On a fall day in 1946, a twelve-year-old girl knelt before Pope Pius XII in the Vatican. He placed his hand on her head and blessed her as a Catholic war hero, honoring her for defending Poland against the Nazis. The name given to the Pope was Stefcia Skołkowska. She was one of the celebrated women soldiers of the Armia Krajowa, the Polish Home Army, held as prisoners of war at Oberlangen, the first time in history that thousands of women soldiers were granted prisoner-of-war status, won for them by General Bór-Komorowski in the surrender of Warsaw.
What Pius did not know was that this child was not Stefcia Skołkowska. She was Edna Szurek, born at Miła 18, the address that would become the ŻOB command bunker of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Edna was a Jewish child of the Ghetto who had escaped to the Aryan side under the alias of a Polish Catholic orphan. She joined the Home Army at nine and fought as a courier, armed with a pistol. At ten she was decorated twice: once for bravery, once for a wound from a grenade. The little girl kneeling before Pius had watched most of her family murdered by the Germans for the single reason that they were Jews. And this pope had spent the war saying nothing, not publicly, not by name, of the genocide that had swallowed nearly everyone she loved.
On another fall day, seventy-nine years later, another pope did what Pius XII would not. On October 29, 2025, standing in St. Peter’s Square to mark the sixtieth anniversary of Nostra Aetate, Leo XIV said it plainly. “And so I too confirm,” he declared, “that the Church does not tolerate antisemitism and fights against it, on the basis of the Gospel itself.” Rabbis stood beside him. Weeks later, when Israel’s president telephoned him after a gunman’s attack on a Hanukkah celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach left fifteen people dead, he said it again.
Pius’s defenders argue that he was a man of his time: that the Church had not yet given the world Nostra Aetate, that it still carried centuries of theological hostility toward Jews. The argument does not hold, and we need only look to the pope who came before him. In June 1938, the elderly Pius XI commissioned an encyclical that explicitly condemned antisemitism and racism. He entrusted the drafting to the American Jesuit John LaFarge, long an opponent of racial hatred. The document was titled Humani Generis Unitas, “On the Unity of the Human Race.” Yet it was a document of its time. Even as it denounced racial hatred, it still described the separation of the Jews as religious in nature and echoed the ancient charge that they bore the guilt for Christ’s death. Its condemnation of racial antisemitism was real, but its vision of Judaism belonged to a world the Church would not begin to leave behind until Nostra Aetate. Its draft lay on the old pope’s desk when he died on February 10, 1939. His Secretary of State was elected to succeed him and took the name Pius XII. The encyclical was never issued. It lay in the Vatican archives until the 1990s.
Those words sat in a vault while Pius XII laid his hand on a twelve-year-old girl whose mother had starved in the Ghetto and whose family had been sent to die at Treblinka, for the single reason that they were Jews. A Jewish child knelt in the Vatican and received the blessing of the man who had decided those words would not be spoken.
Leo XIV was elected on May 8, 2025, the first American-born pope in the history of the Church. Born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago in 1955, he took the name Leo in homage to Leo XIII, whose 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum was itself an act of moral clarity. He stands, too, with his immediate predecessor. On July 29, 2016, Pope Francis walked through the gates of Auschwitz alone. He gave no speech and prayed in silence, saying no words of his could do justice to what had happened there. In the memorial book he wrote, in Spanish: “Señor ten piedad de tu pueblo. Señor, perdón por tanta crueldad!” (“Lord, have mercy on your people. Lord, forgive so much cruelty!”) Francis chose silence too, but not the silence of Pius. His was a silence that bore witness. And it was Francis who opened the Vatican archives, letting the world see the truth of the Church’s past.
Leo inherits that openness. In invoking Nostra Aetate on its sixtieth anniversary, he broke the silence. He understands that his is one of the few pulpits on earth from which moral clarity can still travel across borders and creeds, and that to stand at it and say nothing in the face of evil is not neutrality. It is a choice. Pius XII made his choice. Pius XI, Francis, and Leo made a different one.
Edna survived. She built a family in America and lived a long life. She never spoke bitterly of the pope who blessed her without knowing her, and she kept the remnants of the Catholic identity that had saved her, holding onto Stefania as her middle name until the day she died.
Image: Vatican Media
Janet Bond Brill, PhD, is the author of Little Edna’s War (Amsterdam Publishers), the true story of her mother-in-law’s survival of the Warsaw Ghetto and her years in the Polish resistance, published on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, 2026. Visit her author website for more information about her work.
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