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A Time to Remember

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Anne Frank will be in the limelight once again in ABC’s miniseries (‘Beyond the Attic,” by Elizabeth Jensen, April 29). Isn’t that overkill? Wouldn’t justice be served if, instead, the story of Wanda Poltawska was told?

Wanda was a Girl Guide in prewar Poland. (Girl Guides were the Girl Scout organization in that country.) After the Nazi conquest, she joined the resistance, was captured, and endured four years in Ravensbruck as a human guinea pig for medical experiments.

After recovering from one of these, she resolved to become a doctor to do good so as to make up for the evil Nazi doctors. She did just that, eventually turning to psychiatry to help ex-inmates recover.

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Wanda Poltawska was a Polish Catholic. I would think Anne Frank’s spirit would join in to say that Wanda’s story, rather than hers again, be told.

HUGH HOYLAND

Monrovia

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Your cover story about Anne Frank reminded me of that particular time in the spring of 1945 when I was a 19-year-old American prisoner of war in Stalag XI-B, some 20 miles from where she was kept prisoner. But we soldiers did not know about her at the time.

After the war I read that she had passed away from typhus fever sometime around March 1945. Although all of us American soldiers starved and lost weight, the U.S. Army medical shots given us in England before we left for France and Belgium probably saved our lives.

Anne Frank’s affecting and powerful story lives on; your absorbing article held my rapt attention.

KENNETH LARSON

Los Angeles

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