Within the late twentieth century, Pope John Paul II emerged because the charismatic guru of abortion opponents. As he greeted the devoted in packed stadiums and posed for photographs with rock stars, John Paul II helped flip the tide towards abortion in lots of nations, together with the USA. Behind his views and insurance policies on sexuality stood a little-known lady who may usually be seen padding across the Vatican in home slippers. As her lengthy skirt shifted, it revealed a deep scar operating down her leg.
In 1956, Karol Wojtyła (the longer term pope) met Wanda Półtawska in Krakow, the previous seat of Polish kings whose outskirts had been reworking right into a Soviet-style industrial metropolis. Wojtyła was a younger actor-turned-priest; Półtawska was a psychiatrist and survivor of Ravensbrück, the Nazi focus camp for girls. The hell that engulfed Poland through the Second World Warfare, during which one-fifth of the inhabitants died, had remodeled each of their lives.
As Poland fell into the Soviet orbit from the late Nineteen Forties, competing ideologies sought to type diamonds from ash. Communists declared that historical past was transferring Left and promised to construct a brand new society during which the final could be first. Romantic Polish patriots positioned the devastation in a practice of martyrdom by the long-suffering ‘Christ of countries’. Many discovered little solace in both and bought misplaced. As Półtawska’s friendship with Wojtyła deepened, she recognized a way of redemption that might have penalties for girls in Poland and all over the world.
When Hitler and Stalin invaded Poland in September 1939, Półtawska was 17 years previous. The youngest of three sisters from a household in Lublin, an historical metropolis in what’s now japanese Poland, she attended a faculty run by Ursula nuns. Like lots of her pals (who nicknamed her ‘the colonel’), she belonged to a scouting group. Because the Nazis closed faculties and executed members of the intelligentsia, scouts performed key roles within the resistance. Półtawska turned a courier for the underground Union of Armed Battle, later renamed the Dwelling Military. In February 1941, the Gestapo caught Półtawska and imprisoned her in Lublin fort. The Germans shot some prisoners, whereas others they despatched to focus camps. In September, Półtawska departed on a prepare heading West, to Ravensbrück.
Situated by a lake 50 miles north of Berlin, Ravensbrück opened in Could 1939 to deal with German political prisoners (communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses) and supposed ‘asocial’ inferiors (criminals, intercourse employees, Roma). That autumn, it started filling up with girls from Nazi-occupied nations, lots of whom had been within the resistance. Round 130,000 individuals handed by way of the camp in complete; a minimum of a 3rd of them died, of malnutrition, bullets, deadly injection and, finally, gassing. Prisoners had been French and Dutch, Russian and Norwegian; 10 to 20 per cent had been Jewish. By far the most important nationality represented was Poles, 40,000 of whom had been interned there. Ravensbrück had a detailed relationship with Auschwitz, which was initially constructed to carry Polish political prisoners. When the latter launched a girls’s part, Ravensbrück educated the guards and housed its administration.
After their heads had been shaved, Półtawska and her pals got blue-and-white striped cotton clothes and jackets with a purple triangle on the left shoulder, which recognized them as political prisoners. They had been put to work clearing cesspits, constructing roads, shovelling sand, and throwing bricks. Demise may come at any second. On 18 April 1942, 13 of the women from Półtawska’s transport had been executed; the complete camp may hear the photographs.
Sooner or later, the surviving younger girls from Lublin had been inspected by a bunch of medical doctors, who instructed them to elevate their skirts. After baring their legs, a few of them had been despatched to the hospital ward. Półtawska awakened unable to stroll. As German troopers died of contaminated wounds on the Jap Entrance, Himmler had determined to make use of the focus camps for medical experiments. At Ravensbrück, massive quantities of micro organism had been injected into incisions within the younger girls’s legs, together with grime, glass and splinters. Some had been subjected to bone breaks or grafts and muscle operations. Many developed abscesses, and a number of other died. The women who underwent experiments (nearly all of whom had been Polish) had been nicknamed ‘rabbits’.
