Irene Tomaszewski came across Krystyna Wituska’s letters in a stroke of good luck. Wituska’s cousin, a linguistics professor at McGill University, approached Tomaszweski to translate into English the letters of a young Polish woman captured during the Second World War.
Tomaszewski, already a researcher of Polish history for the BBC, took on the difficult task. As her patience and translating skills uncovered Wituska’s words and thoughts, the collection of smuggled letters written from prisons near Berlin to her family and friends during the Second World War revealed a slice of history.
She discovered the immense courage and optimism of the young woman, who had the same concerns as any other woman, from the colour of her hair to the trimness of her waist. Wituska was eventually beheaded sometime in 1943.
After she finished, Tomaszewski published the translated letters in a book called Inside a Gestapo Prison.
Another young Polish woman with an interest in her country’s history is Kinia Adamczyk, a journalism student at Concordia. She organized the public reading of selected parts of Inside a Gestapo Prison, bringing Tomaszewski to the de S
