{"id":300897,"date":"2023-11-01T08:40:41","date_gmt":"2023-11-01T13:40:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.liveaction.org\/news\/?p=300897"},"modified":"2023-11-02T09:54:37","modified_gmt":"2023-11-02T14:54:37","slug":"holocaust-survivor-advocate-life-friend-pope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/holocaust-survivor-advocate-life-friend-pope\/","title":{"rendered":"Female Holocaust survivor, advocate for life, and friend to Pope John Paul II dies at 101"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Wanda P\u00f3\u0142tawska, a Polish psychiatrist, physician, and Holocaust survivor, has passed away at the age of 101. Poltawska was well known for her friendship<\/a> with Karol Wojty\u0142a… the priest who would later become Saint Pope John Paul II. She influenced many of his writings, particularly on abortion and contraception.<\/p>\n

P\u00f3\u0142tawska was born in 1921, and at just 20 years old, was arrested by Nazis for participating in the Polish resistance movement. P\u00f3\u0142tawska was sent to the notorious Ravensbr\u00fcck concentration camp, where she became one of the Nazis’ “guinea pigs,” and was subjected to human experimentation.<\/p>\n

She detailed her experiences in the book, “And I Am Afraid Of My Dreams<\/a>,” and survived after spending four years in the concentration camp. Nazi doctors cut open her lower legs and infected them with bacteria, while she was forcibly held down on a table.<\/p>\n

“Our legs swelled up, scarlet and angry; mine was so swollen that the plaster cut into my flesh,\u201d she wrote in a memoir. \u201cEvery time we tried to move our mutilated legs, an evil-smelling yellowish brown fluid would seep from under the plaster sheath. They no longer had to bend down to sniff our legs.\u201d<\/p>\n

P\u00f3\u0142tawska vowed that if she survived, she would become a doctor.<\/p>\n

She attended Jagiellonian University in 1951, and received her doctorate in psychiatry in 1964, conducting research on children who were imprisoned at Auschwitz. Her time at Ravensbr\u00fcck also made her a staunch advocate for life.<\/p>\n

“I observed SS with pregnant women. There were no scheduled abortions so as not to slow down women’s labor. They let the children be born, and then threw them into the fire,” she said in testimony<\/a> for the Lejeune Foundation. “I decided that, if I got through this, I would do everything to save the children. When you can kill millions of people, life loses its value. Until now, we have not fully understood the value of life. You cannot compare life to anything else.”<\/p>\n