Lisamaria Meirowsky, Grudziądz

Lisamaria Meirowsky - German dermatologist and pediatrician, convert from Judaism, Catholic Dominican Tertiary and martyr of the Catholic Church.

She was the daughter of Emil Meirowski, a dermatologist who worked in the USA after the war. In 1908 the family moved to Cologne. From 1923 she studied medicine at the University of Bonn, obtained a doctorate in dermatology at the Ludwig and Maximilian University of Munich in 1933 and later a second doctorate in medicine in Rome.

Toward the end of her high school education she became interested in Catholicism, attending the lectures of Father Wilhelm Neuss, intended for converts, but she was not baptized until October 15, 1933 in Rome. Under the influence of Father Franziskus Maria Stratmann OP, as a tertian, Sister Maria Magdalena Dominica, she was supposed to join the newly founded Congregation of Dominican Sisters of Christ the King, but it did not come to fruition. In 1938 she left Germany and moved to Holland. During the German occupation of the Netherlands, she was arrested on August 2, 1942, during mass arrests of Catholics of Jewish origin, in retaliation for publishing the pastoral letter of the Dutch episcopate in defense of the Jews. Together with others she was deported to the German extermination camp KL Auschwitz II - Birkenau and murdered in the gas chamber together with Edith Stein.

On October 28, 2001 a commemorative plaque was unveiled on the house in Grudziadz, 19 Groblowa Street, where she was born. On May 29, 2004, the Faculty of Theology of the Nicolaus Copernicus University organized a conference in Grudziadz, the papers of which were published in a separate volume. She was also commemorated in Cologne, including a memorial plaque near her last residence.