was denounced by a doctor who strongly supported the regime. On Ash Wednesday 1942 (18 February of that year), while coming out of the operating theater, Kafka was arrested by the Gestapo and accused, not only of hanging the crucifixes, but also of having dictated a poem mocking Hitler. On 29 October 1942 she was sentenced to death by the guillotine by the Volksgerichtshof for "favouring the enemy and conspiracy to commit high treason". The authorities offered to release her if she would leave the convent, but she refused. When a request for clemency reached the desk of Martin Bormann, head of the Nazi Party Chancellery, he replied that her execution would provide "effective intimidation" for others who might want to resist the Nazis. Kafka spent the rest of her days in prison, where she was noted for caring for other prisoners. During this period, she wrote in a letter from the prison: It does not matter how far we are separated from everything, no matter what is taken from us: the faith that we carry in our hearts is something no one can take from us. In this way we build an altar in our own hearts. After her imprisonment on Ash Wednesday 1942, Restituta Kafka spent over one year on death row. On 30 March 1943, she was beheaded in the Vienna Regional Court. She was 48 years old. Veneration On 21 June 1998, on the occasion of Pope John Paul II's visit to Vienna, Kafka was beatified. She was the first virgin martyr of Vienna. Maria Restituta Kafka, the only religious sister to be formally condemned to death in the area of the "Greater Germanic Reich", was commemorated in Rome on the evening of 4 March 2013, in the Basilica of San Bartolomeo all'Isola on Tiber Island, with a liturgy of the word at which Cardinal Christoph Schönborn presided. During the service, the Franciscan Sisters of Christian Charity handed to the basilica a small cross which Kafka had worn on the belt of her religious habit. The relic was placed in the chapel there which remembers the martyrs of Nationalist Socialism. In Restituta Kafka's honour, the western half of Weyprechtgasse, a lane running before Mödling Hospital, was renamed Schwester-Maria-Restituta-Gasse. Also there is a park named in her honour in her native Husovice: Park Marie Restituty. Near the location of her birthplace a church dedicated to her was