Another Magdalen: Dr. Lisamaria Meirowsky

The April issue of Magnificat featured a magnificent letter by Sister M. Magdalena Dominica on Thursday the 22nd (pp. 284-285). It would be worth your while to buy a copy of the issue just to read that letter, even though the month is nearly over! Or find a friend who subscribes and borrow her or his copy when the month is over!

Here's an excerpt of the letter from this blog, dedicated to St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein):

I want to send you my last greetings and to tell you that I have complete confidence in God and have surrendered myself entirely to His will. Even more — I regard it as a grace and privilege to be driven along this road under these conditions, a witness to the words of our good Fathers and shepherds in Christ.

If our sufferings have been increased somewhat then we have received a double portion of grace and a glorious crown is being prepared for us in heaven. Rejoice with me. I am going forward unshaken, confidently and joyfully — like the Sisters who are with me — to testify to Jesus Christ and to bear witness to the Truth in company with our Bishops. We are going as children of Our Holy Mother, the Church; we will unite our sufferings with the sufferings of our King, our Saviour and our Bridegroom, sacrificing ourselves for the conversion, for the Jews, for those who persecute us, so that all may know the peace of Christ and his Kingdom. Join with me in thanking God for this great favor by singing an exultant Magnificat.

The same blog provides this brief biography:

Since 1940, she had been resident in the lodge of the Trappistine Abbey near Tilburg. She was a medical doctor of Polish-Jewish origin, acquainted with our Saint with whom she had exchanged several letters. At Tilburg, she rendered valuable services to the community as doorkeeper and community doctor. She was a member of the Dominican Third Order and was regarded by the Trappistines as one of themselves.

In a letter addressed to her confessor from Westerbork, dated "Transfiguratio, 6, VIII." she expressed the most admirable spiritual sentiments, showing to what extent our Saint [Edith Stein] was seconded in her intentions by other Hebrew Catholics.

So you know I wanted to find out more about such a woman of faith and resolve. 

Magnificat told me that she was a medical doctor of Jewish descent and a third-order Dominican and that the letter was from a book published in 1956: Dying We Live: The Final Messages and Records of the German Resistance (also published with different subtitle: The Final Messages and Records of Some Germans Who Defied Hitler), edited by Helmut Gollwitzer, Kathe Kuhn, and Reinhold Schneider.

The blog cited above told me that her name "in the world" was Dr. Meirowsky, so finally I found Dr. Lisamaria Meirowsky and this (Google translated) German website:

Like many baptized Jews, Lisamaria Meirowsky also fled to the Netherlands in autumn 1938; at the same time she was active in the aid organization for Jewish refugees. When the war spread to the Netherlands in 1940, she hid in the Trappist convent Berkel-Enschot in Brabant, where she performed modest services as a porter. On August 2, 1942, she was abducted by the Gestapo. She wrote to her confessor: “I want to send you one last greeting and tell you that I am full of trust and completely devoted to God's holy will. Even more: I consider it a grace and a choice to have to leave under these circumstances in order to stand up for the word of our fathers and shepherds in Christ”. On the following August 9th, she and other Jewish prisoners, among them the Stein siblings . . . (sic)

The biography begins with the poignant sentence: "Up to now there is not even a photograph of her." 

But with that letter, we can see her!

I couldn't find any information about a Cause for her canonization and I wonder who her confessor was and what happened to him.

Image Credit: Used under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license (Stolperstein for Dr. Lisamaria Meirowsky, installed on the street in front of her last home before she fled the Nazis, Furst-Puckler-Strasse 42 in Cologne, Germany)