Blessed Alicja Kotowska

Blessed Alicja Kotowska was a Sister of the Resurrection, a teacher, and the superior of the religious house in Wejherowo. In the fall of 1939 she was arrested by the Germans and shot in the Piaśnica forest. The Roman Martyrology commemorates her on November 11, the day of her death.

She was born on November 20, 1899, in Warsaw as Maria Jadwiga Kotowska, into the large family of Jan, an organist, and his wife Zofia. At home she was called Marylka. In 1918 she passed her final secondary school examinations and began to study medicine at the University of Warsaw. She belonged to the Polish Military Organization, and in 1920, during the Polish-Soviet War, she cared for wounded soldiers as a Red Cross nurse. For this service she was later awarded the Order of Polonia Restituta.

In 1922 she broke off her studies and entered the Congregation of the Sisters of the Resurrection, where she received the name Alicja. In her request for admission she wrote that she desired to live and die for Christ. She made her first vows in 1924. At the wish of her superiors she returned to the university, this time to the faculty of mathematics and natural sciences, and in 1929 she earned a master’s degree in chemistry. She taught in the congregation’s schools in Warsaw: at the teachers’ training college in Sewerynów and at the secondary school in Żoliborz.

In 1934 she became the principal of the schools of the Sisters of the Resurrection in Wejherowo and the superior of the new religious house. She was in charge of a girls’ secondary school, an elementary school, and a kindergarten, and a boarding house for girls was attached to the school. In 1936 her schools obtained the rights of state schools.

After the outbreak of the war and the German occupation of Wejherowo, the school was closed. Sister Alicja was warned that she would be arrested, but she did not want to save herself, so as not to put her fellow sisters in danger. On October 24, 1939, the Gestapo took her from the religious house during common prayer in the chapel. She had been denounced by the school janitor. The sisters remembered that as she left she said she forgave him everything.

On November 11, 1939, she was taken from the prison in Wejherowo to the Piaśnica forest. Witnesses remembered that she came out last, went up to the Jewish children who were in that transport, took one of them by the hand, and got into the truck with them. That day the Germans shot more than three hundred people at Piaśnica. Sister Alicja’s body was not found. During the exhumation in 1946, a fragment of a large black rosary, of the kind the Sisters of the Resurrection wear at the waist, was found in one of the graves. That grave is regarded as her probable resting place.

Pope John Paul II beatified her on June 13, 1999, in Warsaw, among the 108 martyrs of World War II, whose common memorial he set for June 12. Blessed Alicja is the patroness of the shrine in the Piaśnica Forest and of the school that the Sisters of the Resurrection once again run in Wejherowo.