I Am First a Human Being: The Prison Letters of Krystyna Wituska
On the eve of World War II, Krystyna Wituska, a carefree, rather spoiled teenager attending finishing school in Switzerland, returned to Poland. During the Occupation, when she was twenty years old, she drifted into the Polish Underground. By her own admission, she was attracted at first by the adventure, but youthful bravado soon turned into a mental and spiritual mastery over fear. Because Krystyna spoke fluent German she was assigned to collect information on German troop movements at...
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On the eve of World War II, Krystyna Wituska, a carefree, rather spoiled teenager attending finishing school in Switzerland, returned to Poland. During the Occupation, when she was twenty years old, she drifted into the Polish Underground. By her own admission, she was attracted at first by the adventure, but youthful bravado soon turned into a mental and spiritual mastery over fear. Because Krystyna spoke fluent German she was assigned to collect information on German troop movements at Warsaw airport. In 1942, at the age of twenty-one, she was arrested by the Gestapo and transferred to prison in Berlin where she was executed two years later. In the last eighteen months of her life Krystyna wrote over sixty letters which, through the kindness of a courageous prison guard, were smuggled to her parents or the guard's daughter who became her penpal. From the moment she was arrested, Krystyna would not allow her spirit to be broken and believed that "the noble that is within us will not perish." It is Krystyna's humanity that unites her with other victims of war and other resistance fighters, and enables us to identify with her even though her ordeal was outside the scope of our experience.
