Blessed Natalia Tułasiewicz

Blessed Natalia Tułasiewicz was a teacher of Polish from Poznań and a lay apostle. During the Second World War she went to Germany of her own free will to bring faith and courage to Polish women deported for forced labor. She was killed in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. The Roman Martyrology commemorates her on March 31.

She was born on April 9, 1906, in Rzeszów, into the large family of the revenue official Adam Tułasiewicz and his wife Natalia. From childhood she suffered from tuberculosis. She went to school in Kęty and in Krakow, and in 1921 the family moved to Poznań. There Natalia completed the secondary school of the Ursuline Sisters, where she belonged to the Sodality of Our Lady, and then completed Polish studies at the University of Poznań.

She taught in Poznań schools: first at the private elementary school of Saint Casimir, then at the Ursuline secondary school. She wrote poems and kept a diary. In it she noted that her mission was to show the world that the way to holiness also leads through noisy marketplaces and streets, and not only through convents and quiet families.

In the fall of 1939 the Germans expelled the Tułasiewicz family from Poznań to the General Government. The family ended up in Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski, and in February 1940 Natalia moved to Krakow, where she taught in clandestine classes. In 1943, as an emissary of the Polish underground, she volunteered to go to Germany. She wanted to be with her compatriots deported for labor and to sustain in them their faith and their love of their homeland.

In August 1943 she left Warsaw for Hanover, for the Pelikan factory of the Günther Wagner company. After hard physical work she led prayers and catechesis among the women workers, taught them, and even wrote a nativity play for them. On April 29, 1944, after a visit from a careless courier from Poland, she was arrested. She was held in prison in Hanover and in Cologne and was beaten during interrogations. In September 1944, under a death sentence, she was taken to Ravensbrück.

In the camp, worn out by illness and hunger, she taught her young fellow prisoners and led common prayers. Even in Holy Week of 1945, with the last of her strength, she spoke to them about the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. On Good Friday, March 30, during a selection she was taken from among her companions and in the evening carried off with a group of the sick. She died in the gas chamber. The decree on her martyrdom and the Roman Martyrology give March 31, Holy Saturday, as the day of her death; according to some testimonies it happened while it was still Good Friday.

Pope John Paul II beatified her on June 13, 1999, in Warsaw, among the 108 martyrs of the Second World War, whose common memorial he set for June 12. Natalia is one of the two lay women in this group. Her diaries and her letters from Hanover survived the war and have been published. In 2022 the Holy See declared her the patroness of teachers in Poland.