Tekla Juniewicz celebrates her 116th birthday on Friday (June 10). She was born in Austro-Hungary in 1906, eight years before the outbreak of the First World War. That same year the construction of the Panama Canal was underway, the first plane flight was carried out in Europe, and Maria Skłodowska-Curie gave her first lecture at the Sorbonne. Currently, Tekla Juniewicz is the oldest living woman in Poland and the second living person in the world.
Tekla Juniewicz was born on June 10, 1906, in a village of Krupsko in Austro-Hungary, which today is part of Ukraine. When Poland regained its independence, she was 12 years old. Before the war she had led a peaceful life next to her husband, who had been a warehouse manager at the Borysław oil mine. The town became part of the Soviet Union, and together with her family was relocated to Gliwice in Poland, where she still lives today along with her grandson.
In total, Tekla Juniewicz has five grandchildren, four great-grandchildren, and four great-great-grandchildren. Her eldest daughter died in 2016 at the age of 88, while the younger one is 93 at the moment. The eldest grandson is 70 years old, whereas the youngest great-great-granddaughter was born last year on the day of Tekla's 115th birthday.
Secret of longevity
"Grandma likes company, she likes open people, doesn't like distancing. She has some power within her, making people want to touch her, to hug her," her grandson Adam told TVN24. He also commented on a plethora of questions regarding the secret of her longevity.
"Grandma's geriatrician claims it's simply her genes. When she was seven or eight years old, she suffered from typhus. All of the other ill people were being taken away, isolated, the mortality rate was very high, and yet grandma's father hid her in a basement. A doctor then told her: 'Tekla, if you recovered from this, you will live very long'. And as far as I can remember, grandma has never been ill. Until her 100th birthday, when she fell sick with bronchitis," he recalled.
She only needed three pills of an antibiotic to recover. She had not had any problems with health for the next ten years, after which she went through two gallstones removal surgeries in general anaesthesia. Before she turned 111, she had been handling herself perfectly well. "Nowadays she sleeps more often, but she still thinks sharp, watches the world, reminisces," the grandson said.
Not only is Tekla Juniewicz the oldest living Polish woman, but she is the longest-living Pole in history. According to the najstarsipolacy.pl portal, the woman is the first person in Poland to have reached the ages of 112, 113, 114, 115 and 116.
She is also the second-oldest living person in the world. The only older person is Lucile Randon, a 118-year-old nun from France.
Źródło: TVN24 News in English, TVN24 Katowice, najstarsipolacy.pl
Źródło zdjęcia głównego: archiwum rodziny Tekli Juniewicz