Blessed Maria Ewa Noiszewska and Maria Marta Wołowska

Blessed Maria Ewa Noiszewska and Maria Marta Wołowska were Sisters of the Immaculate Conception from the convent in Słonim, a town that today lies in Belarus. The first was a physician and teacher, the second the superior of the house. During the German occupation they helped the persecuted and hid Jews, and in December 1942 they were shot. The Roman Martyrology commemorates them on December 19, the day of their death.

Kazimiera Wołowska was born in 1879 in Lublin, into the family of a well-known lawyer and social activist. While still in her teens she taught girls the Polish language and history. In 1900, at Jazłowiec in Podolia, she entered the Congregation of the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary and received the name Maria Marta of Jesus. She made her perpetual vows in 1909. In 1919 she organized an orphanage at Maciejów in Volhynia for more than a hundred children of various nationalities, and later schools. She directed several houses of the congregation, and in August 1939 she became superior in Słonim.

Bogumiła Noiszewska was born in 1885 at Osaniszki in the Vilnius region, the eldest of the eleven children of an ophthalmologist. She followed in her father’s footsteps and in 1914 completed her medical studies in Saint Petersburg with distinction. During the First World War she worked in military hospitals. She entered the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception in 1919 and received the name Maria Ewa of Providence. When she made her perpetual vows in 1927, she asked God for a hidden life and a martyr’s death. For years at Jazłowiec she was a teacher and the physician of the sisters and the pupils. In 1938 she was sent to Słonim.

In September 1939 the Soviets occupied the town. The sisters were removed from their convent and suffered want and harassment. In the summer of 1941 the Germans came. In the hospital Sister Ewa treated anyone who needed help, Jews included. Sister Marta supported the families of those arrested and murdered and, as her fellow sisters recalled, at night handed bread through the half-open door to people hiding in the forests. Together with their chaplain, the Jesuit Father Adam Sztark, the sisters sheltered Jews in their house, although the penalty for this was death. They were warned that they were being watched, but they stayed where they were.

Late in the evening of December 18, 1942, the Gestapo came for the superior. Sister Ewa declared that she would go with her, and it then turned out that she too was being sought. The next morning, December 19, both were shot on Góra Pietralewicka, a hill outside Słonim, together with Father Sztark and many other victims, and were buried in a mass grave. According to witnesses, they prayed to the end and encouraged their fellow prisoners.

John Paul II beatified them on June 13, 1999, in Warsaw among the 108 martyrs of the Second World War, whose common memorial he set for June 12. After the war the people of Słonim put up a cross at the place of their death. The Soviet authorities removed it, and a new one was erected in 1993.