IFTTT Autopost 
Natalia Tułasiewicz was born on April 9, 1906 in Rzeszów, Poland, second of six children. Her father was a tax clerk, and her mother was a homemaker.
Small and frail, Natalia was blessed with a loving family who was also noted for their love of their homeland, Poland.
Although the family moved from time to time to different locations in Poland whenever Natalia’s father got promotions, Natalia always received an excellent education from schools run by the Poor Clares and Ursulines.
When she was sixteen, Natalia was deeply touched by the death of her cousin who died as a drug addict. This made Natalia reflect on her own life and what her purpose in life should be. She concluded that her life’s mission would be to do good to others.
In 1926, Natalia became a student at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznán studying Polish philology, the branch of knowledge that explores the structure, historical development, and relationships of a language or set of languages. She threw herself into academia and was involved in many social and literary activities.
During her studies, Natalia fell in love with a young man named Janek who defined himself as a communist. Natalia and Janet were together for eight years, but they broke up the engagement because Natalia had difficulty with some of Janek’s ideas and his personality.
A year after beginning her studies, Natalia and her sister were diagnosed with tuberculosis following the death of an elder sister from the disease. For her health, Natalia went into the mountains and worked as a teacher in a school run by the Nazarene sisters. After graduation, she taught at two other schools.
Spiritually, Natalia had a very solid foundation built on daily Mass and Communion, monthly retreats, and frequent night adorations. In her journals in the early 1940s, Natalia wrote about how she felt called to serve the Lord not as a religious sister, but as a lay person. Her missionary zeal was profound. She wrote that she wanted to speak about God to everyone and everywhere. As a young person, Natalia was deeply involved in the lay Catholic apostolate.
When World War II broke out, her family was thrown out of their home like many other Polish families. She became part of the Polish Underground State, the resistance movement designed to do what they could to fight against Hitler’s fascist Nazi movement. First, she did that teaching secretly via help from Ursuline Sisters. Then, however, she volunteered to be trained by the Home Army to help in Germany factories. What the Nazis did not know, however, was that Natalia was actually a member of the Polish resistance and was engaging in apostolic work among the workers.
On April 29, 1944, however, a careless courier from Warsaw visited Natalia, leading to her arrest. She was interrogated, beaten and tortured, and imprisoned in the Gestapo prison in Cologne. In September 1944, she was sent to the mostly-female Ravensbrück prison. There, she continued her religious education classes and helped prepare young girls for the secondary school exam they might one day take when free.
Because of the exhaustion of hard physical labor that the inmates were required to engage in, combined with a flareup of her tuberculosis and poor diet, Natalia was in poor physical shape. On Good Friday, March 30, 1945, the Nazis selected her to be killed. The next day, March 31, Natalia was killed in a gas chamber. A month after her death, the Soviet Union’s Red Army liberated Ravensbrück.
Pope John Paul II beatified Natalia along with 107 other martyrs of World War II on June 13, 1999. The feast day of the 108 Blessed Polish Martyrs of World War II is June 12.
