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On 2 November, the Polish Ravensbrück survivor Wanda Półtawska celebrated her 100th birthday. At a concert that took place today in Krakow in the presence of the jubilarian, the director of the Ravensbrück Memorial Andrea Genest paid tribute to Półtawska's life's work in a welcoming speech. The concert, entitled "The Power of Love", was dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Ravensbrück concentration camp.

Born in Lublin in 1921, Wanda Półtawska had to drop out of school after the German Wehrmacht invaded Poland in 1939 and joined a scout group that organised resistance against the Germans. In 1941 she was arrested by the

arrested by the Gestapo and deported to the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp after six months in prison at Lublin Castle. There she had to do hard forced labour. In 1942, she and other women at Ravensbrück were selected for medical experiments to prove the ineffectiveness of sulphonamide for gangrene. Many of the survivors remained scarred by this for the rest of their lives. She and other women managed to make testimonies of these cruel experiments and smuggle them out of the camp as evidence.

At the beginning of 1945 Wanda Półtawska escaped being shot. She was transported to the Neustadt-Glewe subcamp with a false prisoner number and liberated there in May 1945. She returned to Poland, married the Krakow philosopher Andrzej Półtawski and was able to obtain a doctorate in psychiatry in 1964. She was active in Catholic organisations and received an honorary doctorate from the Catholic University of Lublin in 2008. Her memoir "And I Fear My Dreams" is one of the best-known accounts of the Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany.