Professor Janina Kowalczykowa

Professor Janina Kowalczykowa was one of the best-known woman doctors and medical scientists from Kraków imprisoned in Auschwitz-Birkenau. She deserves a biographical study, especially for the War years and the time she was held in a German prison and concentration camp, when she was at an advanced stage of pregnancy. She was released from Auschwitz-Birkenau after several months of incarceration and managed to survive the War. The biographies and recollections of Professor Kowalczykowa published in Patologia Polska gloss over this crucial time in her life with just a few cursory remarks—quite understandably for a specialist journal for anatomical pathology.

Prof. Janina Kowalczykowa. Source: Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim, 1980.. Click the image to enlarge.

Janina Kowalczykowa was born on 10 March 1907 in Golkowice near Kraków, into the family of Jan Gworek and his wife Mieczysława née Lelek. Both of her parents were primary school teachers. Janina attended primary school and the lower years of secondary school in her home village. In 1925 she passed the school leaving examination in a Kraków grammar school for girls¹ and went up to the Jagiellonian University for Medicine. During her undergraduate years she engaged in social work, and was an intern in the University’s Department of Physiology and in Ward 1A (internal medicine) at St. Lazarus’ Hospital.² She also published her first scientific paper at this time. She completed the prescribed syllabus for Medicine on 15 December 1930 and graduated on 26 November 1931. Her graduation certificate, awarding her the Doctor Medicinae Universae, was signed by Professors Stanisław Kutrzeba, Emil Godlewski, and Stanisław Ciechanowski,³ and bears the date 23 November 1932. She was awarded the degree of Doctor of Medicine on the grounds of a dissertation on rare cases of death due to tuberculosis of the lymph nodes.⁴

In the same year Janina married the surgeon Jan Kowalczyk, later to become an assistant professor in the Professor Jan Glatzel’s Chair of Surgery of the Jagiellonian University Faculty of Medicine. The couple had three children, Katarzyna, Jan, and Janina Małgorzata. Dr Jan Kowalczyk was a well-known surgeon in Kraków’s medical circles and rendered distinguished service in the local underground resistance movement during the war. He died on 26 April 1958.

Janina started work in Professor Ciechanowski’s Chair of Anatomical Pathology in 1931 and soon built up a reputation as a promising young medical researcher. By 1939 she had published over 30 important papers on the medical sciences in Polish and foreign languages. In 1936–1938 she upgraded her academic and professional qualifications during periods of study abroad in Czechoslovakia, Austria, Germany, France, and Switzerland. In June 1936 the postdoctoral habilitation degree was conferred on her on the grounds of her habilitation dissertation⁵ on local changes and the general condition of patients with an artificially induced neoplasm. She was a lecturer and deputy head of the Chair of Anatomical Pathology. In one of her manuscripts she wrote,

My specialisation is a fairly rare field of research. Somehow the determination of the cause of death by conducting a post-mortem, or using a microscope in a quiet pathology lab to establish whether the patient was suffering from tuberculosis or cancer does not arouse the interest of many followers, and what’s more, it’s not very rewarding financially and calls for many years of work and professional experience. However, anatomical pathology offers you excellent training prospects in the theory and practice of medicine, giving you a good foundation to further your medical education.

Janina Kowalczykowa was in Kraków in September 1939 when the War broke out. On 16 October 1939, not long after military operations ceased, Professor Jan Supniewski, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, issued an official document appointing Dr Kowalczykowa “head and supervisor of the Departments of Forensic Medicine, Clinical Anatomy, and Physical Education and Physiology.” On 6 November 1939 the Germans arrested the male academic staff of Kraków’s universities and colleges in an operation known as Sonderaktion Krakau,⁶ and deported them to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Dr Kowalczykowa was one of the women academics not arrested at this time.⁷ The Jagiellonian University’s Faculty of Medicine started its underground teaching activities. Dr Kowalczykowa kept her status in the (now secret) Department of Anatomical Pathology. During the War under German occupation she worked as a pathologist conducting post-mortems in St. Lazarus’ Hospital, but she also took part in the University’s secret teaching activities, giving classes in anatomical pathology. She and her colleagues tried to protect their department against German attempts to devastate and requisition its property and equipment.

