Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Lublin, Lublin Voivodeship, Poland
About Wanda Półtawska
- Wanda Wiktoria Póltawska (born 2 November 1921 in Lublin) is a Polish physician and author.
- She was a victim of the Ravensbrück concentration camp, just north of Berlin, having been arrested in February 1941 and charged with assisting the Polish resistance movement.
- She was used as a human guinea pig and became the subject of various medical experiments.
- She spent four years in the camp but survived her ordeal, and afterwards wrote an account of her experiences, And I Am Afraid of My Dreams.
- She later married and had four children.Her memoir of the life and conditions for the women held in the camp has provided material for other books such as Ravensbrück : The Cell Building by Insa Eschebach, and The Pink Triangle and Political Consciousness: Gays, Lesbians, and the Memory of Nazi Persecution by Eric N.
- Jensen which deals with how the lesbians were treated.
- She had decided during her incarceration that if she survived she would become a doctor, and this is what she did.
- She completed her medical studies at the Jagiellonian University in 1951 and obtained her doctorate in psychiatry in 1964.
- She conducted research on the so-called "Auschwitz children", people who had endured the concentration camps as children.
- In 1967 she organized the establishment of the Institute of Family Theology at the Pontifical Academy of Theology in Kraków and managed it for 33 years.
- Between 1981 and 1984 she was a lecturer at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome.Póltawska was a staunch Roman Catholic, and collaborated with her compatriot Pope John Paul II, influencing him on such topics as contraception and sexuality.
- When, in 1962, Poltawska was ill with cancer and told she had only 18 months to live, the monk Padre Pio was asked by the Pope, then Bishop Wojtyla, to pray for Póltawska.
- After this her cancerous growth disappeared and she no longer needed an operation to remove it.
- This was one of the miracles that led the Pope to canonise Padre Pio in 2002.
Read more at Wikipedia