Stanisław Maciej Kicman was destined to become a priest — but the path he followed to that vocation was anything but conventional.

Born into a loving Catholic family in 1937, the young boy enjoyed only two years of a normal life before Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. What followed were years of brutal occupation marked by terror, forced labor and mass killings that took the lives of millions — including around 3 million Polish Jews and 2 million non-Jewish Poles, most of them Catholic.

During the German occupation, Stanisław’s father, Czeslaw, and mother, Monika, were active members of the Polish Underground, the largest and most effective resistance movement in German-occupied Europe.

On Aug. 1, 1944, the Polish Home Army, under the leadership of Gen. Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, rose up against the Germans in Warsaw. The Poles timed their uprising with the successful offensive of the Soviet armed forces, which had pushed back the German Army to the Vistula River. Bór-Komorowski was aware that his forces could hold the initiative for only a few days until the advancing Soviets crossed the Vistula and rid the Poles of the Germans.

That did not happen. The Soviets, intent on establishing a communist government in Poland, stopped their offensive, allowing the Germans to destroy a huge part of the Polish population and level the Polish capital.

By the time the Soviets decided to renew their offensive, they entered a dead city eerily dusted with snow.

During the Warsaw Uprising, Stanisław and his mother were separated from Czeslaw, who was taken prisoner by the Germans and sent to Hersbruck, a sub-camp of Flossenbürg concentration camp.

Stanisław and his mother found themselves in Wola, a residential district of Warsaw, where the Germans carried out one of their many massacres of World War II. Planes bombed and strafed the area, while German soldiers and SS men shot unarmed men, women and children. The victims’ bodies were stacked in huge pyres and set ablaze.

On one street in Wola, a pregnant woman with three children hid in the cellar of a building, hoping to escape the bloodbath unfolding around her. The SS discovered them, forced the woman and her children into a clearing, and shot them.

Miraculously, the bullet that hit her was not fatal. It penetrated her cheek. She spat out several teeth and her body grew numb. But she was conscious and aware of the horror going on around her. There she lay as men, women and children were executed, their bodies falling on top of her. Later in the day, when the orgy of executions finally stopped, the unfortunate woman crawled away to safety. But she had lost her children.

The SS followed a systematic pattern of murdering, looting and raping in Wola and repeated it in Ochota, another district of Warsaw.

This was the hell that Stanisław and his mother witnessed as they were forced at gunpoint with other women and children to gather in the vicinity of a Catholic church.

Monika Kicman remembered, “The women and children were told to kneel and put their hands up and folded over their heads. In front of us was a manned machine gun.”

Stanisław, 7, cuddled as close as he could to his mother and plaintively asked: “What are they going to do to us?”

Monika drew him to her and tearfully replied, “The bullets will not hurt, my son.”

She had a rosary around her neck but, Monika remembered, “It was impossible to make sense of my prayers. I just kept repeating ‘Hail Mary! Hail Mary! Hail Mary!’”

Expecting death in a matter of seconds, Monika turned her head and saw an SS officer who, to her surprise, ordered the machine gunner to abandon his post. He then directed the mothers and children to stand and enter the church — a welcome refuge from the stifling August heat and the stench of corpses lying all around outside.

Monika believed that the ordeal for her and Stanisław was not over. She said, “My sorrow was for my son, my beloved son. Oh, what sorrow!”

When the Germans later ordered the women and children out of the church, Stanisław and his mother fixed their gaze on the Station of the Cross depicting Jesus’ third fall. “I felt a sincere hope in the mercy of God,” Monika said.

Their lives were spared.

Within hours, Stanisław and his mother found themselves on a train destined for Germany. Monika ended up working as a slave laborer at a German munitions plant. She and her son lodged with a kind German family near Hanover until the arrival of American soldiers.

Young Stanisław was profoundly changed by the grim experiences that occurred in Wola in 1944. He said, “These memories will remain with me until the end of my life.”

And they did. Every Aug. 1 since 1944, he honored the victims of the Warsaw Uprising by observing a moment of prayer.

His wartime experiences as a young boy convinced him that he had to become a priest. He entered the seminary and, on Sundays, sang in the choir of a local church — where he met Czeslawa. The two fell in love, and he eventually discerned a different vocation: marriage. He withdrew from the seminary, married Czeslawa, and together they raised two sons. Throughout their 53-year marriage, he remained a devout and devoted Catholic layman, teaching catechism at the local lyceum (secondary school).

When his beloved Czeslawa died in 2012, the clear and compelling call of the priesthood returned to him.

He had no choice but to answer the insistent call of that frightened child in Wola in 1944. He completed his studies at the Warsaw Theological Seminary and was ordained by Cardinal Kazimierz Nycz. Father Kicman spent most of this seven-year priesthood at St. Stephen’s Church in Raszyn, a Warsaw suburb.

Father Kicman was known for his powerful sermons, lacing them with his experiences as a husband, father and grandfather. Strikingly, long queues of penitents formed for him to hear their confessions. He also faithfully led the Stations of the Cross each Friday.

He modestly explained his popularity, saying, “I know what a good man, husband, father, grandfather and now priest should be like. However, if it were not for the Word of God, which I have always trusted, then perhaps I would not know all this.” Cardinal Nycz agreed with him.

“He had incredible empathy and love for his fellow man,” his nephew, Krysztof Kicman, who lives in Warsaw, told me.

During his priesthood, “Father Stanisław,” as he was known, never lost faith in people. He frequently visited and counseled inmates in prisons. Many prisoners were drawn to this cheerful, yet profound, man of God, and converted to the Catholic faith.

Father Kicman, who suffered from heart disease, had to be hospitalized. His nephew, who knew him well, visited him several times. During one visit, his nephew’s friend, a Jehovah’s Witness, accompanied him. He was so impressed with the priest that he wanted to see him again. After his second visit to Father Stanisław, the man converted to Catholicism.

Father Stanisław Maciej Kicman died on April 16, 2021. He was an extraordinary exemplar of good as a man, husband, father, grandfather and priest, who never lost faith in people and always trusted in the Word of God.

His son, Jacek Kicman, aptly summed up his father’s life, saying, “God willed it so.”

Father Kicman’s middle name, “Maciej,” means “gift of God” in Polish.

He was.