 The communists soon assumed total power in the nation in 1948 and started their mass persecution of religious and priest alike with countless arrested and tortured with some sent in droves to the hospital for treatment.She aided the ailing priest Sandtner and celebrated forbidden Mass with him and managed to get him to remain in hospital when authorities deemed his condition to have improved instead of watching him being sent back to prison.In February 1952 she aided the politically-vocal condemned priest Stefan Kostial flee from his fate which would have been death in Siberia when she slipped sleeping pills into a guard's tea allowing the priest to flee; she organized this on 19 February - a day before the priest was to appear in court.