Blessed Sancja Szymkowiak

Blessed Sancja Szymkowiak, baptized Janina, was a Polish religious of the Congregation of the Daughters of Our Lady of Sorrows, known as the Seraphic Sisters. In Poznań under German occupation she devoted herself to prisoners of war. She died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-two. The Church commemorates her on August 29.

She was born on July 10, 1910, in Możdżanów near Ostrów Wielkopolski, the youngest of five children and the only daughter of well-to-do, deeply devout parents. One of her older brothers became a priest. At home she learned an ardent love for the Sacred Heart of Jesus. From 1929 she studied Romance philology at the University of Poznań. She belonged to the Sodality of Our Lady and to the Saint Vincent Mercy Association and gave practical help to the poor of the most neglected district of Poznań.

In 1934 she went to France to perfect the language before her master’s examination. During a pilgrimage to Lourdes she resolved to give herself to God in religious life and entrusted herself to the care of the Immaculate Virgin. She was then received by the Oblate Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, but at her family’s insistence she had to return home. After many difficulties, in June 1936 she began religious life with the Seraphic Sisters in Poznań and took the name Maria Sancja. From the start she stood out for her fidelity to the rule and her zeal in the humblest duties. In her notes she wrote, “I have to become a saint at all costs.”

After her first vows she worked in a nursery school in the Naramowice district of Poznań, then began a pharmacy course, which the outbreak of war cut short. When the Germans occupied Poznań, the sisters were confined to their convent and forced into hard labor, while the occupiers quartered soldiers and French and English prisoners of war in and around the house. Sister Sancja could have gone back to her family, but she stayed with her community. She served the prisoners as an interpreter, supported and comforted them, and they called her the “angel of goodness” and “Saint Sancja.”

Hard work, cold and hunger wore down her strength. She fell ill with tuberculosis of the throat and bore her suffering calmly, in complete surrender to God’s will. On July 6, 1942, already gravely ill, she made her perpetual vows. She died in Poznań on August 29, 1942.

John Paul II beatified her on August 18, 2002, in Błonia Park in Krakow, together with Zygmunt Szczęsny Feliński, Jan Balicki and Jan Beyzym. In his homily he held her up to religious sisters and consecrated persons as a model and patron and recalled her spiritual testament, summed up in one simple sentence: “To give yourself to God, you have to give yourself to the point of totally losing yourself.”