All Saints’ Day on Wednesday provided another opportunity to remember them, Polish state news agency PAP reported.
Mirosław Hermaszewski, the first Pole in space, died at the age of 81 on December 12, 2022.
In 1976, he was selected from among 500 pilots to participate in the Soviet Union’s Intercosmos programme.
A member of Intercosmos’ second mission, Hermaszewski travelled into space on June 27, 1978, alongside Soviet commander Pyotr Klimuk, aboard the Soyuz 30 spacecraft.
During the mission, Hermaszewski conducted scientific experiments and photographed Earth’s surface from the space station Salyut 6.
He spent close to eight days in space before the team returned to Earth on July 5, 1978, landing in the steppes of then-Soviet Kazakhstan, some 300 kilometres west of the city of Tselinograd, now Astana.
Hermaszewski flew his farewell flight, on a MiG-29 fighter jet, at the age of 64 in October 2005.
Afterwards he continued to tour the country, telling audiences about his space mission and promoting astronautics.
Wanda Półtawska, one of the closest friends of Karol Wojtyła, from the early years of his priesthood to the last days of his long pontificate as Pope John Paul II, died on October 25, 2023, a week before her 102nd birthday.
A noted psychiatrist and devout Roman Catholic, Półtawska was an indefatigable promoter of family values and anti-abortion activist.
During World War II, Półtawska endured the horrors of the Nazi German concentration camp in Ravensbrück, where she was subjected to cruel medical experiments. After the war, she married and had four children.
She is said to have experienced a medically inexplicable recovery from cancer after Wojtyła, a bishop in Kraków at the time, requested the prayers of Padre Pio, a stigmatized Italian priest who has since been canonized as a Catholic saint.
Until her 90s, Półtawska travelled around Poland giving lectures on John Paul II’s teachings on the family.
Kacper Tekieli, a noted mountaineer, was killed in an avalanche in the Swiss Alps at the age of 38 on May 17, 2023.
Tekieli was a leading Polish climber, having scaled peaks in the Tatra mountains, Alps and Dolomites, and elsewhere, from the Caucasus to Alaska, Polish state news agency PAP reported.
He was also a member of Polish expeditions to summit the 8,481-metre Makalu, the world’s fifth-highest mountain, and the 8,011-metre Broad Peak Middle, in the Himalayas, the wspinanie.pl website reported.
Tekieli was swept by an avalanche while ascending the 4,158-metre Alpine peak of Jungfrau in Switzerland, according to local emergency and rescue services.
Tekieli was climbing in Switzerland as part of his project to top all 82 Alpine four-thousanders in the shortest possible time, according to the wspinanie.pl website.
Kacper Tekieli is survived by his wife, Poland’s two-time Olympic and world cross-country skiing champion Justyna Kowalczyk-Tekieli, and their two-year-old son Hugo, the PAP news agency reported.
Also in the past year, Poland has seen the passing of noted actors Jan Nowicki and Leonard Pietraszak, as well as Teresa Stanek, the head of an association of Poland’s World War II underground Home Army veterans, among others, according to news outlets.
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Source: PAP, Interia.pl