[1][2] When she was two years old, her family moved to the Brigittenau neighbourhood of Vienna, the imperial capital, and home to a Czech migrant community, where she grew up.

[4] While working as a nurse, Kafka met members of the Franciscan Sisters of Christian Charity[5] (German: Franziskanerinnen von der christlichen Liebe) and entered their congregation the following year, at the age of 20.

[4] In 1919, after the First World War, Kafka was transferred to a hospital in the suburban town of Mödling, eventually becoming its leading surgical nurse.

Kafka was very vocal in her opposition to the new regime, which had immediately begun to implement the Nuremberg Laws established by the Nazi Party in Germany upon its acquisition of power.

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.

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.