‘I felt cornered by this lustful crowd, this crowd of perverts’
For Półtawska, the operations introduced a fruits of the bodily revulsion that she had felt ever since her confinement in Lublin fort, the place she was overwhelmed by the Gestapo and held in packed cells that teemed with lice and fleas, typhus and scabies. Degradation of the soul and the physique got here collectively as Półtawska felt horror on the sexual relationships that emerged at Ravensbrück. ‘One night time I used to be woke up by the recent kisses of a skinny, pale lady,’ she wrote in her memoir in regards to the camp, And I Am Afraid of My Goals (1987). Półtawska shoved her away. ‘For the primary time I felt disgust in direction of the feminine physique, each hers and mine, and in direction of girls usually.’
Półtawska first encountered ‘LL’ (the camp time period for lesbische Liebe, or ‘lesbian love’) within the ‘asocial’ barracks, however it will definitely unfold to the Poles, too. She described it as a ‘contagion’ and an ‘epidemic’: ‘I felt cornered by this lustful crowd, this crowd of perverts.’ Gender boundaries blurred as some girls wore male garments and hairstyles, and assumed dominant roles inside {couples}. Different survivors additionally talked about intercourse amongst girls in later writings and oral interviews, however Półtawska’s fixation on the topic was distinctive. ‘There got here a time,’ she wrote, ‘when each gesture of the physique and the hand appeared to me like a perversion, as if a disgusting grease had lined every part.’ She tried to protect her youthful pal Krysia from the ‘unbelievable scenes’ she witnessed, ‘greedily and with despair’.
Polish prisoners’ sense of group helped them survive. An aristocratic artwork historian taught the youthful girls about Rubens; secret astronomy classes helped them establish the constellations they noticed above their heads through the prolonged out of doors roll name that befell every single day at daybreak and nightfall. They organised literary lectures and performs, carved crucifixes out of toothbrush handles. Within the winter of 1945, different prisoners helped the ‘rabbits’ survive after they had been ordered to depart on a deadly ‘particular transport’. Relatively than reporting, they took the numbers of useless prisoners and hid within the barracks, overcrowded because the camp swelled with new inmates.
Because the Crimson Military approached in spring 1945, Półtawska sneaked out with a bunch from Auschwitz that was being evacuated to a close-by subcamp, the place she nearly starved to loss of life. For girls, the hazard didn’t subside when the struggle ended. In her description of her journey again to Poland, Półtawska mentioned she fended off overtures by Russian troopers, and he or she described a Ukrainian lady rising from bushes in tears after being raped. She realized to learn males’s physique language to find out who was a menace, and conceal from them in forests and sheds.
Upon returning dwelling, Półtawska stored having desires in regards to the camp. In the summertime of 1945, she stopped preventing her insomnia and spent the sleepless nights writing down reminiscences. She felt alienated from her family members and ashamed that she had survived. Shortly earlier than she was executed, a lady named Mila had requested Półtawska to inform her mom that she wasn’t afraid. Półtawska went to her village, stopping on the home by the mill as Mila had instructed. A person emerged with Mila’s eyes. Półtawska froze. She requested for instructions to the bus cease and ‘ran throughout the meadow rapidly, sooner and sooner,’ again in direction of the place she got here.
Everyone in Poland was haunted by what they’d skilled, seen, and completed through the struggle. Tadeusz Konwicki’s Salto (1965) captured the surreal high quality of post-war Poland; within the movie, Zbigniew Cybulski performs a person who jumps off a dashing prepare right into a city the place he claims to have been in hiding. He provides totally different names and tells contradictory tales; nobody remembers him. He has a recurring dream that an executioner is coming for him, however as a substitute the movie culminates in a ghostly dance. As Stalin’s secret police consolidated management over Poland, obscuring one’s previous turned expedient. Anybody recognized to have served with the Dwelling Military, which had been loyal to the Polish government-in-exile slightly than the Soviet Union (and a few of whose members continued to battle Soviet forces after the struggle) may find yourself imprisoned or useless.
Ravensbrück survivors tried to nurse their wounds and conceal troublesome connections whereas going again to work, taking good care of surviving members of the family, and resuming their educations. When she returned barefoot to her dwelling in Warsaw, the ‘rabbit’ Helena Hegier-Rafalska discovered solely smoking ruins. ‘I used to be psychologically damaged,’ she later recalled. ‘I didn’t have something to exist for.’ She couldn’t keep in mind easy methods to write or do arithmetic; she joked that she attended ‘Ravensbrück College’, however felt as if she had by no means gone to high school in any respect. The one individuals she talked to in regards to the camp had been fellow survivors, with whom she stayed in contact by way of a membership of former prisoners.
Półtawska, ‘tormented’ by the strain between the spirit and the physique, determined to turn out to be a health care provider. She left Lublin for medical faculty in Krakow, the place she educated as a psychiatrist. Amongst her sufferers had been little one survivors of focus camps. Whereas searching for clergymen with whom she may seek the advice of on tough circumstances, she encountered the title Karol Wojtyła.
Wojtyła had spent the struggle working in a manufacturing facility and performing in an underground theatre. He dreamt of being the following nice Polish playwright however determined to turn out to be a priest as a substitute. In 1956, through the thaw that adopted Stalin’s loss of life in 1953, the reformist chief Władysław Gomułka promised a ‘Polish highway to socialism’ that might accommodate nationwide and spiritual sentiment. Additionally in 1956, the Polish state lifted the Stalinist ban on abortion.
She discovered an answer to the disgrace that had plagued her since she felt the recent kisses of a hungry lady
After assembly Wojtyła for the primary time at a confessional sales space, Półtawska noticed him once more at an occasion for ‘saving unborn youngsters’. She supported the trigger by opening a house for pregnant unwed girls. On the premise of her wartime expertise and scientific observe, Półtawska had concluded that unbridled sexuality diminished human dignity. The priest – an outdoorsman who promoted sports activities as a chaste outlet for the libido – agreed.
In Ravensbrück, Półtawska had dreamed of escaping to the forest. Now she and her husband accompanied Wojtyła on prolonged backpacking journeys by way of the Beskids, a low-slung mountain vary on Poland’s border with Czechoslovakia. As they held lots by streams and walked by way of fields studded with wild boar tracks, Wojtyła instructed her that human biology should be submitted to ethics. Over the course of their walks, she discovered an answer to the disgrace that had plagued her since she felt the recent kisses of a hungry lady: ‘household theology’, which might regulate the physique by marrying religion with science.
In response to Wojtyła’s e book Love and Accountability (1960), which relied closely on claims Półtawska made in her papers and lectures, sexual pleasure inside marriage fulfils the divine injunction to like, as long as it might result in procreation. The ‘pure’ (rhythm) methodology, which leaves the ultimate end result as much as God, is subsequently the one acceptable type of contraception. ‘Synthetic’ contraception (together with capsules, condoms, and withdrawal) results in feminine neurosis and male impotence. The e book included charts of the feminine fertility cycle to assist readers plan accordingly.
If there was any erotic element to Wojtyła and Półtawska’s alliance, it was sublimated into their shared mission. They upheld the idea of ascesis, or self-mastery by way of self-discipline and denial. Although Półtawska’s memoirs don’t point out it, Wojtyła flagellated himself with a belt in emulation of Christ’s afflictions; the intense bodily torment that she had endured and he was spared through the struggle was key to their mutual fascination. A miraculous overcome the flesh introduced them even nearer collectively: when Półtawska was recognized with most cancers in 1962, Wojtyła requested the Franciscan friar and mystic Padre Pio (who claimed to bear the stigmata and wrestle with the satan) to heal her. Półtawska mentioned her tumour disappeared. As pope, Wojtyła went on to canonise Pio. Wojtyła signed his letters to Półtawska ‘Br’, for brat (‘brother’), and referred to her as his sister. After turning into a cardinal in 1967, Wojtyła wrote to Półtawska that he needed to ‘put the matter of the household in your arms’. Collectively they established the Institute for the Theology of the Household, which supplied ‘pure’ intercourse schooling and counselling for married {couples} in addition to clergymen, college students and medical doctors.
Wojtyła and Półtawska’s stance towards contraception was usually in step with Catholic teachings till the Sixties, when the Second Vatican Council posed a problem. This papal council, initiated by Pope John XXIII and seen by way of by Pope Paul VI, tried to adapt Catholic perception and observe to the fashionable world; as a part of this effort, the pope determined to revisit the Church’s prohibition on contraception. He appointed an advisory committee that urged the Church to finish the ban, a place endorsed by a supervising fee of bishops and cardinals. On the recommendation of Wojtyła, who submitted a report ready by his personal panel of specialists (together with Półtawska), Paul VI overrode them. In 1968, he issued the encyclical Humanae vitae, which condemned contraception as an offence to God that destroyed relations amongst {couples}. ‘Household theology’ had prevailed.
