From February to the middle of July 1942, a study was carried out in the Warsaw ghetto. It was a study of starvation, conducted by the Jewish physicians in the two largest hospitals in the ghetto. The results of this study show the changes undergone by the human body when not enough food is available. This is the story of that study. The information about the study is true. The background of the physicians who took part in the study is as close to accurate as possible. The motivation for the study, how they got the equipment, and how they smuggled out the manuscript, is fiction. "This story ... is a historical novel in the truest sense. Together the fact and the fiction will give you, the reader, an understanding of an extraordinary scientific event that helped a people define itself during one of the saddest chapers of its existence."--Page 4 of cover.
Based on years of archival research, ‘The Doctors of the Warsaw Ghetto’ is the most detailed study ever undertaken into the fate of more than 800 Jewish doctors who devoted themselves, in many cases until the day they died, to the care of the sick and the dying in the Ghetto. The functioning of the Ghetto hospitals, clinics and laboratories is explained in fascinating detail. Readers will learn about the ground-breaking research undertaken in the Ghetto as well as about the underground medical university that prepared hundreds of students for a career in medicine; a career that, in most cases, was to be cut brutally short within weeks of them completing their first year of studies.
White Coats in the Ghetto narrates the struggle of the Jews to survive in the Warsaw ghetto while also preserving their humanity during the Holocaust. Based on a vast quantity of official and personal documents, it describes the elaborate medical system that the Jews established in the ghetto to cope with the lethal conditions imposed on them by the Nazis, and the tragic ethical dilemmas that the medical teams confronted under German occupation.--Publisher description.
Faced with infectious diseases, starvation, lack of medicines, lack of clean water, and safe sewage, Jewish physicians practiced medicine under severe conditions in the ghettos and concentration camps of the Holocaust. Despite the odds against them, physicians managed to supply public health education, enforce hygiene protocols, inspect buildings and latrines, enact quarantine, and perform triage. Many gave their lives to help fellow prisoners. Based on archival materials and featuring memoirs of Holocaust survivors, this volume offers a rich array of both tragic and inspiring studies of the sanctification of life as practiced by Jewish medical professionals. More than simply a medical story, these histories represent the finest exemplification of a humanist moral imperative during a dark hour of recent history.
In Warsaw Ghetto Police, Katarzyna Person shines a spotlight on the lawyers, engineers, young yeshiva graduates, and sons of connected businessmen who, in the autumn of 1940, joined the newly formed Jewish Order Service. Person tracks the everyday life of policemen as their involvement with the horrors of ghetto life gradually increased. Facing and engaging with brutality, corruption, and the degradation and humiliation of their own people, these policemen found it virtually impossible to exercise individual agency. While some saw the Jewish police as fellow victims, others viewed them as a more dangerous threat than the German occupation authorities; both were held responsible for the destruction of a historically important and thriving community. Person emphasizes the complexity of the situation, the policemen's place in the network of social life in the ghetto, and the difficulty behind the choices that they made. By placing the actions of the Jewish Order Service in historical context, she explores both the decisions that its members were forced to make and the consequences of those actions. Featuring testimonies of members of the Jewish Order Service, and of others who could see them as they themselves could not, Warsaw Ghetto Police brings these impossible situations to life. It also demonstrates how a community chooses to remember those whose allegiances did not seem clear. Published in Association with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
“[Dr. Reicher] lived through the Second World War in Poland, dodging bullets, uprisings and deportations—not to mention betrayal, starvation and airless hideouts—in a manner more reminiscent of a talented outlaw than a mild-mannered dermatologist . . . It is the impressive simplicity of the good doctor’s writing that makes [t]his book resemble [Victor] Klemperer’s, and the detailed observations of its report that makes it emotionally memorable. . . . William Carlos Williams once said that people who prize information are perishing daily for want of the information that can be found only in poetry. By the same token, there will never be a time when we will not need the information that an important, evocative book like Country of Ash provides.” —VIVIAN GORNICK, Moment magazine Country of Ash is the starkly compelling, original chronicle of a Jewish doctor who miraculously survived near-certain death, first inside the Lodz and Warsaw ghettoes, where he was forced to treat the Gestapo, then on the Aryan side of Warsaw, where he hid under numerous disguises. He clandestinely recorded the terrible events he witnessed, but his manuscript disappeared during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. After the war, reunited with his wife and young daughter, he rewrote his story. Peopled with historical figures like the controversial Chaim Rumkowski, who fancied himself a king of the Jews, to infamous Nazi commanders and dozens of Jews and non-Jews who played cat and mouse with death throughout the war, Reicher’s memoir is about a community faced with extinction and the chance decisions and strokes of luck that kept a few stunned souls alive. Edward Reicher (1900–1975) was born in Lodz, Poland. He graduated with a degree in medicine from the University of Warsaw, later studied dermatology in Paris and Vienna, and practiced in Lodz as a dermatologist and venereal disease specialist both before and after World War II. A Jewish survivor of Nazi-occupied Poland, Reicher appeared at a tribunal in Salzburg to identify Hermann Höfle and give an eyewitness account of Höfle’s role in Operation Reinhard, which sent hundreds of thousands to their deaths in the Nazi concentration camps of Poland. Country of Ash, first published posthumously in France, was translated from the French by Magda Bogin and includes a foreword by Edward Reicher’s daughter Elisabeth Bizouard-Reicher.
"But the Jewish children will never grow up : in August 1942, they board the train that will carry them away to the death camps. Offered his freedom, Doctor Korczak refuses to abandon the children and proudly joins them on their last journey."--Publishers' website.
Recounts the struggle against the Nazi takeover of Warsaw and provides an account of the author's activities as head courier for the ZOB, the Jewish Fighting Organization.
