Jadwiga Karolina Żak

Jadwiga Karolina Żak was born on 29 December 1918 in Węgrów, Poland, in the first months of the restored Polish state after the First World War. In 1938 she entered the Congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth, a community founded in the nineteenth century by Blessed Frances Siedliska for the Christian formation of families and service to the poor. She received the religious name Sister Maria Imelda of the Eucharist, a title that expressed a particular devotion to the Blessed Sacrament. She made her first profession of vows in 1940, while eastern Poland was under Soviet occupation. She was assigned to the congregation’s house in Nowogródek (now Navahrudak, Belarus), in the northeastern borderlands of the former Second Polish Republic, where the Nazareth Sisters had maintained a convent and school since 1929.

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Nowogródek passed under Nazi occupation. The sisters continued their apostolate among the local population as far as wartime conditions permitted. In July 1943 the Gestapo arrested a large number of civilians in the town, including many fathers of families, and prepared to execute them. The Nazareth community, led by their superior Sister Maria Stella of the Blessed Sacrament (Adela Mardosewicz), offered their lives to God in substitution for the imprisoned. On 31 July 1943 German police arrested eleven of the twelve sisters then attached to the convent. Sister Maria Imelda was among those taken. One sister, Maria Małgorzata Banas, was not present and survived.

Before dawn on 1 August 1943 the eleven nuns were taken to a forest several kilometres from Nowogródek and shot by firing squad. Sister Maria Imelda of the Eucharist was twenty-four years old and the youngest of the group. Their bodies were buried in a mass grave at the place of execution. After the German occupation ended, the remains were recovered and in time were enshrined in the parish Church of the Transfiguration (the Fara) in Nowogródek. The lay hostages for whom the sisters had offered themselves were, in large part, spared.

Pope John Paul II beatified Sister Maria Imelda together with her ten companions on 5 March 2000 in Saint Peter’s Square in Rome, presenting them to the Church as the Blessed Martyrs of Nowogródek. Their liturgical memorial is kept on 4 September. They are honoured in Poland and Belarus as witnesses to evangelical charity and to consecrated life lived unto death. Sister Imelda’s brief religious life unfolded entirely within the violence of the Second World War in the Polish-Belarusian borderlands; her memory is preserved by her congregation and by the local Church at the site of the martyrdom.