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Biography

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Paulina Borowik was a Polish Roman Catholic religious sister of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth and one of the eleven nuns of that community murdered by the German Gestapo near Nowogródek on 1 August 1943. She was born in 1905 in Wierzbica, in the Lublin countryside of Poland, then under Russian imperial administration. Surviving sources say little about her family or childhood beyond her later vocation. In the 1930s she entered the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth, a congregation founded by Frances Siedliska, and received the religious name Sister Maria Felicyta. After profession she was assigned to the sisters’ house in Nowogródek, then a town in the eastern borderlands of the Second Polish Republic and today Navahrudak in Belarus. The Nowogródek community, established in 1929, conducted a school and pastoral and charitable work among Poles, Belarusians, and Jews.

During the Second World War the town was occupied first by the Soviet Union and from 1941 by Nazi Germany. The sisters remained at their convent, supporting the parish of the Transfiguration and the local civilian population amid arrests, deportations, and terror. In July 1943 the Gestapo prepared a large round-up of inhabitants, including the parish priest and many fathers of families. The community, led by their superior Sister Maria Stella (Adela Mardosewicz), offered their lives to God in prayer in exchange for the prisoners. On 31 July 1943 eleven sisters, including Sister Maria Felicyta, were arrested. They were taken at dawn on 1 August 1943 to a forest a few kilometres from the town and shot, then buried in a concealed mass grave. A twelfth sister, Maria Małgorzata Banaś, had been left at the church; she later found the burial site.

After the war the remains of the eleven were exhumed and reinterred at the Church of the Transfiguration in Nowogródek, where they still rest. Pope John Paul II beatified them together on 5 March 2000 in Rome as the Blessed Martyrs of Nowogródek. They have not been canonized. The Church commemorates them collectively; their liturgical memorial is kept on 4 September. Published historical and hagiographical material treats Paulina Borowik primarily as a member of this community rather than as an independently documented figure, and few personal writings or detailed anecdotes about her individual character are available. She is venerated as a blessed martyr of faith and self-offering during the German occupation of eastern Poland.

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