The e book Past Human Endurance (1970), a group of camp reminiscences by Polish ‘rabbits’, included updates on their lives. Many continued to battle with ache of their legs and different well being issues, in addition to despair, nervousness and insomnia. ‘Full bodily and nervous exhaustion,’ one description learn. Półtawska, in the meantime, was flourishing. By the late Sixties, she had remodeled from misplaced survivor to resolute chief. ‘My life is so full it scares me,’ she wrote in her diary. Along with operating the Institute for the Theology of the Household and treating psychiatric sufferers, she had additionally earned a PhD. She puzzled if she was neglecting her 4 daughters, however concluded that each one her actions had been for God.
Półtawska known as on girls to be virtuous wives and moms whose lives had been dedicated to serving others. Those that rejected their pure roles had been ‘seduced by Devil’ and doomed to despair. For some Ravensbrück survivors, motherhood was agonising. Hegier-Rafalska mentioned that having a child offered her with a aim in life, however she discovered herself unable to smile, kiss or hug her son; each time she checked out him, she considered the youngsters she noticed within the camp. Her mom ended up serving as his main caretaker. In Półtawska’s thoughts, nonetheless, maternity vanquished sorrow. In Outdated Scores (1969), a e book of tales primarily based on her scientific observe, she describes a girl with recurring nightmares in regards to the struggle, one among which is so terrifying it causes her to miscarry, who lastly finds bliss when she and her husband have daughters.
When Wojtyła was named pope in 1978, Półtawska was bereft: ‘I felt like a tree standing on immediately dry floor, like an empty bell which can not ring as a result of it lacks a coronary heart.’ He despatched her a reassuring letter: ‘[Y]ou had been and can stay my private “skilled” from the sphere of Humanae vitae. It has been this fashion for 20 years, and so it should keep.’ To any extent further, the Półtawski’s annual holidays befell on the papal summer season residence at Castel Gandolfo, the place they imagined they had been nonetheless climbing their favorite mountain ridge again dwelling. Półtawska break up her time between Krakow and Rome, the place she served on the Pontifical Council for the Household and the Pontifical Academy for Life.
The historical past of reproductive rights could possibly be reversed – if solely sure individuals would give it a push
Półtawska incessantly drew on her ethical authority as a survivor of Nazi medical experiments to match abortion with the mass murders of the Second World Warfare and the Holocaust. For instance, she instructed an viewers in Lublin that ‘what medical doctors are doing [with abortion] is worse than the Holocaust.’ At her encouragement, John Paul II made related statements, which discovered a receptive viewers within the revitalised anti-abortion motion overseas.
Through the pope’s lifetime, Półtawska’s position as his chief advisor on sexuality was little-known. After his loss of life in 2005, she grew extra vocal about their relationship, and have become a star of conservative Polish media. A 2008 documentary reveals her striding confidently by way of the halls of the Vatican whereas talking fluent Italian to churchmen who variously revere, disdain and concern her. When Półtawska printed a e book about her shut relationship with the pope, Polish clerics tried to claim that it had by no means existed. Vatican officers demanded that she hand over her archive.
In October 2020, Poland’s constitutional courtroom imposed a near-total ban on abortion, which had already been severely restricted after the autumn of communism. Półtawska known as it the ‘victory’ that John Paul II desired: ‘I’m very glad that I lived to see it.’ Within the huge protests that adopted, protesters defaced John Paul II statues and invaded lots. The courtroom’s determination was unpopular amongst most Poles, particularly the more and more secular younger era, lots of whom affiliate the Church with corruption and intercourse abuse scandals. But it confirmed the world that the historical past of reproductive rights could possibly be reversed – if solely sure individuals had been prepared to provide it a push. Two years later, a majority-Catholic US Supreme Court docket overturned Roe v Wade.
