Wanda Półtawska was a Polish medical student when she was arrested by the Germans in 1941 and sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. There, she became one of the hundreds of Polish women subjected to the so-called medical experiments, operations performed without anesthesia that involved deliberate infections, amputations, and bone grafts designed to test pain, endurance, and obedience.

 

She survived what few could. After the war, while many tried to forget, she devoted her life to remembering. Półtawska gathered testimonies, documented the crimes committed against Polish women, and helped the world understand the moral and physical cost of those experiments. Her testimony before the Nuremberg Tribunal and her lifelong work with survivors preserved one of the most important records of that camp’s atrocities.

 

In the years that followed, she became a psychiatrist, a healer of the mind and soul. She believed that true recovery began not in forgetting but in confronting pain with courage and faith. Her work reflected an unbroken conviction that the human spirit, when guided by love, can endure even the deepest wounds.

 

Her friendship with Karol Wojtyła, later Pope John Paul II, was one of profound spiritual kinship. Both had lived through the destruction of their homeland and the dehumanization of their people. Both believed that suffering could be transformed into compassion and that the only answer to cruelty was moral strength. Their letters reveal two souls united by the belief that love, when lived sincerely, is stronger than despair.

 

Wanda Półtawska’s life was a testimony to endurance and conscience. From the barracks of Ravensbrück to her years as a doctor and moral voice, she embodied the belief that meaning can be found even in pain. Her journey echoed the lessons of Dostoevsky and Frankl, who also discovered that the human being can turn suffering into awakening.

 

She passed away on 24 October 2023, at the age of 101. Her life remains a bridge between horror and hope, a reminder that even when everything is taken from us, the soul still has the freedom to love, to remember, and to heal.

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Source: Edward Reid Facebook post

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