Dr Kowalczykowa employed medical students in the pathology lab and enjoyed their confidence to such an extent that every morning they would exchange the latest news they had heard broadcast by foreign radio stations.⁸ She also joined in the work to distribute the resistance movement’s samizdats, which she hid in her baby daughter’s pram, as we are told by Dr Stanisław Mroziński, who was one of her colleagues at the time and is now an assistant professor of the Pomeranian Medical Academy.

There was a pretty high turnover rate in the German management of St. Lazarus’ Hospital, so they did not pay much attention to the post-mortem lab, which meant that it could be used for a variety of other purposes, including activities which were illegal from the point of view of the German occupying authorities. Eventually, however, Dr Trop, an SS-man, became the hospital’s new director, and took a closer look at the pathology lab and its staff. In January 1943 he notified Dr Kowalczykowa that he would sack all the medical students working in it. Things were getting dangerous. 

A small group of these students continued to keep in touch with Dr Kowalczykowa. Apart from attending her clandestine classes, they also took part in underground resistance operations. Kowalczykowa’s unpublished recollections contain numerous notes on this period. She took these students under her wing like a caring mother and looked after them like the exemplary university teacher she was. She joined them in their resistance activities, trying to keep them from disclosure and falling prey to reprisals. Working conditions in the lab were getting more and more precarious, especially when the German psychopath, alcoholic and notorious sadist Dr Werner Beck⁹ was appointed hospital manager. Beck was responsible for the arrest of many people, including medical students, doctors, Professor Jan Stanisław Olbrycht,¹⁰ and Dr Kowalczykowa. Beck appears in articles published in our journal by Professor Maria Byrdy¹¹ and Professor Bolesław Popielski.¹²

Kowalczykowa conjectured that the reason for her arrest was that she was being observed by the Gestapo, which suspected her of having a patriotic influence on the young people around her and encouraging them to join the resistance movement. In the investigation that followed she was even accused of being die Leiterin des Widerstandes.¹³ The students who worked with her told her that she was being sleuthed by Gestapo agents. After the War she said her students gave her warnings (“today you’re being followed by the agent with the blue scarf, and tomorrow the one in the cloth cap will be on duty”). So she stepped up precautionary measures and took care to keep things that might serve as evidence against her out of her house and workplace, just in case there was a search.

A blue notebook which used to belong to Professor Kowalczykowa and contains scraps of her wartime recollections has a note that she was arrested on 18 January 1943, when two plain-clothes Gestapo men forced their way into her apartment. She was taken to Montelupich prison and put in a small cell. Many fellow inmates, such as Pelagia Żuława of Warsaw, who was using the false name Halina Firkowska and had been transferred from Zakopane, remember her. She made friends with Pelagia and with a Roma woman who was in deep distress because the Germans had taken away her baby, which she was nursing. Kowalczykowa was good at comforting her fellow-prisoners and keeping their spirits up.

In her blue notebook she made a detailed record of the arrival of a Jewish woman, Gustawa (aka Justyna) Draenger in the cell and her behaviour. Gustawa was terrified of being tortured and the consequences of torture, which made her so depressed that during the night she tried to hang herself on the belt of her coat. Luckily, the belt was too short. Later, after Dr Kowalczykowa’s release from Auschwitz, Gustawa, who had managed to avoid being executed by a firing squad at Przegorzały,¹⁴ visited Dr Kowalczykowa at home. Alas, shortly afterwards she was shot by the wall of the Kraków ghetto.

Kowalczykowa gives a vivid account of her time and observations in the Transportzelle (the cell for prisoners due for transportation). A particularly tense atmosphere prevailed in the cell, both for the prisoners as well as for their guards. There was a lot of uncertainty and anxiety, especially as any moment a prisoner could be “snatched,” and either deported to a concentration camp or sent to her death. Only very rarely would the prisoner who was taken away be discharged. During the arduous sanitary inspection and bath prior to transportation, Kowalczykowa happened to meet Dr Franciszek Pochopień, who had been a fellow student during her undergraduate days. He was now working as a doctor in the prison, and helped her by giving her some food from parcels sent to the prison. She was very much in need of extra nourishment because of the oppressive hunger aggravated by the fact that she was pregnant. She wrote the following description of the transportation cell:

