Anna Kokołowicz

Anna Kokołowicz was born on 24 August 1892 in the village of Wiktorówka in the Lida district of the Vilna Governorate, then part of the Russian Empire. She came from a Polish Catholic family in the eastern borderlands. As a young woman she entered the Congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth, founded by Frances Siedliska for the Christian education of children and youth and for parish work. In religion she received the name Sister Maria Raimunda of Jesus and Mary.

In the interwar years, after Poland had regained independence, she was assigned to the Nazareth Sisters’ community in Nowogródek (now Navahrudak). There the sisters conducted a school for girls, taught catechism, and assisted the parish of the Transfiguration of the Lord. Their life combined hidden prayer with modest educational and charitable service among a mixed population of Poles, Belarusians and Jews in the eastern voivodeships of the Second Polish Republic.

Under German occupation during the Second World War the Gestapo carried out severe repressions. In the summer of 1943, after partisan activity in the area, the occupiers prepared to execute a large group of local civilians, especially fathers of families. The superior, Sister Maria Stella, and her community offered their own lives to God in exchange for the condemned men, praying that the prisoners might be spared and returned to their children.

On 31 July 1943 the Gestapo arrested eleven of the sisters, including Sister Maria Raimunda. They were taken by truck to a forest several kilometres from the town and shot at dawn on 1 August 1943. The bodies were thrown into a mass grave. After the war the remains were recovered by surviving sisters and local people and were later placed in a common tomb in the Church of the Transfiguration in Nowogródek.

Pope John Paul II beatified the eleven nuns as martyrs on 5 March 2000, recognizing their death as martyrdom and as an act of charity in offering themselves for others. Blessed Anna Kokołowicz is venerated together with Blessed Maria Stella and her companions. Surviving sources give few personal anecdotes about her individually; she is known primarily as a member of this community whose ordinary religious life ended in a shared martyrdom under totalitarian occupation.