After Nazi Medical Torture, She Befriended a Future Pope

Wanda Wojtasik was 19 when she was captured by the Gestapo in February 1941 in Poland. She was eventually brought to the Ravensbrueck concentration camp in Germany, where more than 90,000 people died before the camp's 1945 liberation. She was a survivor, one who was subjected to medical torture at the hands of Nazi doctors—and whose later quest to cope with what she'd suffered led to a deep and enduring friendship with the priest who would become Pope John Paul II. The New York Times is among the publications recounting the remarkable details of Wanda Poltawska—her married name—following her Oct. 24 death at age 101.

The Times recounts that in an apparent effort by Nazi doctors to test sulfa drugs, she was restrained on a table as her lower legs were cut and infected with virulent bacteria. "Every time we tried to move our mutilated legs, an evil-smelling yellowish brown fluid would seep from under the plaster sheath," she later wrote. "They no longer had to bend down to sniff our legs." The National Catholic Register reports she was one of of 74 Polish women who'd been subjected to such experimentation, and one of the few to survive. Poltawska said that at one point she was tossed onto other corpses after a doctor thought her dead, but that a friend who saw her move a finger removed her from the pile, saving her.

More than a decade later, having become a psychiatrist, she encountered Rev. Karol Wojtyla in a confessional and shared some of what she had suffered; her daughter says she felt understood for the first time. Consultations between the two followed, and the Times reports the extent of their friendship only became known when she published a memoir in 2009.

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Letters shared in the memoir are addressed to "Dearest Dusia" and signed "Br" for "brat," meaning "brother" in Polish. He wrote at one point, "I have always believed that you, in the concentration camp, suffered in part for me. It is on the basis of this belief that I have come to the idea that yours might be my family, and you a sister to me." Poltawska was among those who was permitted to visit the pope after the attempt on his life in 1981 and in the hours before his 2005 death. A state funeral held Tuesday for Poltawska was attended by President Andrzej Duda, who in a eulogy called her "an unwavering advocate for life, morality, and a believer in other people," reports Radio Poland. (More obituary stories.)