It was a large, dingy room in the basement, stuffy and noisy, and overcrowded with women prisoners. It was like the third-class waiting room at a railway station before the departure of a suburban train. . . . Most of the inmates held in the transportation cell were just ordinary women in headscarves, street-market traders. . . . They were victims of Sonderaktion 1943 cordoned off by police and caught in round-ups in the street market, Kraków main station and suburban stations like Borek Fałęcki or Bonarka, or on the busy streets of the city centre, and sent to Germany for slave labour¹⁵ or to a concentration camp.

But what Dr Kowalczykowa found particularly annoying was being held in the company of prostitutes and the vulgar way they treated fellow inmates and guards. She was shocked and appalled by the tragic sanitary conditions in the cell. She wrote that there was an unbearable stink from the excrement spilling out from the overfull slop buckets. The situation prompted conflicts; rows and slanging matches would break out any time, for instance, once there was a fight with a Roma woman who wanted to answer the call of nature into a children’s potty that was used as a food bowl. Kowalczykowa tried to stop such rows. She also gave her fellow-inmates medical advice or assistance, whenever possible. Once she saved an epileptic who was having a fit from injuring her tongue. At first her companions ignored her, but with time she earned their respect and became an authority the inmates of this unruly cell looked up to. In her handwritten recollections she noted,

Hours upon sickening hours of hopeless waiting pass by at a snail’s pace. Evening falls, and there is rising turmoil and noise in the cell, now and again rowdy quarrels break out or a volley of verbal abuse is targeted at women who are utterly incensed already. I look around the room, realising that unless there is some sort of order it will be absolutely impossible to take just a few hours of rest lying down. Women jam-packed in a congested crowd are trying to make their way round the room, bumping into each other all the time. In my university days I had acquired the knack of crowd control at student meetings by modulating my voice and keeping it at exactly the right pitch, not a quarter of a tone stronger than required, which would have only increased the volume of noise, so in less than twenty seconds I get my way. The room falls silent, heads turn in my direction: I’m up on a bench, and in a manner that brooks no defiance, I order them to spread the mattresses out on the floor. There are several disordered stacks of mattresses, which some of the better organised women used during the day to sit or lie on. To each of them I allocate a fair share of sleeping room on the mattresses and then I start prayers and get them all to say the Lord’s Prayer, followed by a Polish Christmas carol, asking them to sing it softly. That was a bad idea, because it reminded them, and even myself, of home, and for a moment stuck in my throat in a ridiculous spasm, but all in all everyone calmed down and the room went quiet.

There were about 170 women in the cell. It was very difficult to put up with the things that went on in such a hornets’ nest. Also there were fleas and other insects to annoy her, as well as air raid alerts and the noise coming from the traffic in the street and prison vehicles arriving, so she hardly ever got a moment’s peace. In addition, there was constant hunger, which could hardly be satisfied by the disgusting prison soup served to them in small portions dealt out hastily into chamber pots.

When the time came to send some of them to a concentration camp, Gestapo men would suddenly barge into the cell to check new arrivals. Kowalczykowa, who spoke German, served as an interpreter and stood up for women who were sick or pregnant, in the false hope of managing to save them from deportation. But nothing could be done once a deportation list had been drawn up and signed. In the prison Kowalczykowa met women she had known before her arrest, such as Helena Fikowa,¹⁶ the dentist Stefania Kordasiewicz,¹⁷ and several other acquaintances.

Prof. Janina Kowalczykowa’s camp photo. Source: Archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Click the image to enlarge.

One day, after about ten days in the Montelupich prison (the women’s department was in the building of the Helcel institution¹⁸), all the inmates of the transportation cell were told to collect up all their “belongings” except for their spoons, bowls, and chamber pots, and hustled out into the corridor. Their names were yelled out and they were made to line up along the corridor; all the while they were being sworn at. The uncertainty reached a climax. The women anticipated they were being sent to Auschwitz. And indeed, in the middle of the night they were put on a train bound for Auschwitz. There were prisoners from Tarnów¹⁹ already on board. They arrived at their destination on 29 January 1943. Kowalczykowa was registered in the camp as No. 32212.

