Wanda Poltawska, a Polish psychiatrist and creator who after World Conflict II sought religious assist to deal with the horrors she had skilled in a Nazi focus camp and have become a lifelong good friend of her counselor, a priest who would someday be Pope John Paul II, died on Oct. 24 at her house in Krakow. She was 101.
Her dying was confirmed by her grandson Chris Dadak.
The pope’s friendship with Dr. Poltawska (pronounced pole-DUS-ka), a married Roman Catholic with 4 grown daughters, was largely unknown till 2009, 4 years after John Paul’s dying, when she revealed particulars of it in a memoir.
That they had exchanged letters and visits for nearly a half-century, she wrote, beginning in 1956 in Krakow, Poland, the place she had begun a psychiatric follow and the place the longer term pontiff was a dynamic younger parish priest, the Rev. Karol Wojtyla.
It was a contact in a confessional that initially introduced them collectively. There, Dr. Poltawska advised Father Wojtyla of the burdens she had borne for years as a sufferer of grotesque medical experiments carried out on her and different ladies within the focus camp at Ravensbrück, Germany. Their alternate led to additional consultations and, over time, a bond that will prolong from Poland to the Vatican.
Her ebook “Reminiscences of the Beskidy Hills” included photos of her household on climbing, snowboarding and tenting journeys with Father Wojtyla within the mountains of southeastern Poland, lengthy earlier than his papacy started in 1978. Different pictures confirmed the household with the pope on the Vatican and at Castel Gandolfo, his retreat exterior Rome.
Written in Polish throughout 570 pages, the ebook supplied reminiscences about outdated instances collectively: prayers and campfire non secular discussions, carols sung at Christmastime, First Communion celebrations for the women, and common visits to the Poltawska house in Krakow, the place the kids referred to as him “Uncle Karol.”
The memoir quoted from letters that he addressed to “Dearest Dusia” and signed “Br,” for “Brat,” or “Brother.” In a single, dated Oct. 20, 1978, a couple of days after his elevation to the papacy, he expressed delight that she and her household had been coming to Rome for a non-public go to with him.
That letter supplied endearing private confidences. Referring to his election in a conclave of cardinals, he wrote, “I thank God that he gave me a lot calm.”
“In all of this, I consider you,” wrote the pope, whose mom, father and brother had all died, leaving him and not using a shut household. “I’ve at all times believed that you simply, within the focus camp, suffered partly for me. It’s on the premise of this perception that I’ve come to the concept yours is likely to be my household, and also you a sister to me.”
Dr. Poltawska met the pope on the Vatican shortly thereafter, alongside together with her husband, Andrezj Poltawska, a professor of philosophy, and their daughters. The household would apparently see him usually throughout his 26-year papacy. She visited him at a hospital in Rome after he was shot by a would-be murderer in 1981, and she or he was one in every of a bunch of people that had been allowed to go to his bedside within the hours earlier than he died in 2005.
Whereas nothing in her ebook urged any closeness past a brother-sister relationship, some church officers reacted to its publication with hostility. Cardinal José Saraiva Martins, prefect emeritus of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, which was contemplating canonization for John Paul II, accused Dr. Poltawska of withholding correspondence that would delay beatification.
Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz of Krakow, John Paul’s former non-public secretary, accused Dr. Poltawska of exaggerating her relationship with the pope. He advised the Italian newspaper La Stampa that John Paul had many aged associates from Poland. “That was his secret: to make all those that had been pricey to him really feel like they’d a particular relationship with him,” the cardinal was quoted as saying.
Dr. Poltawska was the creator of books defending conventional household values and Catholic dogma opposing contraception, abortion and premarital intercourse, and she or he reiterated her assist for these concepts in a A hundredth-birthday interview in Krakow with The Nationwide Catholic Register.
For years she had dismissed efforts to reduce her friendship with the pope, in addition to hypothesis of a romantic relationship between them. “What’s fallacious in a priest’s friendship with a lady?” she as soon as requested The Related Press. “Isn’t a priest a human being?”
John Paul’s bond with Dr. Poltawska was affirmed in 1962 when, as a bishop in Rome for the Second Vatican Council, he obtained a observe from her husband saying she had discovered that she had intestinal most cancers and had been given 18 months to reside. He requested a stigmatic friar, Padre Pio da Pietrelcina, to hunt divine intervention. Days later, her medical doctors found that the tumor had inexplicably disappeared, the Vatican stated.
In 2002, John Paul canonized Padre Pio, citing Dr. Poltawska’s abrupt restoration as one in every of two requisite miracles for sainthood.
Wanda Wiktoria Wojtasik was born on Nov. 2, 1921, in Lublin, Poland, the daughter of Adam and Anna (Chaber) Wojtasik. Her father was a postal clerk, and her mom was a homemaker. She attended the College of Ursuline Sisters in Lublin and have become a Lady Information, studying outside scouting expertise like tenting and citizenship duties to God, nation and household.
