DR. Janina Iwańska
Dr. Janina Iwańska was born in Warsaw. She spent her childhood in the Wola district, where she started attending school. During the war her father was arrested. In 1944, when the Warsaw Uprising broke out on
1 September, she was home alone. For the first eight days of the Uprising she managed to live by herself with the help of some older residents of the tenement house in which the whole family lived before the war.
Dr. Janina Iwańska and other residents were led to the camp in Pruszków and then transported to the Auschwitz camp. She also went through
a death march and was liberated in Ravensbrück.
"I was here for the first time in 1965 - quite by accident, because friends asked me to show them the former camp. I told them that I would show them the block in which I stayed, and the bunk bed on which I slept. At Birkenau, I stood before the gate, so dumbfounded that I was only able to walk in silence to the barracks, where I pointed to my bunk. I could not bring myself to say a word. In the car, from Oświęcim to Warsaw, I could not speak but cried all the way.
"After a few days, I remembered that my parents came to Auschwitz 10 years earlier on an excursion, and for a long time, they did not speak to me about it, only stroking my head occasionally when passing by me. It was only after a few days did my mother say, “We saw your braids in Oświęcim." I never returned to Auschwitz again and never encouraged anyone to visit it. I was unable to utter a word there. I consciously returned for the 50th anniversary of the camp’s liberation."