Blessed Piotr Szarek

Piotr Szarek (7 May 1908 – 9 September 1939) was a Polish Catholic clergyman, and a member of the Congregation of the Missionwho was publicly murdered by the Nazis on the ninth day of the Second World War. He has in recent years been accorded the title of Servant of God and is in the process of being beatified by the Catholic Church. Szarek was born on 7 May 1908 (not 5 May as sometimes indicated) at the village of Złotniki in Congress Poland (Kielce Governorate) when the area was under Russian occupation. He joined the Lazarists on 14 October 1926, at the age of 18, already in independent Poland, and received holy orders on 3 June 1934. He then went to Bydgoszcz, a major centre of the Lazarists in Poland, to pursue his ministry. One of his functions included directing the church choir Vincentinum in Bydgoszcz. Szarek left the premises of his religious institute in Bydgoszcz on Saturday, 9 September 1939, in company with another priest, Stanisław Wiórek (1912­–1939) who had just returned from Rome, in order to complete the required formalities of registration with the authorities imposed on the population by the Nazis after the invasion of Poland. While in a street outside, they were both caught in a łapanka, a random rounding-up of Polish hostages in re­pri­sal for what the Nazi prop­a­gan­da portrayed as anti-German events of the so-called Bloody Sunday of 3 September 1939, six days earlier. The randomly detained passers-by were brought to Bydgoszcz's historic Old Market Square (the Stary Rynek), a prominent central place where they were displayed and harassed before twenty-five of them were summarily executed by a firing squad in public, in front of the Municipal Museum (the building in the background of the photographs to the right), at about 12 noon. Szarek was killed together with his younger companion Stanisław Wiórek, who had just obtained a doctorate in Rome. Szarek was 31-years' old.