Helena Wolińska-Brus

Helena Wolińska-Brus (born Fajga Mindla Danielak; 28 February 1919 – 26 November 2008) was a military prosecutor in the Polish People's Republic with the rank of lieutenant-colonel (podpułkownik), involved in the Stalinist show trials of the 1950s. She has been implicated in the arrest and execution of many Polish World War II resistance fighters, including significant figures in Poland's wartime Home Army.

The Third Polish Republic sought the extradition of Wolińska-Brus from the United Kingdom on three occasions between . The official charges against her were initiated by the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), which investigates both Nazi and Communist crimes committed in Poland between 1939 and 1989. Wolińska-Brus was accused of being an "accessory to a judicial murder".

Biography Wolińska-Brus was born to a Jewish family in Warsaw, where she later married Włodzimierz Brus (born Beniamin Zylberberg). They became separated during the German occupation of Poland after Wolińska-Brus escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto. She joined the communist People's Guard and became the mistress of its commander, Franciszek Jóźwiak, whom she married in 1942, believing that her first husband was dead. The rest of her family had been transported to Treblinka, where most of them were murdered. She became known as Helena Wolińska because of the false documents she acquired at this time.

However, she met Brus again in 1944 and they eventually remarried in 1956, after she had separated from Jóźwiak, now a deputy minister of the Stalinist Secret Police (1945–1949) and a member of the Politburo of the governing communist Polish United Workers' Party.

Fieldorf was executed on 24 February 1953, following a show trial, and his remains buried in a secret location – his family was never shown the body. The Polish indictments were based the claim that Wolińska-Brus had fabricated evidence which led to the execution of General Emil Fieldorf and the wrongful arrest and imprisonment of 24 other anti-Nazi resistance fighters. Both requests were refused by the Home Office; in particular, because of her advanced age and the long period of time that had elapsed since the alleged crimes occurred (the Polish authorities considered the latter reason to be unfair, given that any proper investigation of her alleged crimes became possible only after the fall of communism in Poland in 1989).

Wolińska-Brus, in a telephone conversation with historian Anne Applebaum in 1998, said she would not return to that "despicable country"; she claimed her accusers were motivated by anti-semitism. Her acquaintances told Applebaum she had said she would not return to "the country of Auschwitz and Birkenau", claiming that she would not receive a fair trial in Poland. Bartoszewski told Anne Applebaum in 1998 that he recalled, while in prison during the 1950s, seeing blank arrest warrants with Wolińska's signature on them as a demonstration of the authorities ability to continue extending his imprisonment.

In 2007, the IPN asked Polish prosecutors to issue a European Arrest Warrant against Wolińska-Brus, which was duly issued on 20 November 2007. A year later, Wolińska-Brus died on 26 November 2008 in Oxford. Although the funeral was scheduled for 5 December 2008, she was buried on 3 December in a closed ceremony, at Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford, with only a few family members attending.

Popular culture Wolińska-Brus inspired the character of prosecutor Wanda Gruz in Paweł Pawlikowski's 2013 Academy Award-winning film Ida. Pawlikowski had met Wolińska-Brus and her husband while he was a student at Oxford; at the time, Pawlikowski was unaware of her past. After learning years later that Wolińska-Brus had been a prosecutor in Stalinist Poland, and that the Polish government was demanding her extradition, Pawlikowski expressed an interest in making a documentary about her life, which Włodzimierz Brus allegedly refused on his wife's behalf. Pawlikowski described Wolińska-Brus as an "archetype" for Wanda Gruz.