Stanisława Rodzińska

Stanisława Rodzińska was born on 16 March 1899 in Nawojowa, a village near Nowy Sącz in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Her father, Michał Rodziński, was organist at the parish church. She was orphaned in childhood after the deaths of both parents and was thereafter cared for with the help of relatives and the Dominican Sisters, who also provided her education. In 1916 she entered the Congregation of the Sisters of Saint Dominic and received the religious name Julia. After formation and teacher training she professed her vows and spent the following years in the congregation’s schools and orphanages, teaching and looking after poor and orphaned children, a work shaped by her own early loss of family.

In the 1930s Sister Julia was assigned to Vilnius (Wilno), where she taught, served as a catechist, and later became superior of the local Dominican house. After the outbreak of the Second World War the city passed under Soviet and then German occupation. She continued clandestine Polish-language instruction in defiance of the occupying authorities and gave material and other help to people in danger, including those persecuted on ethnic or religious grounds.

The Gestapo arrested her in July 1943. After imprisonment in Vilnius she was deported to the Stutthof concentration camp. There she shared the forced labor, hunger, and brutality of the women’s camp. During a typhus epidemic she volunteered to nurse sick fellow prisoners, among them Jewish women, giving them food from her own rations, clothing, and spiritual consolation. She contracted typhus and died in the camp on 20 February 1945. Fellow prisoners later testified to her charity and to the manner of her death.

Pope John Paul II beatified her in Warsaw on 13 June 1999 as one of the 108 Martyrs of World War II, a group of Polish clergy, religious, and laity killed under Nazi occupation and recognized as martyrs. The Catholic Church commemorates them on 12 June. Sister Julia is remembered as a Dominican teacher and superior whose fidelity to her vocation and whose care for children, the imprisoned, and camp inmates of different backgrounds marked both her active life and her death.