Halina Bortnowska
1931–2024 (age 93)
Biography
Halina Bortnowska (23 September 1931 – 19 June 2024) was a Polish social and ecumenical activist, and publicist. She was born in Toruń on 23 September 1931, and died on 19 June 2024, at the age of 92.
Halina Bortnowska-Dabrowska (born September 23, 1931 in Torun, died June 19, 2024[1]) - Polish philosopher, theologian, publicist. Animator of social projects, participant in the ecumenical movement expressing the need to convene the next Council in the Catholic Church. In 2007-2012, chairwoman of the Council of the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights.
She graduated from elementary school in Warsaw in 1944 and was deported to a German labor camp during the Warsaw Uprising.
She studied at the Catholic Institute in Wroclaw, at the Catholic University of Lublin (master's degree in philosophy, 1961), later in Leuven (1964). During her studies she worked with children and adults as a catechist (in Wroclaw and Lublin). From 1961 to 1983, editor and secretary of the editorial board of the monthly Znak (among other things, journalist-reporter of the Third Session of the Second Vatican Council; 1964).
In the 1970s, she co-founded the hospice movement in Poland and the first Polish hospice in Nowa Huta. For five years she helped the terminally ill as a volunteer (editor of the book “The Sense of Sickness, the Sense of Death, the Sense of Life” - three editions in the Znak publishing house). In the 1980s, she was an advisor to the Workers' Committee of Steelworkers in Nowa Huta. She participated, as an advisor to the delegates of Malopolska, in the First Congress of the NSZZ “Solidarity”. She participated from December 13, 1981 in a several-day strike at the Metalworks Combine in Nowa Huta. She was briefly interned during martial law[2]. In 1986 she became a member of the Helsinki Committee in Poland. She was involved in activities for Polish-German reconciliation.
She participated in the Action of Signs of Repentance projects of cleaning up ruins in Poland (Auschwitz) and Germany (Dresden). From 1967 to 1982 she actively participated in the work of the World Council of Churches[3]. She was an animator of projects to commemorate the victims of the Warsaw Ghetto, Jedwabne and Srebrenica[4].