Helena Cierpka

Helena Cierpka was born on 1 April 1900 in Granowiec, a village in Greater Poland. At the time of her birth the district belonged to the Prussian Partition of former Polish lands. Surviving sources say almost nothing about her family or childhood; she is known to history chiefly through her later religious life and her death among the Martyrs of Nowogródek. As a young woman she entered the Congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth, a community founded in Rome in 1875 by Blessed Frances Siedliska for the Christian formation of families, and received the religious name Sister Maria Gwidona. After formation and profession of vows she was sent to the congregation’s house in Nowogródek, then a town in the eastern voivodeships of the Second Polish Republic and today Navahrudak in Belarus. The sisters had opened that house in 1929.

In Nowogródek the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth taught in a school, prepared children for the sacraments, cared for the parish church of the Transfiguration, and served a mixed population of Poles, Belarusians, and Jews. The local community numbered twelve sisters. The town passed from Polish administration to Soviet occupation in 1939 and to German occupation in 1941. Religious and educational work was heavily restricted under both occupations, yet the sisters remained with the people of the parish.

In July 1943 the German security police arrested some one hundred and twenty local men and made ready to execute them. The superior, Sister Maria Stella (Adela Mardosewicz), and the sisters of the house, including Sister Gwidona, offered their own lives to God in place of the prisoners, asking that fathers of families be spared. On the night of 31 July 1943 the Gestapo came for the convent. Eleven sisters were taken; one member of the community, Sister Małgorzata Banaś, was not arrested. Sister Helena Cierpka, in religion Maria Gwidona, was among those seized.

The eleven were driven a few kilometres from the town into a forest and shot at dawn on 1 August 1943. Their bodies were buried in a mass grave. The imprisoned men were later released. After Soviet forces returned, the remains of the sisters were exhumed in 1945 and in time transferred to a common tomb in the Church of the Transfiguration (the Fara church) in Nowogródek, where they continue to be venerated.

Pope John Paul II beatified Sister Maria Stella and her ten companions, including Sister Maria Gwidona, on 5 March 2000 in Rome. They are known collectively as the Blessed Martyrs of Nowogródek. Individual biographical material that treats Helena Cierpka apart from the shared history of the eleven remains limited; her memory is preserved above all in the collective witness of the community that offered and gave its life for the people it served.