A NEW BLESSED BENEDICTINE OBLATE

Soon to be blessed  (April 28 in Poland) HANNA HELENA CHRZANOWSKA was a Polish Roman Catholic Benedictine oblate who served as a nurse.  She worked in her profession during World War II when the Nazi regime targeted Poles, tending to the wounded and the ailing throughout the conflict. She was awarded two prestigious Polish awards for her good works. Her cause of sainthood began  a decade after her death in 1973.  Pope Francis declared her to be Venerable in 2015 upon the confirmation of her heroic virtue. She will be beatified on 28 April 2018 in Poland.

Hanna was born in 1902 in Warsaw.  She was part of an industrialist (maternal side) and a land-owning household (paternal side) that maintained a long-standing tradition of charitable works. Her parents were well known for this in their native Poland. Her home's religious circumstances were also quite unique since half were Roman Catholic and the other half was Protestant (descended from the Jauch house). Her maternal grandfather Karol set up a technical school for aspiring artisans while his wife Maria set up a health center for poor children in Warsaw. 

She was a relative of the Nobel laureate Henryk Sienkiewicz (on her father's side) who was best known for writing the novel Quo Vadis.

Since childhood she suffered from respiratory and immune system deficiencies and spent a great deal of time in hospitals and sanatoriums in order to recover from illness. In 1910 the family relocated from Warsaw to Kraków.

Hanna was  curious and exuberant, attending an Ursuline high school and graduating with honors. During the Bolshevik Revolution she tended to the wounded soldiers and later began studies at the School of Nursing in Warsaw in 1920.  It was also around this  time that she worked under the Servant of God Magdalena Maria Epstein. She gained a scholarship to a nursing school in France in 1925 while later going on to work with the members of the U.S. Red Cross as a nurse in a time when the profession was not so well respected.

She also traveled to Belgium to observe the nursing profession there as part of her education in order to gain greater experience and broader knowledge of the field. During her time as a nurse she became a leading light in the field in her region and a well known face in her local area due to her temperance and her good works among the people whom she was dedicated to serving.

Hanna became an instructor at the University School of Nurses and Hygienists in Krakow from 1926 until 1929 and also served as the editor of the monthly publication "Nurse Poland" from 1929 to 1939.

Drawn to St Benedict and aspiring to follow his example and the message of the Gospel in an effort to draw closer to God she became an Oblate, with the desire  to fuse her faith with her work as merciful and charitable.

In 1940 during World War II she lost her father who died during the Sonderaktion Krakau at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and her lieutenant brother Bogden died at the hands of Soviet soldiers on the orders of Joseph Stalin in the Katyn massacre. As the war continued she organized nurses for home care in Warsaw and helped to both feed and resettle refugees. At the conclusion of the war she became the head of a nursing home where she attended to administrative duties and cared for residents while working with nursing students.  She also served as the director of the School of Psychiatric Nursing in Kobierzyn until the Communists closed it.  She then  moved into nursing the poor and the neglected in her own parish area. She  attained a scholarship to the USA from 1946 until 1947.

In 1966 she was diagnosed with cancer and despite several operations  the disease spread. On 12 April 1973 she received the Sacrament of the Sick  and the next day lost consciousness, dying a day later. Cardinal Archbishop of Krakow Karol Józef Wojtyła ( the future St.Pope John Paul II) celebrated her funeral.