3477 And I Am Afraid of My Dreams

By Dr. Wanda Poltawska. In 1941, nineteen-year-old Wanda, who worked for the Polish Resistance Movement, was suddenly arrested and sent to prison and later to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. There, for four years, she was used as a human guinea pig, the subject of various medical experiments.

Years later, when she looked back on the Ravensbrück years, Wanda Póltawska did not, for all its horror, regret the experience. Ravensbrück, she said, taught her many things. Not least, it daily brought her face to face with imminent death and made her understand that, for a Christian, all life is a preparation for life after death. She came to understand the real meaning of freedom, that interior freedom of the spirit which soars above circumstances and cannot be destroyed. “I never lost that interior freedom,” she says. It is a remarkable claim, but one that is borne out on every page of this remarkable record of courage and faith.