Julia Brystiger

Julia Brystiger (; née Prajs; 25 November 1902 – 9 October 1975) was a Polish communist activist and member of the security apparatus in socialist Poland. She was the author of several books.

Life Brystiger was the daughter of a Jewish pharmacist from Stryj (now Ukraine). In 1920, she graduated from high school in Lwów (new Second Polish Republic) and married a Zionist activist Natan (Nathan) Brystiger (1890-1932). She studied history at the Lwów University while pregnant and a year later gave birth to a son, Michał Brystiger (1921–2016), a musicologist.

After graduating from University, Brystiger went to Paris where she continued her education, receiving a PhD in philosophy. Upon their return, in 1928–1929, she got a job at a high school in Vilnius and in a Jewish Teacher's College Tarbuch. Since 1927, she was an active participant in the communist movement, and in 1929 was fired because of her communist agitation. Working for the Communist Party of Poland, she was arrested several times, and in 1937 was sentenced to 2 years in prison. She was "denouncing people on such scale, that she antagonized even Communist party members".

Following German Operation Barbarossa Brystiger fled to Kharkov, then to Samarkand deep in the USSR. In 1943-44, she worked for the Union of Polish Patriots, and in October 1944, joined the new Polish Workers' Party. In December 1944, after returning behind the Soviet front, Brystygier began working for the infamous Ministry of Public Security of Poland, where she soon got promoted to the rank of Director of the Fifth Department created in July 1946 specifically for the purpose of persecution and torture of Polish religious personalities. Her career is believed to have been so rapid also because she was intimate with such high functionaries as Jakub Berman and Hilary Minc.

Brystiger personally oversaw the first stages of each UB investigation at her place of employment. She would torture the captured persons using her own methods such as whipping male victims' genitals. One of her victims was a man named Szafarzyński – from the Olsztyn office of the Polish People's Party – who died as a result of interrogation carried out by Brystygier. One of the victims of her interrogation methods testified later: "She is a murderous monster, worse than German female guards of the concentration camps". Anna Roszkiewicz–Litwiniwiczowa, a former soldier of the Home Army, said about Brystygier: "She was famous for her sadistic tortures; she seemed to have been obsessed with sadistic treatment of genitalia and was fulfilling her libido in that way.".

Brystiger became the head of the 5th Department of UB sometime in the late 1940s. It specialized in the persecution of Polish religious leaders. Brystygier – a dogmatic Marxist – yearned to destroy all religion as an "opiate of the masses". Julia Brystygier left the Ministry of Public Security (UB) in 1956 and tried to become a writer, authoring a novel "Crooked Letters". She worked in a publishing house under Jewish communist Jerzy Borejsza (Różański's brother), and was a frequent visitor to a boarding school for the vision impaired, in a village near Warsaw.

Works Krzywe litery (1960) Znak "H" : opowiadania (1962) Przez ucho igielne (1965)