To start with, she and all the others were sent to the sauna. Józefa Leśniewska-Szkodzińska, a fellow prisoner, remembers that sinister episode, and that Dr Kowalczykowa was so exhausted by what she had been through in the prison and during the night on the train that she passed out a couple of times due to the hot temperature in the sauna. For a brief spell Dr Kowalczykowa was a Zugang²⁰ in Block 14, and was later transferred to Block 24,²¹ where she worked as a doctor and looked after sick women. As of 1 May 1943 she was in Block 10²² in Auschwitz I; and as of 1 July 1943 she worked as a histopathologist in the SS Institute of Hygiene at Rajsko.²³ From Rajsko she was taken under an armed escort to the SS headquarters in Kraków.

From the very beginning of her time in the concentration camp, Dr Kowalczykowa had to put up with extremely hard conditions. Block 14, the Zugang block, was overcrowded, with about 900 women of different nationalities in it. It had neither a proper floor nor a ceiling, the roof leaked, and the place was lice-ridden. Prisoners were made to stand for hours on end out of doors in nerve-racking roll calls, and the sinister atmosphere was aggravated by a variety of repressive measures, violence, operations designed to humiliate them, and above all the incessant selections for the gas chamber.²⁴ The shabby prison gear offered no protection against the cold; and the small portions of disgusting, cold, and low-calorie food they got could not stave off their endless hunger. In general, women who fell ill tended to die even before they got to the hospital. 

Block 24, the hospital block, was another nightmare. Kowalczykowa worked there with three Jewish women doctors from Berlin. The fate of the three Jewish doctors shows how bad the conditions in this block were, and emphasises Dr Kowalczykowa’s resilience. She managed to put up with the situation, while the Jewish doctors were less resilient mentally and physically. One of them broke down mentally pretty soon and was sent to her death in a selection, and the other two contracted typhus and died. Kowalczykowa, who had been vaccinated against typhus, caught the disease as well, but it took a much milder course and she pulled through.

In Block 24, Dr Kowalczykowa had about 700 patients, all running high fevers—only those with a temperature over 39^o Centigrade were admitted to the hospital. She was a histopathologist and had not practised in internal medicine, but she had to cope, putting in a lot of effort and having to deal with just about anything. Her patients suffered from a wide variety of diseases, especially the infectious ones, as well as vitamin deficiency, starvation diarrhoea, cachexia etc. The primitive, insanitary conditions, the bitter cold, water shortage, congestion, dirt, stuffiness, the lice and the plague of rats, hunger, the fact that patients’ underwear was never changed, and the utter want of medications and dressings, as well as of ancillary medical staff—all these disadvantages turned the provision of medical treatment into an uphill job or in fact made it hopeless. Turning for help to the German doctors brought no result, because all they were interested in were selections, not improving the conditions in the hospital block, which over and above all this had to take the brutal, inhuman behaviour of the convicted criminals who served as the functionaries managing it. Nonetheless, Dr Kowalczykowa tried to save at least some of her patients by changing or faking diagnoses in the official medical records, or managing to discharge prisoners when a selection was about to start etc. These conditions were sapping her energy at a fast rate, even though she was being helped unofficially by friends and people she knew in Kraków before the War, who were now incarcerated in the men’s camp in Auschwitz I.

Incidentally, an article on Block 24 appeared in the previous issue of Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim. Its author, Dr Irena Białówna,²⁵ was transferred to this block on the day Dr Kowalczykowa was moved to Auschwitz I.

Having been transferred to Block 24 in the fifth month of pregnancy, at the end of her tether with practically no more energy left to look after patients, which she realised was a hopeless task, Dr Kowalczykowa was suddenly offered and decided to accept an appointment in the SS Institute of Hygiene. Dr Bruno Weber,²⁶ the head of the Institute, wanted her to manage the department of histopathology, which was located in Block 10 in Auschwitz I. Weber had heard of Kowalczykowa and her qualifications, because (as she wrote in her recollections) for a certain time he was formally in charge of the infectious diseases ward at St. Lazarus’ Hospital in Kraków. At this time he was redeveloping the Institute of Hygiene.

