Janina Barbara Sowa, née Gettel, was born in Warsaw in 1918. Her father, Paweł Gettel, was a member of the Polish Parliament, “president of the Sierszańskie mining plants” – as she noted in the questionnaire submitted in September 1936 together with the application for admission to the SGH. Her mother, Eugenia, née Wysocka Gettlowa, worked at the NBP. Among Janina Barbara’s teachers are the greatest names of the Warsaw School of Economics: professors Lipiński, Loth, Grodek, Skrzywan and rector Miklaszewski. She coped excellently with political economy, economic geography, statistics. She did worse with commercial arithmetic, which she improved in February 1940. Her studies at the SGH were interrupted by the war.
In her application for admission to the student body, preserved in the SGH archives, Janina Gettlówna wrote:
“I was born in Warsaw on June 23, 1918. In 1922, I went with my parents to Nowogródek, where I spent 3 years. In 1925, I went to Kielce, where in 1928 I entered the first grade of the Blessed Kinga State Gymnasium. A year later, I moved to Warsaw, where I attended the Wanda Szachtmajerowa, née Posselt Gymnasium, from which I graduated on May 28, 1936.” Her sister Zofia also studied at the SGH.
After the outbreak of the war, she actively joined the underground, using the pseudonym “Basia”. From January 1940, she was an active member of the Union of Armed Struggle, and later of the Home Army. She was assigned to the Medical Department of the 4th District “Grzymała” of the Warsaw District of the Home Army (Ochota). During the occupation, she participated in clandestine nursing courses and undertook a secret hospital internship with Dr. Janina Bachańska-Kuźniecow at the Infant Jesus Hospital. Immediately after the outbreak of the uprising, she ran a makeshift field hospital in the basement of a house at 5 Barska Street in Ochota, where a dozen or so seriously wounded insurgents from the attacks on the Academic House and Antonin were hospitalized. “From 2-3 August, she operated in the so-called Kaliska Redoubt, co-organizing a temporary hospital in the basements of the captured building of the Polish Tobacco Monopoly at 1 Kaliska Street. She was a member of a team working under the supervision of Dr. Janina Bachańska-Kuźniecow and Dr. Anatol Kuźniecow. In the face of constant fire from the makeshift hospital, she and other nurses moved the wounded from the hospital in Monopoly to apartments private at Jotejki Street.
“After the fall of Ochota, she was in a temporary camp in the so-called Zieleniak, from where she was sent to Pruszków. On the way from the transport, she managed to escape. (…) On September 15, she reached a new field hospital being set up in Mrs. Kapuścińska’s manor house in Łuszczewo”, providing assistance to, among others, wounded soldiers from the Kampinos Group. “She finished her medical service only in August 1945” – states the Warsaw Uprising Museum on its website.
