By Joseph Pearce
Crisis Magazine
October 21, 2025
Of all the many dark centuries in the history of Christendom, there is no denying that the 20th century was one of the darkest. It was also the deadliest. In terms of the sheer body count, the last century, with its wars of irreligion, fought with industrialized weapons of mass destruction, was the most murderous in human history-and among the most tyrannous. New secular fundamentalist ideologies, such as communism and Nazism, ushered in a culture of death in which millions perished on the altar of "political correctness."
Having celebrated the heroic witness of Anna Abrikosova (Mother Catherine of Siena) against communist tyranny, let's now celebrate women who bore witness to the culture of life in the midst of the death culture of the Nazis.
When we think of Catholics who were martyred by the Nazis, our minds will turn immediately to St. Maximilian Kolbe and St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein), both of whom were murdered in the infamous Auschwitz death camp. The former was deprived of food and water for two weeks and was then killed with a lethal injection of carbolic acid; the latter was exterminated in the concentration camp's infamous gas chamber. Both were canonized by St. John Paul II.
Edith Stein is not, however, the only woman to be honored by the Church for resisting the tyranny of the Nazis. Eleven Polish nuns of the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth were murdered by machine gun fire by the Nazis in August 1943 and have been beatified by the Church. Another Polish woman, Blessed Marianna Biernacka, was shot by German soldiers after she asked to be killed in the place of her pregnant daughter, unborn grandchild, and son-in-law.
A Hungarian woman, Blessed Sára Salkaházi, was murdered by Nazi collaborators in December 1944 for her leadership of the Catholic Women's Association, which helped to hide hundreds of Jews in Budapest. A young devout Italian woman, Blessed Teresa of Savona, was strangled and shot to death in August 1944 for resisting a German soldier who was trying to rape her, emulating the example of the better-known St. Maria Goretti, who had been stabbed to death for resisting an attempted rape in 1902.
Blessed Maria Antonina Kratochwil, a religious sister imprisoned by the Nazis in occupied Poland, was brutally attacked by a member of the Gestapo after she had tried to protect Jewish women from being abused by the Nazis. She died from her injuries in October 1942. Another religious sister, Blessed Maria Restituta Kafka, was a Franciscan who worked as a surgical nurse in Austria. In defiance of the Nazi authorities, she maintained overt Christian practices in her hospital, including the displaying of crucifixes on the walls. She was arrested for her anti-Nazi stance and was guillotined in March 1943. Prior to her execution, she wrote the following:
It does not matter how far we are separated from everything, no matter what is taken from us: the faith that we carry in our hearts is something no one can take from us. In this way we build an altar in our own hearts.
Among the heroic women warriors who fought the Nazis, some were destined to survive the war, outliving Hitler's self-proclaimed "Thousand-Year Reich" which was destroyed after only 12 ignominious years. Blessed Enrichetta Alfieri, an Italian Sister of Charity, worked for the resistance in Milan, and Zofia Kossak-Szczucka, was active in the resistance in Poland, editing an underground newspaper and founding the Front for the Rebirth of Poland, an anti-Nazi Catholic organization.
Kossak-Szczucka was a famous writer and had been elected to the Polish Academy of Literature on the eve of the war. She was arrested for helping Jews escape the clutches of the Nazis and was sentenced to death, a fate she escaped, thanks to the Polish underground, during the Warsaw Uprising. Having survived the war, she continued to resist tyranny as a dissident voice against the new totalitarian regime of the communists. She died in 1968, at the age of 78.
We will conclude by returning to Auschwitz concentration camp and to the prolife witness of Stanisława Leszczyńska, a wife and mother who had worked for many years as a midwife prior to the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. With her husband and children, she began to assist local Jews by delivering food and false documents. In February 1943, she was arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo, along with her daughter and two of her sons. Her husband escaped. She would never see him again because he would subsequently be killed fighting in the Warsaw Uprising. The two sons were sent as slave laborers to the stone quarries of the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp.
Leszczyńska and her 24-year-old daughter Sylwia were transported to Auschwitz in April 1943. Due to her experience as a midwife, she was assigned to work in the women's camp infirmary along with her daughter, who had been a medical student prior to the war. She was under the supervision of the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele, later dubbed the "Angel of Death" for his medical experiments on prisoners, who ordered her to write reports about birth defects and problems associated with childbirth.
Leszczyńska's experience at Auschwitz would be recorded in The Report of a Midwife from Auschwitz (Raport położnej z Oświęcimia). Of the 3,000 babies that she delivered, approximately 2,500 perished, many through cold-blooded murder. Horrifically, she described how the newborn children were snatched away and taken to another room to be drowned in a barrel by someone whom she named as "Sister Klara," who had apparently been imprisoned at Auschwitz for infanticide. Others, who were lucky enough to be born with blue eyes, were sent away to become Germanized. Only about 30 infants survived in the care of their mothers. Heartbreakingly, many expectant mothers had no idea what was going to happen to their babies and traded their meager food rations for fabric to be used for diapers.
Leszczyńska remained the camp's midwife until Auschwitz was liberated in January 1945. Continuing to work as a midwife after the war, she prayed over every newborn baby that she delivered in remembrance of those who had died in the death camp. In January 1970, on the 25th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Leszczyńska met the women prisoners of Auschwitz and their grown-up children who had been born in the camp and whom she had helped to deliver.
Eighteen months earlier, Pope Paul VI had issued the encyclical Humanae Vitae, in defense of human life in the wake of the new culture of death emerging after the so-called sexual revolution had led to demands for the legalization of infanticide. As the fight against the death-culture continues, it is right and just that we should remember these women warriors of the culture of life.
This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.