Wanda Poltawska, 101; befriended a future pope
Wanda Poltawska, a Polish psychiatrist and author who after World War II sought spiritual help to cope with the horrors she had experienced in a Nazi concentration camp and became a lifelong friend of her counselor, a priest who would one day be Pope John Paul II, died Oct. 24 at her home in Krakow. She was 101.
Her death was confirmed by her grandson Chris Dadak.
The pope’s friendship with Dr. Poltawska, a married Roman Catholic with four grown daughters, was largely unknown until 2009, four years after John Paul’s death, when she revealed details of it in a memoir.
They had exchanged letters and visits for almost a half-century, she wrote, starting in 1956 in Krakow, where she had begun a psychiatric practice and where the future pontiff was a dynamic young parish priest, the Rev. Karol Wojtyla.
It was a contact in a confessional that originally brought them together. There, Dr. Poltawska told Wojtyla of the burdens she had borne for years as a victim of gruesome medical experiments performed on her and other women in the concentration camp at Ravensbrück, Germany. Their exchange led to further consultations and, over time, a bond that would extend from Poland to the Vatican.
Her book, “Memories of the Beskidy Hills,” included pictures of her family on hiking, skiing, and camping trips with Wojtyla in the mountains of southeastern Poland, long before his papacy began in 1978. Other photos showed the family with the pope at the Vatican and Castel Gandolfo, his retreat outside Rome.
Written in Polish across 570 pages, the book offered reminiscences about old times together: prayers and campfire religious discussions, carols sung at Christmastime, First Communion celebrations for the girls, and regular visits to the Poltawska home in Krakow, where the children called him “Uncle Karol.”
The memoir quoted from letters that he addressed to “Dearest Dusia” and signed “Br,” for “Brat,” or “Brother.” In one, dated Oct. 20, 1978, a few days after his elevation to the papacy, he expressed delight that she and her family were coming to Rome for a private visit with him.
That letter offered endearing personal confidences. Referring to his election in a conclave of cardinals, he wrote, “I thank God that he gave me so much calm.”
“In all of this, I think of you,” wrote the pope, whose mother, father, and brother had all died, leaving him without a close family. “I have always believed that you, in the concentration camp, suffered in part for me. It is on the basis of this belief that I have come to the idea that yours might be my family, and you a sister to me.”
Dr. Poltawska, along with her husband, Andrezj Poltawski, a professor of philosophy, and their daughters, met the pope at the Vatican shortly thereafter. The family would apparently see him often during his 26-year papacy. She visited him at a hospital in Rome after he was shot by a would-be assassin in 1981, and she was one of a group of people who were allowed to visit his bedside in the hours before he died in 2005.
Dr. Poltawska was the author of books defending traditional family values and Catholic dogma opposing contraception, abortion, and premarital sex, and she reiterated her support for these ideas in a 100th-birthday interview in Krakow with The National Catholic Register.
Wanda Wiktoria Wojtasik was born Nov. 2, 1921, in Lublin, Poland, the daughter of Adam and Anna (Chaber) Wojtasik. Her father was a postal clerk, and her mother was a homemaker. She attended the School of Ursuline Sisters in Lublin and became a Girl Guide, learning outdoor scouting skills such as camping and citizenship duties to God, country, and family.
She was almost 18 when Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, and World War II began in Europe. Schools were closed, and regimented youth organizations, including Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, were outlawed by Nazi occupiers. Many older youths were executed as potential resistance leaders.
Wanda joined the underground resistance, carrying medical supplies and messages. Caught by the Gestapo in February 1941, she was beaten, tortured, and imprisoned for months at Lublin Castle, then transported by railway to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in northern Germany.
Some inmates were killed in hideous pseudomedical experiments by Nazi doctors. Dr. Poltawska was subjected to these in a morphine stupor, ostensibly to test sulfa drugs. While she was held down on a table, her lower legs were cut and infected with virulent bacteria.
As the war progressed and killings in the camp rose sharply, Dr. Poltawska became a witness to processed mass murder.
“We did not weep when the death lists were delivered to the block and we learned the names of those who would be killed next day,” she wrote. “Roll calls, when they took people out of the line and executed them, cloaked us in a seamless silence at the heart of which was something far deeper than fear. There was no longer any fear when we faced the shadow of death.”
She promised herself that if she got out alive, she would become a doctor.
After the war, she returned to Lublin in despair. “Her faith in human beings was destroyed,” her daughter Anna Dadek told The National Catholic Register in 2014. “She had grown up believing in heroes and that every person was created in the image of God. But afterward she couldn’t find any peace.”
Tormented by nightmares, Dr. Poltawska wrote a memoir, not for publication but to exorcise the ghosts. (That book, “And I Am Afraid of My Dreams,” was published in 1961 and has been reissued in English.) The writing was therapeutic and eased her nightmares, but not the haunted memories.
She married Andrzej Poltawski in 1947. He died in 2020. She leaves their daughters, Katarzyna, Anna, Maria, and Barbara; in addition to Chris, seven more grandchildren; and 13 great-grandchildren.
Dr. Poltawska earned her medical degree at Jagiellonian University in 1951 and later a degree in psychiatry. She specialized in treating juveniles and traumatized survivors of the concentration camp at Auschwitz. It was while she was working at a clinic at Jagiellonian University in 1956 that she met Wojtyla.