After a lot of hesitation, Dr Kowalczykowa decided to accept the offer. She knew that there was a high probability she would not live to see the end of the War because she knew too many secrets, especially the most closely guarded ones concerning Block 10,²⁷ and that a time would come when she would be eliminated. Yet she decided to take the job, partly to change her personal situation, but also because she wanted to see for herself what kind of criminal experiments were being carried out there on human victims, so that one day—if she ever got the chance—she could bear witness to the truth. She made the following note in her handwritten recollections,

I stopped in front of the gate to Block 10 with a bundle of “belongings” on my back. . . . The Blitzmädel Aufseherin²⁸ who had escorted me from Birkenau had a key to unlock the gate,²⁹ opened it and pushed me in like a coin into a money box, and then locked it up.

In Block 10 Dr Kowalczykowa had the good luck to be welcomed by supportive fellow-inmates, including Magda Hellinger,³⁰ a friend and formerly block senior of Block 14, and other Jewish women from Birkenau. She was given a cup of hot milk and bread and marmalade that had arrived in a transport of Greek Jews.

Dr Weber sent a couple of other specialists as well as Dr Kowalczykowa to work in Block 10. They included the bacteriologist Dr Ludwik Fleck,³¹ the pathologist Dr Janusz Mąkowski,³² and the chemist Dr Jan Reyman.³³ Weber’s motives for collecting all these specialists to work for him were self-seeking. He heard of most of them from other SS doctors. It was not just a question of his institute’s professional standards. In her recollections of how Weber got her to work in Block 10, Dr Kowalczykowa wrote the following:

Once he had obtained the services of a histopathologist, he could make money on the side from the analytical work I did for him, so he was indispensable and didn’t have to be sent to the front.

Readers will have had the opportunity to learn what Block 10 was used for from numerous publications on the subject, some of which are in the bibliography at the end of this article. One of these items is Dr Kowalczykowa’s account, “Dziesiąty blok. Fragmenty pamiętnika lekarza obozowego w Oświęcimiu,”³⁴ in which she gives a detailed description of the block; the conditions in which she conducted analytics; the life-threatening harassment she got from the SS; her problems with short-sightedness after the loss of her glasses (which happened when she was in Block 24); the atmosphere during firing squad executions conducted in the yard of Block 11, which was next door to Block 10, and the terror people felt when they heard victims shouting, screaming, yelling, and wheezing as they choked to death under torture before being killed at Death Wall; the experiences and conduct of the women prisoners who were human guinea pigs in the experiments, most of which were painful; the good living conditions in Block 10, in contrast to the poverty and squalor of Birkenau; some of the operations performed in the block; and her reflections on medical ethics and how shocked she was when she saw how utterly “dehumanised” the German researchers conducting these experiments were and how they treated the women prisoners they experimented on like guinea pigs. The ethical principles practised by the SS were the exact opposite of those observed outside the concentration camp, for instance, helping people, which is regarded as good in the free world, was bad in the concentration camp, while the general rule in the camp was practice normally considered execrable. 

Kowalczykowa did not lose hope that she would manage to survive, and even that there would be a considerable improvement in her predicament, as she knew that her husband was doing all he could, using all the means possible—writing letters, seeking the protection of VIPs, and offering bribes—to get her out of Auschwitz and back to Kraków, especially as he realised that having the baby in the camp was tantamount to a death sentence for both the mother and the child. Prisoners engaged in the resistance movement in the camp sent urgent messages in their secret letters smuggled out to the resistance units in Kraków to help in the effort to get Kowalczykowa discharged.

Dr Kowalczykowa sent letters to her husband through the official channel, and some of these letters have been preserved. She asked for food parcels and money to buy things in the canteen on the camp’s premises, which would help her to survive. She also asked about the health of her husband, her daughter Kasia, and the family. She was compelled to put the obligatory formulas in her letters and write that she was in good health and doing well, so she couldn’t inform him of her real condition, put in any critical remarks about the camp, or openly urge him to keep trying to get her released.

