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Oil Dedicated to Adele Dirsyte
Oil Dedicated to Adele Dirsyte born in Lithuania to parents who were farmers. She was the youngest of six children.
By 1944, the Soviet army had reoccupied the capital city of Vilnius. Adele began participating in a resistance movement that was organizing for Lithuanian independence.
In 1946, she was arrested for hiding a woman who had escaped from the Soviets. She was brought before a tribunal. And sentenced for “counterrevolutionary activities” to ten years in a concentration camp.
Adele known for her kindness, faith, and steadfast efforts to console and comfort her fellow prisoners. At Magadan concentration camp. She managed to produce a small prayer book, hand-sewn with cloth covers.
One day a priest inmate from the adjacent men’s camp arranged for the Eucharist to brought over and distributed among the Lithuanian women.
In the fall of 1953, she held in the punishment cell for a week, then transferred to an unknown location for the winter. She returned to Magadan partially incoherent, with half of her hair torn out, and moved to the ward for the mentally ill. Here she refused food, saying, “You who work must eat.” She died on September 26, 1955. The cause for her beatification opened on January 14, 2000.
One detail, from her time before prison, haunts. A former student remarked. “She was modest and very quiet. Her lessons were a bit boring.”
Her lessons were a bit boring. How sharply we reminded that the person marked out by Christ to share his crown is often outwardly ordinary and without special talents.
Her lessons were a bit boring. And within Servant of God Adele Dirsyte burned the heart of a martyr, a queen, a saint.
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