Weronika Narmontowicz

Weronika Narmontowicz was a Polish Roman Catholic nun of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth and one of the eleven women later known as the Blessed Martyrs of Nowogródek. She was born in 1916 in the village of Bućki in the Lida district, then in the western reaches of the Russian Empire and after 1918 part of the eastern borderlands of the Second Polish Republic (the area is now in Belarus). She came from a poor farming family and received only a basic education. In 1936 she entered the Nazareth Sisters, receiving the religious name Maria Boromea. She made her first profession in 1938 and was assigned to the congregation’s house in Nowogródek, where she did humble kitchen and garden work. Those who knew her remembered a young, unassuming, and cheerful sister, the youngest member of that community.

The Nowogródek convent had been established in 1929 and conducted educational and pastoral work among the townspeople. After the outbreak of the Second World War the district was occupied first by the Soviet Union (1939–1941) and then by Nazi Germany. The sisters remained in the town through both occupations, sharing the population’s hardships and continuing works of charity after their school was closed. In the summer of 1943 the German security police carried out mass arrests in Nowogródek. Among those seized were many men who were heads of families, and they were threatened with execution. The Nazareth community, under its superior Sister Maria Stella (Adela Mardosewicz), made a collective offering of their lives to God in place of the imprisoned civilians.

On 31 July 1943 the Gestapo arrested the eleven nuns. In the early hours of 1 August they were taken to a wooded area outside the town and shot. Weronika Narmontowicz, Sister Maria Boromea, died with her companions; she was about twenty-six years old and the youngest of the group. Local testimony held that a substantial number of the condemned prisoners were subsequently spared or released. The sisters were buried in a secret woodland grave.

After the war the remains of the eleven were recovered and placed in a common tomb in the Church of the Transfiguration (the Fara) in Nowogródek, where they remain. Pope John Paul II beatified them together in Rome on 5 March 2000. The Catholic Church commemorates the Blessed Martyrs of Nowogródek on 1 August. They have not been canonized. Weronika Narmontowicz is venerated as a member of this group of martyrs; no separate, widely documented individual patronages are attached to her name.