Teresa Walewska-Przyjałkowska
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Teresa Walewska-Przyjałkowska (10 September 1937 – 10 April 2010) was a Polish scientist and social activist, founding member and vice-president of the Golgota Wschodu (Golgotha of the East), an organisation which commemorates the victims of the Katyn massacre. She was founder and president of the Association for the Propagation of the Cult of St. Andrew Bobola Foundation. She died in the 2010 Polish Air Force Tu-154 crash near Smolensk on 10 April 2010[1] and was posthumously awarded the Order of Polonia Restituta.[2]
Teresa Maria Barbara Walewska-Przyjałkowska was born on 10 September 1937.[3] Her parents were Aleksandra, née Rosińska (1905-1989) and Polikarp Konstanty Collona Walewski (1897-1965, an aviation engineer).[4] As a child she lived in Warsaw during the German occupation and survived the Warsaw Uprising.[5] Her husband was Andrzej Przyjałkowski (d. 1978).[6]
Career
Teresa Walewska-Przyałkowska was a long-time employee of the Faculty of Automobiles and Robotic Machines at the Warsaw University of Technology. She held a doctoral degree in engineering and specialised in industrial automation and robotics.[7] As part of her academic work, she developed a communication system related to control on marshalling hills for goods trains, and in the 1960s she was the first to organise research on them in her department.[8]
Religious convictions
She was associated with the Warsaw parish of St Andrew Bobola in Warsaw-Mokotów.[8] In the early 1990s she founded, and from 1997 was president of the Association for the Propagation of the Cult of St Andrew Bobola, She organised pilgrimages tracing in his footsteps.[8] On her initiative, in 2002, the image of Our Lady of Kozielsk, painted on the basis of a bas-relief made in the NKVD camp in Kozielsk, was enthroned in the sanctuary of St Andrzej Bobola at Rakowiecka Street in Warsaw. In 2003, this painting was consecrated by Pope John Paul II.[9]
