POLISH MARTYRS- CAUSE FOR JOY

“Every beatification or canonization of any nun is a cause of joy, while every example of radical commitment, including martyrdom, has huge value,” said Mother Jolanta Olech, secretary-general of Poland’s Conference of Higher Female Superiors. "I’m certain martyrs are being created there now about whom we’ll learn in the future.” 

The St. Elizabeth order, founded in 19th-century Silesiato nurse cholera and typhus victims, was one of many facing brutality from the Soviet Army during its victorious 1944-45 sweep across Poland, which had already lost a fifth of its population, including most of its Jewish minority, during six years of Nazi occupation.

 Atrocities were most common against women religious of German origin, who were among millions of civilians expelled as lands in eastern Germanywere incorporated into Polandin exchange for Polish lands annexed by the Soviet Unionin the east.

 The oldest nun, 70-year-old Sister Sapientia Heymann, had spent the war caring for sick and elderly nuns at Nysa, Poland. She was shot by drunken Russian soldiers while attempting to protect fellow sisters from rape.

The youngest, Sister Paschalis Jahn, had joined the order in 1937, also nursing the old and infirm. Before making her final vows, she had been evacuated to Sobotina in nearby Czech Moravia. She was 29 when apprehended by a Russian soldier May 11, 1945, four days after the war’s official end, and shot through the heart for resisting his advances.  

Sister Edelburgis Kubitzki, a 40-year-old ambulance nurse, attempted to escape rape by hiding with other nuns inside a chapel at Zary, Poland, but was beaten and shot at least a dozen times when troops entered the building Feb. 20, 1945.

 Another nun, Sister Felicitas Ellmerer, 56, took refuge in her order’s refectory at Nysa, after Russian soldiers profaned the chapel and drank wine from its liturgical vessels while shouting “Long live Christ the King!” She was shot by a Russian trooper, who stomped on her head to finish her off.

Sister Adela Schramm, 40, a convent superior at Godzieszow, Poland, had cared for wounded soldiers and displaced civilians when she was seized by Russians while sheltering in a farm attic and shot and dumped in a bomb crater following a long struggle.

                                                        Wroclaw-born Sister Rosaria Schilling, 36, who was raised as a Protestant, hid with other nuns in an air-raid shelter at Nowogrodek, but was dragged out, raped and shot by a group of 30 soldiers.

Others beatified were Sisters Melusja Rybka,  Adela Schramm and  Adelheidis Töpfer.

In his letter, Archbishop Kupny said the story of the nuns contained “terrifying descriptions of evil and cruelty,” and had left “wounds that cannot fail to move and should never be forgotten.”

The martyred sisters, he added, had offered “a signpost for people in the 21st century” by remaining “faithful to their vows and the values they believed in,” without expecting personal recognition.

 “Whenever Christ isn’t accepted, with the commandments and values he left us, it always leads to criminal totalitarian systems, genocide and the collapse of morality and culture — as we now see among our neighbors in Ukraine, where the Russian army is doing the same as Red Army soldiers did in 1945, playing out before our eyes the same scenes with the same directors.”

 Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, presided over the ceremony.

“The whole life of these sisters was a true gift of self in service to the sick, the little ones, the poor, the most needy. Their selfless love was heroic to the extent that they chose not to flee from the approaching Red Army in late 1944-45. And this despite the news of its brutality and the atrocities committed by its soldiers against the inhabitants of East Prussia,” the cardinal said during his homily.

In the face of ongoing war, the Cardinal encouraged fervent prayer through the intercession of the new blessed. “We ask the Lord through their intercession that the world may never again lack respect for womanhood, equality in the dignity of man and woman and protection of motherhood.  Today we commend to them in a special way the Ukrainian people, migrants and our quest for peace.”