Today is the feast of St.John the Evangelist (aka the Theologian or the Divine). It is also the anniversary of the martyrdom of Blessed Sara Salkahazi. Encouraged and supported by her superior in religious life, Sr.Margit Slatcha, founder of the Sisters of Social Work, she arranged to hide hundreds of Jewish woman in their convents and institutes when the Nazi occupiers and their fascist Arrow Cross allies began to deport Jews to Auschwitz in 1944. *
On December 27th, 1944 four Jewish women she was sheltering in Budapest were denounced and arrested. She refused to be separated from them and along with an unidentified Christian co-worker, all six were murdered on the embankment of the Danube and their bodies thrown into the river.
In the darkness of the genocidal fury of the Nazi perpetrators and their allies, the majority of Europe's Catholics and Protestants abandoned their Jewish neighbors to their fate due to fear, prejudice or indifference.
May the courageous actions and self-sacrifice of men and women such as Pere Jacques de Jesus OCD, Blessed Sára, Raoul Wallenberg ,Chiune Sugihara, ordinary families like the soon-to -be beatified Polish martyrs Józef and Wiktoria Ulma and their seven children, and others inspire us to live our lives in the light of compassion, hope and solidarity .
*Yad Vashem estimates that the Sisters of Social Work rescued 2000 Jewish women and that Blessed Sara personally rescued 1000 of them.
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