where he has lived his entire life. Winnik spent four years, from 1941 to 1945, in nearby Niezabitow, a short distance from Gorajek’s village.

“I didn’t know what happened to him,” he said. “I provided false birth certificates for many, but so few came back.”

Winnik, who lives in Encino, said he decided to return to Poland after he came across the Communion paper, signed by the priest, among his deceased mother’s belongings. After the war ended, he and his mother had emigrated to Argentina and then to the United States.

Little had changed in the rural area, a 2 1/2-hour drive from Warsaw, when the Winniks journeyed there. Jo-Ann Winnik said the priest’s village had few cars, minimal electricity and no plumbing.

When the Winniks pulled up to Gorajek’s church, a young priest bounded out the front door to greet them. When they showed the young man the Communion paper, he disappeared inside and returned with Gorajek.

Winnik remembers meeting the priest for the first time under far less auspicious circumstances. It was 1941, and he and his mother, Danuta Winnik, had fled Nazi-occupied Warsaw by train, leaving behind his father, an affluent dentist. He never saw his father again and believes he perished in a concentration camp.

When they arrived in Wawolnica, Gorajek, a member of the Resistance, agreed to pretend that he and his mother were Catholic villagers. After Gorajek arranged for the boy to care for the village’s herd of cattle, Winnik’s mother, 30 at the time, became an active member of the Resistance.

Most of the time Winnik was left to fend for himself. He dug up potatoes and cooked them over small fires he made from dried cow dung. When Nazis came through town, he hid in wheat silos. He did not attend school until after the war.

At night, when he returned from the forest, Gorajek taught him the catechism. But the priest never tried to convert him, Winnik said, and told him that someday he would be free to live as a Jew.

“Without him, I would have died,” Winnik said, looking at Gorajek with obvious affection on Thursday.