Schwester Maria Restituta (Helene) Kafka SFCC

Helene Kafka was born in Brno as the sixth child of the Moravian shoemaker Anton Kafka and the Bohemian florist Marie Kafka. Two years after her birth, the family moved to Vienna due to better living conditions. There she completed elementary and secondary school in Vienna's 20th district and then a one-year domestic school in Vienna's 1st district. She then worked as a maid and as a clerk in a tobacconist's shop.

In October 1913, Helene Kafka fulfilled her long-cherished career dream and started work as a nurse at the municipal hospital in Vienna-Lainz. There she became acquainted with the "Order of the Franciscan Sisters of Christian Charity", also known colloquially as the "Hartmann Sisters", because of their mother house in Vienna's Hartmanngasse. She joins the order against her parents' wishes. Her novitiate begins on October 23, 1915, and she chooses the name "Maria Restituta" as her religious name. She made her first profession on October 23, 1916 and her perpetual profession on June 8, 1923. She trained as a surgical nurse and anaesthetist in various hospitals.

Sister Maria Restituta was strictly opposed to National Socialism and was convinced of the idea of a free and independent Austria. At the time of the occupation of Austria by the Third Reich, she was working at Mödling Hospital. She makes no secret of her opposition to National Socialism. She said that she wanted the "Saunazis and the fools" out of the country.

In Mödling Hospital, Sister Maria Restituta was particularly at odds with the doctor Lambert Stumfohl. Stumfohl had been a member of the SS since 1931 and a member of the NSDAP since 1932 and was an "illegal" during the time of the so-called corporative state in Austria, when National Socialism was banned. He was negligent in his care of foreign patients, made difficulties for the dying with regard to the provision of spiritual assistance and regarded the medical histories that Sister Maria Restituta insisted on as deliberate bureaucratic harassment.

When a new surgical department was opened in Mödling Hospital in 1940, the anti-clerical National Socialist hospital management refused to put up any crucifixes. Sister Maria Restituta and Sister Maria Kajetana, in defiance of a ban, put up crucifixes above all the entrance doors with the consent of the matron. Shortly afterwards, there is a great commotion on the occasion of a visit by high-ranking Nazi officials. Due to Sister Maria Restituta's professional irreplaceability, she was not dismissed.

In 1941, Sister Maria Restituta received two anti-regime texts from soldiers, which she had Margarete Smole, an employee of the chancery, duplicate using a typewriter with a carbon copy of each. She reads the "Soldiers' Song" to other nurses. A cleaning lady who observes this reports it to Lambert Stumfohl. He obtains the carbon copies and reports Sister Maria Restituta to the police.

On February 18, 1942, Sister Maria Restituta is arrested by the Gestapo from the operating theatre and charged with preparation for high treason by the People's Court on June 4, 1942. Her preferred defense lawyer was not admitted without giving any reasons; instead, she was assigned the National Socialist lawyer Ernst Hoffmann. On October 29, 1942, Sister Maria Restituta was sentenced to death.

Petitions for clemency, including from the Archbishop of Vienna Theodor Cardinal Innitzer, were rejected. On March 30, 1943 at around 6:20 p.m., she was murdered by guillotine in the Vienna Provincial Court. Shortly before her murder, she wrote on a note in her breviary:

The National Socialists did not even release her body, but buried it in the anonymous "Group 40" at the Central Cemetery.

In 1978, she was posthumously awarded the Decoration of Honor for Services to the Liberation of Austria and beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1998.