By DONALD DeMARCO
The city was Toledo, Ohio. The year was 1990. The venue was the dining room in a private home. The audience consisted of several pro-life people, including myself. The speaker was Wanda Poltawska who was relating a series of events in her life that we were most privileged to hear.
In 1962, doctors, after diagnosing Poltawska as having throat cancer, planned to subject her to a desperate medical procedure. The auxiliary bishop of Krakow, Karol Wojtyla, a close friend of Wanda, and being vitally concerned about her condition, dispatched a letter to Padre Pio, requesting his intervention:
“Venerable Father, I ask that you pray for a forty-year-old mother of four girls, in Krakow, Poland (who during the last war spent five years in a concentration camp), who is now in very grave danger related to her health and possibly may die of cancer: that God may extend his mercy to this woman and her family in the presence of the Most Blessed Virgin. Most obligated in Christ, Karol Wojtyla.”
Angelo Battisti, the administrator of the House for the Relief of Suffering, a hospital which Padre Pio helped to build, offers the following personal testimony: “Having just arrived at the monastery, Padre Pio told me to read the letter to him. He listened to the brief message in Latin, then said: ‘To this request one cannot say “no”,’ and then added, ‘Angelino, save this letter because one day it will become important’.”
The saint’s directive was prophetic. The letter was included in the canonization process for St. John Paul II.
The hoped-for miracle occurred. Just before the scheduled surgical procedure, Wanda Poltawska’s health was completely restored. However, owing to her scientific temperament (she was a trained psychiatrist), Dr. Poltawska was hesitant to believe that she was the recipient of a miracle. Therefore, she traveled to Pietrelcina, where the Capuchin friar resided. Not knowing where to find Padre Pio, she found herself standing outside of a church, asking a passerby where he might be. She was then told that she was standing outside of the very church where Padre Pio was saying Mass.
Dr. Poltawska entered the church. During the celebration of the Mass, the now canonized saint paused momentarily and looked directly at the pilgrim from Poland, conveying to her the assurance that he knew that she was the woman for whom he had prayed.
This was a series of events that Wanda was only too happy to relate. Her internment in the Ravensbrück concentration camp — for nearly five years — was quite another matter.
In September of 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland. Their aim was to subjugate the Polish people, whom they did not regard as exactly human beings, to their Arian ideology. “Re-education” (a word that was a euphemism for dehumanization) was needed. Any resistance on the part of Poles was severely punished, usually by internment or death.
Wanda Poltawska was arrested for the crime of carrying letters and orders to various Resistance groups. She was beaten badly and ultimately sent to the Ravensbrück camp where she remained for nearly five years. There, she was subjected to horrific psychological humiliations and physical injuries. She was used as a “guinea pig,” Diseased bacilli were injected into her bone marrow, for no other reason than to find out how the body might react to this disease. She managed to survive whereas many died or were executed.
When she returned home in the spring of 1945, she was tormented by “frighteningly realistic” nightmares about the camp to the extent that she dared not sleep. By contrast, while she was at Ravensbrück she dreamed of the comforts of home. A psychiatrist advised her to write out her horrors as a way of exorcising them. The advice worked, though she did not want to share her experiences with anyone else. Consequently, And I Am Afraid of My Dreams remained in a drawer for 15 years until she was finally persuaded to publish it. Mary Craig, who translated the book into English, states that it gives “a priceless insight into a dark period of human history which we might prefer to forget, but which it might be wiser to try to understand.”
“Hunger is a terrible thing,” Poltawska writes, though it was not the most horrible thing she experienced in the camp. It is “monstrous and indescribable.” Yet, something inside Wanda Poltawska, her will to live, her pledge to become a doctor, her sense of herself as a human being, kept her going: “I must, simply must get the better of my hungry body. I will not stop being myself just because I am hungry.” She knew, decisively, that she was far more than “prisoner number 7709,”
“I never lost that interior freedom,” she tells her readers. Tragically, 92,000 women and children perished in the unimaginably inhuman conditions of Ravensbrück.
Wanda Poltawska went on to become a psychiatrist, specializing in the treatment of juvenile patients, including the deeply traumatized “Auschwitz children” who had been born or incarcerated in the Nazi concentration camps.
She worked in the psychiatric clinic of Krakow’s Jagiellonian University. In addition, she was appointed by Pope John Paul II as director of the Marriage and Family Institute in Krakow, Poland, and became an important adviser to the Pontiff on matters of marriage and the family. Both she and her philosopher husband, Andrzej, were appointed members of the Papal Commission on Family Matters.
After reading And I Am Afraid of My Dreams, one reviewer made the comment that he is now able to read the personalism of John Paul II “in a new and dramatic way.” Dr. Poltawska’s life includes the best and the worst of the 20th century. It is testimony to the best inasmuch as it reveals the strength of the person, the capacity to transcend evil, and the insistence of living in accord with one’s dignity as a human being.
Wanda Poltawska has shown us that one’s sense of inner dignity can prevail under conditions of the utmost barbarity. She demonstrates for all of us both the grittiness of human existence and the value of life.
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(Dr. Donald DeMarco is a senior fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College in Cromwell, Conn., and a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. His latest works, How to Remain Sane in a World That Is Going Mad; Poetry That Enters the Mind and Warms the Heart; How to Flourish in a Fallen World, and Footprints on the Sands of Time: Personal Reflections on Life and Death are available through Amazon.com.
(Some of his recent writings may be found at Human Life International’s Truth and Charity Forum. He is the 2015 Catholic Civil Rights League recipient of the prestigious Exner Award.)
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