Brus, Helena Wolińska born Fajga Mindla Danielak on 28-02-1919 in Warsaw,
Second Polish Republic,
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. 
Włodzimierz Brus born Beniamin Zylberberg, 23-08-1921 – 31-08-2007) was an economist and party functionary in communist Poland. He emigrated from Poland in 1972, removed from power after the 1968 Polish political crisis. Brus spent the rest of his life in the United Kingdom.
Helena joined the communist People’s Guard. The People’s Guard was a communist partisan force of the Polish Workers’ Party (PPR) 
active in Occupied Poland during World War II from 1942 to 1944. and she became the mistress of its commander, Franciszek Jóźwiak, 
a communist underground resistance organization in German-occupied Poland during WWII, 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.
In 1998, the Polish Ministry of Justice submitted a request to the British authorities for the extradition of Wolińska, accusing her of the unlawful detention of 24 soldiers of the Polish Home Army between 1950 and 1953, including Brigadier General August Emil Fieldorf “Nil”. 
(On 21-11-1950, she ordered Fieldorf’s temporary arrest and oversaw the investigation against him.)
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. She was dismissed from her job as prosecutor during the Polish October of 1956.
In the 1960s, her husband Brus shifted from supporting the party hierarchy to openly backing such dissidents as Jacek “Jan” Kuroń, 
Karol Cyryl Modzelewski, 
Leszek Kołakowski 
and Krzysztof Pomian. 
The couple were both expelled from the party in 1968.
Death and burial ground of Brus, Helena Wolińska born Fajga Mindla Danielak.
Wolińska-Brus and her husband left Poland in 1971, after the 1968 Polish political crisis and spent the rest of their lives in the United Kingdom. Wlodzimierz Brus became a professor of economics at the University of Oxford and passed away on 31-08-2007 (aged 86) in Oxford, United Kingdom. Wolińska-Brus lived in Oxford until her death, 26-11-2008 (aged 89) in Oxford, England, having previously acquired UK citizenship.
Leave a Reply