Ciesielska - The Doctors of the Warsaw Ghetto

The Holocaust: History and Literature, Ethics and Philosophy

Series Editor
Michael Berenbaum (American Jewish University)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ciesielska, Maria, 1971- author. | Krzychylkiewicz, Agata, translator.

Title: The doctors of the Warsaw Ghetto / Maria Ciesielska ; translated from the original Polish by Agata Krzychylkiewicz.

Other titles: Lekarze getta warszawskiego. English

Description: Boston : Academic Studies Press, 2022. | Series: The Holocaust: history and literature, ethics and philosophy | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021053644 (print) | LCCN 2021053645 (ebook) | ISBN 9781644697252 (hardback) | ISBN 9781644697269 (paperback) | ISBN 9781644697276 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781644697283 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Getto warszawskie (Warsaw, Poland) | Jewish physicians--Poland--Warsaw--Biography. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Poland--Warsaw. | World War, 1939-1945--Medical care--Poland--Warsaw. | Jews--Persecutions--Poland--Warsaw. | Jewish hospitals--Poland--Warsaw--History--20th century. | Jews--Medicine--Poland--Warsaw--History--20th century.

Classification: LCC DS134.64 .C5413 2022 (print) | LCC DS134.64 (ebook) | DDC 940.53/1853841--dc23/eng/20211102

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021053644

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021053645

Copyright 2022 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved

ISBN 9781644697252 (hardback)

ISBN 9781644697269 (paperback)

ISBN 9781644697276 (adobe pdf)

ISBN 9781644697283 (epub)

Book design by Lapiz Digital Services

Cover design by Jacqui Morris

Published by Academic Studies Press

1577 Beacon Street

Brookline, MA 02446, USA

www.academicstudiespress.com

Contents

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre for its strong support in publicizing the story of the Warsaw Ghetto doctors and supporting the publication of an English-language version of Dr. Maria Ciesielskas book. One of these Warsaw Ghetto doctors, Dr. Halina Szenicer-Rotstein, is honored with a memorial plaque, put up even before the Centre was officially opened in March 2019, which greets every visitor who walks up the stairs from the basement parking. Since its opening, the Centre has provided a forum for well-attended presentations on the fate of the Warsaw Ghetto doctors as well as providing guidance and financial support for the translation and editing of the book.

A special word of thanks needs to go to Tali Nates, the founder and director of the Centre, who enthusiastically supported this book project from her very first meeting with Dr. Maria Ciesielska in Warsaw in 2018. Tali spent countless hours on the draft of the book, editing it line by line, and her contribution to the ultimate product is immense. It would not have seen the light of day without her support.

Professor Michael Berenbaums passionate interest in the book was evident from the outset; from that hot summer day in 2018 when Tali first described the book project to him as we walked from Auschwitz to Birkenau during the March of the Living. We are very grateful for his support and the wonderful foreword, which he has contributed.

We are deeply indebted to Agata Krzychylkiewicz, a retired associate professor of Russian literature and civilization at the University of South Africa, who took on the arduous task of translating the book from Polish. Her passion for the book, which, amongst many other topics, covered the fate of the mother of her good friend, Wanda, was always touchingly evident.

We would like to thank Jeanette Friedman for the many hours of work she spent editing the book and ensuring it was in a form that could be successfully published in the United States.

Most of all, we would like to thank Dr. Maria Ciesielska, who devoted years of her life to the research of the most detailed and painstaking kind in order to bring the story of the Warsaw Ghetto doctors alive and save it from the oblivion that it would otherwise have suffered. Maria was also deeply involved in checking and double-checking the English version of the book in order to ensure that the inevitable errors and omissions were weeded out prior to publication. We are deeply grateful to her for her immense work of restorative justice; by the most detailed form of documentation, she has made remembrance and commemoration possible for future generations.

Luc Albinski,
January 23, 2021

Foreword

by Michael Berenbaum

Dr. Maria Ciesielskas Doctors of the Warsaw Ghetto is a book rich in detail. I read it three times: when it was translated into rough Englishbefore it was condensed and editedthe first draft of the major edit, and the galleys that became this book. Each time, I learned something important, something different. It is not an easy read but it is one that forces us to confront fundamental issues of humanity, ethics, and survival.

Having committed myself to writing the preface, I decided to offer readers a map to assist them in understanding Ciesielskas highly detailed and exacting research and how those statistics and lists are the heart-rending description of the reality the doctors and their patients faced in Warsaw before and during the Holocaust.

Historians of the Holocaust struggle to decide whose history to write. Which stories should they tell? Is it the history of how Jews were killed? That is telling German history and the history of its allies, collaborators, and enablers. That is what we call perpetrator history, in which their victims appear precisely as the perpetrators want them to appearas targets deprived of their identities and agency. How Jews were killed is just part of the story. If we tell the stories of the killers, we must also focus on their victimswho they were, why they were chosen, and how they were separated from the societies in which they were more or less integrated, and how they were enslaved and murdered.

Ciesielska tells the story of how Jews lived under horrific conditions, struggling under circumstances not of their doing. She writes of physicians, nurses, and pharmacists who did what they could to sustain a medical system under conditions the Germans designed to methodically kill them and their patients, one step at a time.

Under German occupation of Poland, Nazi leaders generally had no interest in the health of the Jewish population. But they were keenly interested in preventing epidemics that could endanger German personnel or get beyond the ghetto walls and afflict the general population. In the latter case, it was feared that the disease might infect German troops and civilian personnel making German occupation deadly for the occupiers.

In 1941 a typhus epidemic hit Warsaw hard. The ghetto wall did not prevent the epidemic from spreading to the Aryan side, especially since many Poles and Germans were going back and forth from one side to the other. German assistance to the hospitals, pharmacists, physicians, and health services of the ghetto was motivated by a desire to contain epidemicsmost especially, the typhus epidemic. But the measures put in place were not designed to enhance the well-being of the captive Jewish population.