Some former Ravensbrück prisoners, together with Hegier-Rafalska, selected by no means to return; if she noticed the camp, she mentioned, then she would know that it had been actual. Półtawska went again for the primary time in 1959 with a delegation of survivors. As she noticed the sq. the place they stood at roll name and the punishment bunker the place the disobedient had been thrown with out meals, ‘the road between what was and what’s utterly blurred.’ Individuals had been tossing roses on the lake in reminiscence of the useless, however there weren’t sufficient. Her ideas turned to the ladies who by no means made it out:
What would the names and surnames imply if I listed all those that skilled their final lonely second right here? Nothing will change the very fact of this horrible last loneliness. None of us will know what they went by way of right here, those that stayed, even when I say every part about them: how Pola was slender and Grażyna had bleached curls, how Halinka had golden eyes like honey, and the way Niusia was at all times dissatisfied, and Romeka was at all times smiling.
In September 2021, a pregnant lady named Izabela was admitted to a hospital in southwest Poland. Abortion stays authorized in Poland solely in circumstances when the life or well being of the mom was in peril, however many medical doctors are afraid of performing the process; if a prosecutor decides it was pointless, the physician may face jail time. Izabela felt that one thing wasn’t proper along with her child, however the medical doctors stored saying they couldn’t function as a result of the infant’s coronary heart was nonetheless beating. She texted her household what was taking place over WhatsApp. ‘For now, due to the abortion regulation, I’ve to remain in mattress they usually can’t do something,’ she wrote to her mom. ‘Alternatively, they’ll watch for the infant to die or for one thing to begin taking place. If it doesn’t, then nice, I can anticipate sepsis.’ She died the next morning of septic shock.
Półtawska was blind to how her regeneration contributed to others’ ache
Solidarity with different girls had enabled Półtawska to outlive the camp and persist by way of life after it. However her imaginative and prescient of group excluded those that didn’t need or couldn’t have youngsters, or discovered a special technique to dwell and love. She referred to feminists as ‘witches’ and in contrast them with the feminine guards in Ravensbrück. For Półtawska, a devoted servant of God’s battle towards evil, human existence was chaotic; the Holy Spirit, clarifying. The divine mild that suffused her world left Izabela’s in darkness.
Półtawska was not the one camp survivor who tried to banish ambiguity. The Polish poet and Auschwitz political prisoner Tadeusz Borowski wrote sardonic tales (first printed in English as This Means for the Fuel, Girls and Gents) during which life within the camp is much like the world outdoors it. Whereas nationalism, Catholicism and communism framed particular person struggling as collective redemption, in Borowski’s Auschwitz, nobody is ennobled or absolved. After the struggle, Borowski tried to beat this lack of decision by turning into a Stalinist author and denouncing his previous work. His final undertaking was a paean to Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Polish founding father of the Soviet secret police. Borowski’s father had been a prisoner in Dzerzhinsky’s gulag.
Borowski’s materialism and Półtawska’s metaphysics had been twin options to the issues of their era. An ironist at coronary heart, Borowski couldn’t resolve the contradictions in his thoughts; like another camp survivors, he selected suicide, taking his personal life at age 28 by turning on the gasoline in his residence. Półtawska dispelled any doubt and continues to be alive immediately at age 101.
One other Ravensbrück survivor, Alicja Gawlikowska-Świerczyńska, suggests an alternate path. Bored with seeing loss of life and feeling powerless to cease it, she additionally determined to review drugs, and have become a specialist in sicknesses of the lung. When the Solidarity commerce union motion started in 1980, she created a chapter in her hospital, which she mentioned felt like being within the resistance once more. In a later interview, Gawlikowska-Świerczyńska mentioned that intercourse amongst girls within the camp was ‘pure’. In response to her, all the extraordinary relationships that developed at Ravensbrück had ‘a fragile notice of repressed sexuality’, which for many Polish girls was restricted to shut friendship. This was not proof of their superiority: on the contrary, Poles had been at all times ‘behind’ in these issues.
In a poem devoted to these misplaced through the Warsaw Rebellion (‘Dedication’, or ‘You whom I couldn’t save’), Czesław Miłosz expressed his embarrassment earlier than the useless: ‘What strengthened me, for you was deadly.’ Good and pedantic, empathetic and merciless, Półtawska was blind to how her regeneration contributed to others’ ache. Within the documentary about her, she is filmed strolling within the mountains the place she as soon as walked beside the person who turned her brother. After the struggle, as some fell, she ascended, declaring the query of human struggling resolved. She stored pushing on with the ideas that turned her salvation, increased and better, as if by strolling she may escape herself.
