The Martyrs of Nowogrodek were a group of eleven Polish nuns from the Congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth who were shot on August 1, 1943 by Gestapo men in the forest near Nowogródek in Poland (now Belarus). They were beatified on March 5, 2000 in Rome by John Paul II.
The nuns moved to Nowogródek in 1929 at the request of Msgr. Zygmunt Lozinski to take care of the catechism and teaching the children. They opened a boarding school there. The region was occupied ten years later, during the Polish campaign, by the Soviets, who closed the boarding school and deported the notables to Kazakhstan, while practicing a policy of atheism. The nuns still had the right to take care of the apostolate discreetly in the parishes. In the summer of 1941, it was the turn of the Wehrmacht to occupy the region and German soldiers began to terrorize the Jewish population of the city (more than half of the city), as well as Polish notabilities and anyone showing opposition inclinations. The Jews were quickly deported, and then about sixty people, including two priests, were executed. When on July 1, 1943, a final wave of arrests struck 120 Polish hostages with a view to shooting them, the nuns, led by Mother Marie-Stella of the Blessed Sacrament (born Adèle Mardosewicz in 1888), expressed their disapproval and even gave their lives to exchange their fate, which they confided to their chaplain in the evening. Almost immediately, the German authorities changed their decision and either released the hostages or sent some of them as forced laborers to Germany.
However, on July 31, 1943, the nuns were summoned to the police station. They think that having harmed no one, they will be sent as forced laborers. In fact, they were handed over to Gestapo men, who put them in trucks and shot them at dawn in the forest five kilometers from the city, after a night of prayers. A young boy who was an unfortunate witness to the scene was also shot.
The only surviving sister, who was not there at the time of the arrest, Sister Maria Małgorzata Banas, managed to locate the mass grave, which she maintained until her own death in 1966.
The liturgical memorial of the eleven martyrs is set for August 1. The city's Church of the Transfiguration houses the relics of the martyrs.
• Adela Mardosewicz
• Anna Kukolowicz
• Eleonora Aniela Józwik
• Eugenia Mackiewicz
• Helena Cierpka
• Jadwiga Karolina Zak
• Józefa Chrobot
• Julia Rapiej
• Leokadia Matuszewska
• Paulina Borowik
• Weronika Narmontowicz