She was nearly 18 when Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, and World Conflict II started in Europe. Colleges had been closed, and regimented youth organizations, together with Boy Scouts and Lady Guides, had been outlawed by Nazi occupiers. Many older youths had been executed as potential resistance leaders.
Wanda joined the underground resistance, carrying medical provides and messages. Caught by the Gestapo in February 1941, she was crushed, tortured and imprisoned for months at Lublin Fort, then transported by railway to the Ravensbrück focus camp in northern Germany.
It was a camp for girls and kids who provided slave labor for struggle manufacturing by the German producer Siemens. Of 132,000 prisoners from throughout Europe who entered Ravensbrück throughout the struggle, solely 15,000 had been discovered alive when the camp was liberated by Russians in 1945. As many as 92,000 died of illness, hunger, exhaustion and abstract executions, many in mass shootings. Others had been despatched to Auschwitz.
Some inmates had been killed in hideous pseudo-medical experiments by Nazi medical doctors. Ms. Wojtasik was subjected to those in a morphine stupor, ostensibly to check sulfa medication. Whereas she was held down on a desk, her decrease legs had been minimize and contaminated with virulent micro organism.
“Our legs swelled up, scarlet and indignant; mine was so swollen that the plaster minimize into my flesh,” she recalled in a memoir. “Each time we tried to maneuver our mutilated legs, an evil-smelling yellowish brown fluid would seep from beneath the plaster sheath. They now not needed to bend down to smell our legs.”
Because the struggle progressed and killings within the camp rose sharply, Ms. Wojtasik grew to become a witness to processed mass homicide.
“We didn’t weep when the dying lists had been delivered to the block and we discovered the names of those that can be killed subsequent day,” she wrote. “Roll calls, once they took folks out of the road and executed them, cloaked us in a seamless silence on the coronary heart of which was one thing far deeper than concern. There was now not any concern once we confronted the shadow of dying.”
She promised herself that if she obtained out alive, she would change into a physician.
After the struggle, she returned to Lublin in despair. “Her religion in human beings was destroyed,” her daughter Ania Dadek advised The Nationwide Catholic Register in 2014. “She had grown up believing in heroes and that each particular person was created within the picture of God. However afterward she couldn’t discover any peace.”
Stricken by nightmares, she wrote a memoir, not for publication however to exorcise the ghosts. (That ebook, “And I Am Afraid of My Desires,” was revealed in 1961 and has been reissued in English.) The writing was therapeutic and eased her nightmares, however not the haunted reminiscences.
She married Andrzej Poltawska in 1947. He died in 2020. She is survived by their daughters, Katarzyna, Anna, Maria and Barbara; along with Chris, seven extra grandchildren; and 12 great-grandchildren.
Dr. Poltawska earned her medical diploma at Jagiellonian College in 1951 and later a level in psychiatry. She specialised in treating juveniles and traumatized survivors of the focus camp at Auschwitz. It was whereas she was working at a clinic at Jagiellonian College in 1956 that she met Karol Wojtyla.
Father Wojtyla was an assistant at St. Florian’s Church in Krakow when he first heard her confession in 1956. By her daughter Ania’s account, Dr. Poltawska felt for the primary time that somebody had understood her. The priest advised her to return to Mass the following day. A session adopted. He gave her scriptural passages for meditation and prayer.
Dr. Poltawska started attending day by day Plenty celebrated by the priest, adopted by extra consultations with him that explored her previous and resurrected painful recollections of her focus camp experiences.
A friendship blossomed as they found frequent pursuits and outlooks on faith and household life. She discovered that he had been born in Wadowice, close to Krakow, right into a strict Catholic household. His mom, Emilia, died when he was 9. His father, Karol Wojtyla, was a retired Military sergeant with a small pension.
As she obtained to know her counselor, she launched him to her household. There have been dinners and get-togethers. Father Wojtyla had a wealthy baritone voice and favored to sing and play a guitar. He liked poetry, literature and drama, had appeared in novice theatricals, and performed goalkeeper on a college soccer staff. Mates referred to as him Karolek (Little Charles) or Lolek.
For Dr. Poltawska, his counseling yielded insights into her issues in addition to gradual aid from the burdens she carried.
With newfound confidence, she returned to Ravensbrück on the invitation of the East German authorities on Sept. 12, 1959, becoming a member of scores of former inmates to dedicate a memorial to the dwelling and the lifeless: a 12-foot statue of a lady carrying an emaciated camp sufferer in her arms.
“I didn’t wish to come,” she stated. However she was there.
Over the following 20 years, Karol Wojtyla, already the auxiliary bishop of Krakow, was named performing archbishop in 1962, archbishop in 1964, a cardinal in 1967 and the pope in 1978. In 2014, he was elevated to sainthood.
By then, Dr. Poltawska had written 18 books, taught psychiatry on the Medical College of Krakow for many years and for 33 years managed the Institute of Household Theology on the Pontifical Academy of Theology in Krakow. In 2016, President, Andrzej Duda of Poland bestowed on her the Order of the White Eagle, the nation’s highest honor.
Alex Traub contributed reporting.
