| Danuta Mostwin, an author, psychologist and sociologist who had been a member of the Polish underground during World War II and whose fiction chronicling the experiences of Polish emigres earned her two nominations for the Nobel Prize in literature, died Monday of Parkinson's disease at her Ruxton home. She was 88. She was born Danuta Pietruszewski in Lublin, Poland, and she completed high school in Warsaw in 1939. She had planned to be a playwright, but turned her attention to studying for a medical career after the outbreak of World War II.
After Germany occupied her homeland, Dr. Mostwin had to study at an underground medical school held at the University of Warsaw. During the war years, she and her family were active in the resistance movement. "The house in which she lived with her mother (her father was with part of the Polish military in London) served as a shelter and meeting point for couriers who had been parachuted into Poland," said her son, Dr. Jacek Mostwin, a urologist who lives in Ruxton.
In 1944, she met a young Polish freedom fighter, Stanislaw B. Mostwin, who became her husband. With the end of the war and the Russian occupation of Poland, and with her husband facing arrest by the secret police, the couple and her mother fled to England. Dr. Mostwin completed her medical education in 1948 in Edinburgh, Scotland. In 1951, the couple and their young son immigrated to New York and then to Baltimore, where Dr. Mostwin went to work for the city Department of Public Welfare.
Many of her patients were Polish immigrants who lived near Patterson Park and Fells Point, and her experiences found their way into "Asteroids," a collection of short stories that she later wrote.
source: Baltimore Sun
About Danuta Mostwin's books - in Polish - on The Oficyna Kucharski website | 
