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Auschwitz survivor, midwives meet with Pontiff
September 17, 2026
» Continue to this story on L'Osservatore Romano (Italian)
CWN Editor's Note: At the conclusion of his September 16 general audience, Pope Leo XIV met with an Auschwitz survivor, 70 midwives, and Bishop Krzysztof Nykiel, regent of the Apostolic Penitentiary.
“I was born in the Auschwitz camp on December 20, 1944, thanks to the Servant of God Stanisława Leszczyńska, the Polish midwife who, during her imprisonment in the Nazi concentration camp, assisted about 3,000 women in childbirth,” said Ewa Machaj-Antosiewicz.
“This pilgrimage to Rome is to thank the Lord for giving us a figure like the Servant of God Stanisława, on the 130th anniversary of her birth, and for the good she poured out in favor of life, saving our little ones,” said Bishop Nykiel, the postulator of Leszczyńska’s canonization cause. He recalled that when Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi doctor at Auschwitz, asked her to kill all the newborns in the camp, she replied, “One cannot kill a baby.”
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