In 1944, nine months after giving birth to her first son, Barbara Wojtowicz left home to fight with the Polish resistance army - known as the AK - in the Warsaw Uprising during the Second World War.
Though Dr. Wojtowicz was a new mother and not expected to take part, she felt compelled to join the battle to liberate Warsaw from German occupation. In her role as an intelligence agent, she descended into the city's labyrinth of sewers, wading through waste up to her chin, in order to courier verbal messages between pockets of the resistance.
For nearly two months, while Warsaw was flattened by war, Dr. Wojtowicz travelled underground. All around her, friends died in the sewers. Some drowned; others were killed by the Nazis, who would occasionally shoot and toss grenades into the canals.
"I don't think she was really scarred from what happened, except for the very late part of her life, when she became afraid of loud noises and being in basements," said her son Martin Wojtowicz. "I suspect it had something to do with her time during the war when she had to walk through those sewers."
Dr. Wojtowicz was born in Lvov, Poland, on March 28, 1918, the last year of the Great War. Her father was a colonel in the Polish Army, and for his work, the family moved to Paris, Warsaw, and Poznan, where she earned a degree in agricultural science.
Mrs. Wojtowicz spent much of her early life on her father's farm, becoming fluent in French and English, and riding horses. She learned to drive, and her love of cars deepened after graduation, when her parents rewarded her with a small Italian automobile, the Topolino.
In 1939, when the Third Reich and the Soviet Union invaded Poland, launching nearly six years of war, Dr. Wojtowicz's father was wounded in battle and sent to a POW camp. With her mother, she fled to eastern Poland where they narrowly escaped capture by the Soviet army, and turned back to Nazi-occupied Warsaw.
At the Warsaw Military Hospital, Dr. Wojtowicz began volunteering as a nurse and soon joined the intelligence unit of the newly formed underground resistance, which delivered information to the allies about the German eastern front. Through this work, she met another resistance fighter, Jan Wojtowicz, whom she married just before the Uprising erupted.
During the war, the couple saw each other only on infrequent dates: "Even though they were married," Martin explained, "they didn't stay together - to reduce the risk of being caught by the occupiers."
En route to one of these secret meetings, Mr. Wojtowicz was nearly arrested by the Nazis during a random search, and ran away to hide in an attic. While he waited underneath a pile of rubble, nervously anticipating his end, he placed in his mouth a glass capsule filled with poison.
If the Nazis had discovered him, he would have bitten the capsule to end his life instead of the alternative: possibly releasing intelligence information during an interrogation.
"It struck me how dedicated they were to the cause to carry one of these capsules with them and be ready to use it even on the way to see a loved one," Martin said.
After 63 days, the Poles' guerrilla tactics could not match the German might, and the uprising was crushed. Dr. Wojtowicz and her husband were separated once again: He was sent to a German POW camp, while she left Warsaw with her mother and son.
In 1945, when the war ended - after claiming the lives of six million in Poland (half of them Jews) and erasing entire areas of Warsaw - Dr. Wojtowicz reunited with her father in Italy, and the family travelled back to Poland.
On the trip, during a stop in a crowded train station in Germany, by pure chance she happened upon her husband. Together, they went home to start over again.
In Warsaw, she drove a taxicab to supplement the family income and worked toward her PhD in agricultural science, while her husband earned his PhD in chemistry. As a hobby, the couple raced cars in national and international rallies.
In 1960, a research fellowship with Canada's National Research Council brought Dr. Wojtowicz to Ottawa. "She loved [Canada] from day one," Martin said. "She loved the safety, the fact that you didn't have to lock cars or homes. You could get out in nature, have a cottage, own land, which is something she remembered from before the war in Poland."
She returned to Poland about two years later, but soon found a position on the Fisheries Research Board, and travelled back to Canada, without her family. "She did that alone, like a pioneer in Canada. She was determined and decided she would have nothing to do with Communist Poland, and wanted us all to immigrate," Martin said.
Her daughter, Elzbieta Pietrzak, said, "If you imagine a woman in a different country, in a different language, that must have been hard. And we couldn't often communicate with her. We wrote letters and we used to exchange cassette tapes and messages. She left the family behind and was quite determined to bring us over."
By 1968, the family was reunited in Halifax, where Dr. Wojtowicz worked as a researcher for the fisheries department. About a decade later, they relocated to Merrickville, Ont., for Mr. Wojtowicz's research work at the nearby University of Ottawa. He died in 1992, and Dr. Wojtowicz took early retirement, working on a hobby farm, happily caring for the land and a menagerie of animals, including pigs, cows, donkeys, horses, and many species of birds.
On her 80th birthday, she was stopped by the police for speeding. "Her first and last encounter with the police in Canada was memorable," said her son Jerzy Wojtowicz. "Needless to say, she never sped again."
For her service during the war, the Polish government-in-exile decorated the resistance fighter with four medals. "I only began to realize that she was remarkable when she was older, and people from wartime Poland came to Canada to visit her and pay homage," Martin said. "I didn't understand this earlier because she didn't talk about the war."
BARBARA WOJTOWICZ
Barbara Wojtowicz was born in Lvov, Poland, on March 28, 1918. She died on Oct. 22, 2009. She was 91. She leaves her three children, Martin, Jerzy, and Elzbieta. Special to The Globe and Mail
Lest we forget
Through Nov. 11, we pause for a week to remember veterans of the Second World War on the Obituaries page. They survived the war and rebuilt their lives, often repressing the horrors they had witnessed. They may have succumbed to illness and old age, but their courage and their valour flourish. To those who fought in that great bloodletting from 1939-1945 - and those who stand on guard at home and abroad today - we owe an enormous debt of sacrifice and remembrance.
