Blessed Natalia Tulasiewicz

Bl Natalia Tułasiewicz

What hope is there when your country is invaded? What hope is there when you and your family are thrown out of their home by the invading army? What hope is there when you are sent to a forced labour factory? What hope is there when you are arrested and then brutally interrogated for providing help and spiritual comfort to your fellow forced labour workers? What hope is there when you face execution in a gas chamber at Ravensbrück concentration camp, on Easter Sunday 1945.

The hope is that love will prevail, that the power of good will triumph over evil, that the forgiveness of God, the kindness of Jesus and the mercy of Mary will come to rest in the hearts of everyone.

That's the hope that shines through in the painting of Blessed Natalia Tulasiewicz (1906-1945) by Ruben Ferreira, part of an exhibition by the Portuguese born and London based artist, at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Farm Street, Mayfair, central London.

The story of Blessed Natalia Tułasiewicz is one that is close to me. She is a cousin, many times removed, who lived in Poznan, Poland before the Second World War. My father, Witold, used to run away from his boarding school and would make the journey by train to Poznan to stay with her. Then the Second World War broke out, and my father together with his parents, sheltered in her flat escaping from Leipzig and en route to Warsaw.

He is mentioned in her diaries, which together with other writings miraculously survived the War. Perhaps they survived as when Natalia and her parents were being evicted from their flat to make way for a German family, she insisted that they were left some food - invaders they may have been, but their were also God's creatures, she said. When the war ended, Natalia's writings had been left untouched.

Blessed Natalia Tułasiewicz was a Polish philologist, poet, and social activist. During World War II, she was recruited as an envoy for the Pastoral Department of the underground organization 'Zachód', operating under the authority of the Polish Government-in-Exile in London.

Volunteering as a forced labourer, she undertook a secret pastoral and educational mission in a labour camp in Hanover, where she supported the spiritual and emotional well-being of young Polish women deported for forced labour in Nazi Germany.

When the Germans found out about her secret mission, she was arrested, tortured, and condemned to death in the Ravensbrück concentration camp.

On Good Friday 1945, she climbed a stool in the barracks and spoke to the prisoners on the passion and resurrection of Jesus. Two days later, on Easter Sunday, 31 March, she was murdered in a gas chamber. The concentration camp was liberated two days later.

Natalia Tułasiewicz is one of the only two lay women among the 108 Martyrs of World War II, beatified on 13 June 1999 by Pope John Paul II In 2022, a Vatican decree proclaimed her the Patron Saint of Teachers in Poland.

Hope also shines through in Ruben Ferreria's other paintings at the exhibition in which he shares the powerful stories of unknown heroes, from members of the Resistance, Consecrated and Lay people, objectors of conscience, an entire family and even a survivor of the Atomic Bomb - holy people who, amidst the despair, prejudice, and hatred of the Third Reich, dared to choose love.

They include Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran pastor and anti-Nazi dissident and St Maximilian Maria Kolbe who volunteered to die in place of a man named Franciszek Gajowniczek in the German death camp of Auschwitz.

Ferreria's paintings have a hyper-realistic quality to them - the faces have a polished sheen and a transparency that quite literally allows hope to shine through from the canvas. They show an almost super human determination, at times even looking a bit like superheroes or characters from a manga comic book. This determination is of course one rooted in love and powered by faith.

The exhibition is at the Jesuit Church of the Immaculate Conception Arrupe Hall, 114 Mount Street, London, W1K 3AH, (Monday to Friday: 9am to 8pm Saturday & Sunday: 9 am to 2 pm), for the whole month of October.

LINKS

Ruben Ferreira London Exhibition: https://rubenferreiraart.com/2025-london-exhibition

More information about Blessed Natalia Tułasiewicz: www.blogoslawionanatalia.eu and www.fundacjablogoslawionanatalia.eu