2023-10-25 12:55 update: 2023-10-25, 21:37
Photo PAP/Łukasz Gągulski
Wanda Poltawska, a Polish psychiatrist, friend of Pope John Paul II, and former prisoner of the Nazi German Ravensbrueck concentration camp died at the age of 101 on Tuesday night in her home in Krakow, Father Lukasz Michalczewski, Krakow Curia spokesman told PAP.
It is believed that Poltawska had a real influence on John Paul II.
"I didn't measure this influence. But I certainly had an influence on him, as a woman, on a completely new reality, because he did not have the opportunity to have a sister or a mother - his mother died early - and for him the world of women was interesting, and he was fascinated by femininity," Poltawska was quoted by Tomasz Krzyzak in his book "Wanda Poltawska. Biography with character."
Wanda Wiktoria Wojtasik was born on November 2, 1921 in Lublin, into the family of a postal clerk. In secondary school, she became a girl guide. In the first months of the German occupation of Poland, she became involved in underground activity. She and her friends were liaisons – they delivered mail, weapons and money.
She was arrested on February 17, 1941. In the Lublin prison, she was interrogated and tortured, and after seven months, transported to the Ravensbrueck camp where she was subjected to pseudo-medical experiments. Shortly before the end of the war, Poltawska was transported to the Neustadt-Glewe camp (Ravensbrueck sub-camp), where she stayed until May 7, 1945.
After the war, Poltawska studied medicine at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, where she also earned a PhD in psychiatry. She also met there her husband Andrzej Poltawski, a philosopher, with whom she had four daughters.
She worked as a psychiatrist in a clinic at the Jagiellonian University. She also conducted research on victims of the Nazi German Auschwitz camp in southern Poland.
It is not known when Poltawska first met Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II. According to her biography, it happened in 1953, when she went to confession to Wojtyla and decided she had found a priest who understood her and could "show her the light."
Wojtyla then became her spiritual director, and later, as the newly elected Pope John Paul II, he commissioned Poltawska to manage his private papers.
Over time, she began to play an increasingly greater role both in the Krakow Church and the Vatican as a person who had direct access to John Paul II and was not afraid to intervene.
In 2016, Poltawska was awarded the Order of the White Eagle for promoting the value and importance of the family in contemporary society, for the Christian testimony of humanism and contribution to the development of Catholic social science.
In 2012, she was awarded the Order of Polonia Restituta "in recognition of outstanding merits in commemorating the truth about the wartime fate of Poles, the development of Catholic social teaching and achievements in research work in the field of psychiatry. (PAP)
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