My mother, Julita Korwin-Szymanowska, who has died aged 93, was a nurse, businesswoman and feminist who participated in some of the major events of the last century.

Born in Płock, Poland, she was the first of six children of Leokadia Schultz, a half-German school teacher, and Felix Szymanowski, a French-educated engineer and architect. Her education in Jazłowiec, now in western Ukraine, was interrupted by the second world war. She continued clandestine schooling in German-occupied Warsaw and at 16 she entered the Warsaw school of nursing.

In 1943, while she was a student on a night shift, a casualty was brought in from the street with a fatal sniper’s bullet in his lung. Summoned to help, Julita discovered it was her father.

A resistance member, she worked in the lying-in hospital for mothers and babies. With the Warsaw uprising in August 1944 life became hand to mouth, dodging explosions and collapsing buildings.

Julita aided her wounded and dying resistance colleagues, working round the clock and moving across the city via sewers or cellars. When the uprising was quashed Julita was one of many taken into captivity.

The Germans set up special PoW camps for the 2,000 female combatants. Julita was not to see her family again until the late 1950s. Her captivity lasted eight months in various camps. She and several hundred other women escaped from her fifth camp when a dogfight in the air above them destroyed their accommodation. They were eventually liberated by a US battalion.

Julita became a medic in the Polish Independent Parachute Brigade, under the British Army of the Rhine. She was promoted to sister and lieutenant at 21. She attended the Nuremberg trials, where she met General George S Patton. Although she was accepted by Louvain University to study medicine, she was refused a grant because men were given priority.

In 1947, her regiment moved from Germany to Scotland, where it was demobilised. She then nursed in Wrexham. While visiting London, she met a fellow Pole, Tadeusz “Ted” Kutek, a naval officer and survivor of Dachau. They married in 1949 and settled in London, where my sister, Marie-Hélène, and I were born.

The family built up a travel business, Julita running its small hotel, the Lord Jim, in Earl’s Court. She and Ted divorced after 32 years of marriage. When not travelling, Julita was always in the company of a dog. She was an accomplished needlewoman. A classically beautiful woman who never wore makeup, she was loyal, obstinate and principled.

In 1885 her grandfather, Théodore de Korwin Szymanowski, had published an economic and social blueprint designed to avoid armed conflict in Europe. To her astonishment and joy, in 2015 the Polish ministry of foreign affairs published the rediscovered essay.

She is survived by Marie-Hélène and me.