Today marks the anniversary of the martyrdom of Blessed Maria Paschalis Jahn, brutally murdered by a soldier of the "liberating" Red Army three days after the end of World War II and beatified by Pope Francis shortly after the onset of Russian aggression in Ukraine.
Sister Paschalis entered the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Elizabeth in Nysa just one year before Germany, along with the Soviet Union, unleashed World War II. Lower Silesia, where Paschalis resided during the war, remained relatively safe throughout the war. However, this changed in late 1944/45 when the Red Army began its advance to the west.
At that time, Sister Paschalis sent her parents a postcard with the following text:
Dear parents. I am sending you both the warmest Christmas greetings and a blessed New Year. Yes, yes, the old year has brought much suffering to humanity, and it seems that the new year will be even worse. We now also have to prepare for the worst. Wroclaw has already had to be cleared and evacuated. However, we do not want to lose courage; we are all in God's hands. Nothing happens without His will.
From the then-million-strong Wroclaw, hundreds of thousands of people fled ahead of the advancing Red Army. The hurried evacuation of the city in January 1945 cost nearly 90,000 lives; the siege of the city by the Red Army resulted in the deaths of approximately six thousand German and eight thousand Soviet soldiers, but primarily claimed another 80,000 civilians. In March 1945, the Red Army approached Nysa, from which nearly all inhabitants had fled in fear of Soviet soldiers' brutality—over thirty thousand people—leaving their homes and all their belongings at the mercy of plundering. Less than two thousand old and sick people who were unable to evacuate remained in the city, along with nearly two hundred nuns and priests who decided to care for them. The Mother Superior, fearing the rampant rapes that Red Army soldiers were committing, transferred the young Sister Paschalis along with one other fellow sister to the currently calm Moravia, to Sobotín. This decision temporarily saved their lives, as on the very first day after the Red Army entered Nysa, soldiers stormed the convent, where mostly old and sick sisters resided, killing 23 of them, mostly in the attempt to rape them. The vast majority of houses in the city were deliberately set on fire.
Sister Paschalis experienced the "liberation" in Sobotín, where the Red Army arrived on May 7. The very next day—May 8, the day the war ended—a clash with locals occurred, during which Soviet soldiers shot 16 residents of the village and burned several houses. Three days after the end of the war, on May 11, one of the "liberators" shot Sister Paschalis when she refused to submit to rape. She was buried in the local cemetery. A letter has survived in which the Mother Superior later addresses the grieving parents:
Most likely, she has already asked for many graces for her loved ones. … At her grave, groups of young people often kneel and ask for her intercession. We were not aware of this. We were still waiting for our young sister to return…until eyewitnesses told us...
Out of the many dozens of nuns brutally murdered by Soviet soldiers, the life stories of ten have been sufficiently documented. The beatification process for these sisters was initiated in 2011, and the decree on their martyrdom was signed by Pope Francis in 2021. The beatification of Sister Maria Paschalis and nine fellow sisters took place on June 11, 2022, in Wroclaw, three and a half months after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine had begun, in the context of confirmed testimonies about the mass extermination of the Ukrainian civilian population and the massacres committed by the Russian army in Bucha and other cities. The beatification mass took place on the day when an epidemic of cholera broke out in Mariupol due to hundreds of unburied decomposing bodies...
Processed according to the bachelor’s thesis by M. Macoun:
“The Life and Martyrdom of Sr. Maria Paschalis Jahn, nine of her fellow sisters, and the legacy for today’s man”,
defended in Hradec Králové in 2023 (https://theses.cz/id/lhvgtt/STAG100124.pdf),
and according to Riccardi's book Centuries of Martyrs, KNA 2014.
