Sponsors, Donors & Bequests

Pola Pasvolsky

Pola Katz was born in 1919 in Poland, and emigrated to South Africa with her parents during the turbulent 1930s. She met her husband, Issie Pasvolsky, in Cape Town in the early 1940’s and they got married soon thereafter.

Mr Issie Pasvolsky was a transport entrepreneur and well known for establishing the Golden Arrow Bus Company, in its heyday one of very few profitable city bus companies run anywhere in the world. A reverse takeover by Mr Pasvolsky of City Tramways Company resulted in the amalgamation with Golden Arrow to form Tollgate Holdings. Issie Pasvolsky’s business success was founded on hard work. He apparently drove and maintained his first buses himself, and succeeded in the then unregulated transport sector largely by getting to the departure points first. This usually meant that he had to be on the job and in position by  03h00 in the morning!

Mr and Mrs Pasvolsky emigrated to Switzerland in the late 1970s. This was largely due to Issie’s failing health, and Mrs Pasvolsky penchant for living the good and cultured life. They spent seven relatively unhappy years in Switzerland (some of them residing in a castle along a lake), but still were able to spend the northern winters in Cape Town. During one of these visits to Cape Town in 1986, Issie Pasvolsky passed away, whereupon Mrs Pasvolsky decided to stay on permanently in South Africa. 

But what do we know about the woman herself??

Pola Pasvolsky enrolled as a mature student for BA studies in Social Anthropology at UCT in 1950, bearing testimony to her single-mindedness and confidence in her intellectual capabilities.

She is described by all who knew her as a passionate and powerful woman who had a cultured sophistication about her. She had a superb eye for colour and was considered ahead of her time with her tastes in décor. For example, she would use deep purple and deep reds at a time when the boldest colours in equivalent residences would favour pale shades of only a few conventional colours. She was also a particularly avid and astute collector of 20^th century art, and she favoured art from the first half of that century, including early Picasso, Irma Stern, Renoir, etc.

Until the eighties, she is described as someone who was a connoiseur of art, décor and food. But around the late eighties and early nineties, she characteristically differently developed an awareness of the natural environment. And although one could probably have expected a lady who loved walking around town with her Yorkshire Terrier, Trinket, on her arm to have gravitated towards animal welfare issues, she instead immersed herself in the more serious business of ecology and conservation. To this end, she left in her will two generous bequests respectively to WWF-SA for the conservation of wetlands, and to the FitzPatrick Institute at UCT, to establish the Pola Pasvolsky Chair in Conservation Biology.

Something that radiates through all the discussions with those who were privileged enough to have known Pola Pasvolsky is that she had a tremendous zest for life. To emphasize this vibrancy of personality, her relatives inscribed her grave with the following words: “She lived life to the full”.