There is an extant letter dated 2 July 1943 from the Regierung des Generalgouvernements³⁵ to Dr Adam Szebesta,³⁶ head of the Polish Red Cross, concerning Dr Janina Kowalczykowa. The letter says that the chief officer of the German Sicherheitspolizei³⁷ is considering the petition for her release. Amazingly, the efforts to get her out of Auschwitz were successful, and she left the camp on 12 August 1943. That is not to say she was a free woman, only transferred (überstellt) to Kraków. On leaving the camp she still had to work for the SS Institute of Hygiene. She was discharged on condition that she would continue to carry out histopathology tests for Weber.

When Kraków was liberated in 1945,³⁸ Dr Kowalczykowa reported for work at the Jagiellonian University. On 2 February she was registered on the list of academic staff. She was appointed head of the University’s Chair and Department of Anatomical Pathology, as the previous head, Professor Ciechanowski, had retired (he was 77 at the time and in very poor health), while the Department’s junior members of staff had either been killed during the War or had not returned to the city. There were only a few medical students ready to start work as assistants. Dr Kowalczykowa resumed her scientific and teaching duties. In 1948 she was appointed extraordinary professor, and on 1 October 1956 she became a full professor of anatomical pathology. She published a total of 127 scientific papers, some of which were on subjects connected with Auschwitz, including personal recollections. Many of her colleagues in the Department earned the doctor’s degree in medicine, and a few went on to earn the post-doctoral habilitation degree under her supervision.

In 1953–1956 Professor Kowalczykowa was Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at the Kraków Medical Academy,³⁹ and served as Vice-Rector⁴⁰ for the 1956–1959 term of office. She was the national expert for anatomical pathology and served as the chairperson of the Anatomical Pathology Committee in the Polish Academy of Sciences. She also made an active contribution to the work of the Academy’s other committees. She served as President of the Board of the Polish Society of Pathologists⁴¹ and was a member of other Polish and foreign medical societies, as well as of the League of Polish Women⁴² and the Society for Informed Maternity.⁴³ She was the long-standing editor of several medical journals, such as Patologia Polska, Acta Medica Polona, and Przegląd Metodyczny Akademii Medycznej w Krakowie.

After her husband’s death she was left with the additional duty of running the household on her own and bringing up their three children. She remained active to the end of her life, despite the many chronic diseases from which she suffered. Professor Janina Kowalczykowa died on 6 December 1970, at the age of 63. Many prestigious distinctions, such as the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta,⁴⁴ were conferred on her. 

***

Translated from original article: S. Kłodziński, “Prof. dr Janina Komalczykowa.” Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim, 1980.

1. Państwowe Gimnazjum Żeńskie w Krakowie.
2. Szpital św. Łazarza.
3. At the time Prof. Stanisław Kutrzeba (1876–1946), a historian of law, was the Jagiellonian University’s Rector (viz. its head); Prof. Emil Godlewski Jr. (1875–1944), was an embryologist and Dean of the University’s Faculty of Medicine; and Prof. Stanislaw Ciechanowski (1869–1945) held the Chair of Anatomical Pathology and was Janina Kowalczykowa’s tutor.
4. Original title “Rzadkie zejścia gruźlicy wewnętrznych gruczołów chłonnych.”
5. The habilitation is a postdoctoral degree awarded in Poland and other Central European countries to scholars aspiring to continue their academic career after the doctoral stage. The Polish title of Prof. Kowalczykowa’s habilitation dissertation was “Zmiany miejscowe a usposobienie ogólne w nowotworach sztucznie wywołanych.”
6. The Germans arrested 184 persons, most of them senior academics of Kraków’s universities and colleges, and sent them to concentration camps, where over 20 died. Many more died on release after spending 3 winter months or more in German concentration camps. For more on Sonderaktion Krakau see the special edition of the Jagiellonian University magazine Alma Mater (No.178, 2015), available under the link.
7. On invading Poland, the Germans closed down all of the country’s universities and institutions of higher education as well as the secondary schools, leaving only a restricted form of primary and vocational education open to Polish pupils. Polish teachers and academic staff set up an underground system of education, including secret university classes.
8. In German-occupied Poland it was illegal for Poles to have radio sets; if caught, the “offender” was punished by death or deportation to a concentration camp.
9. Dr Werner Beck, one of the organisers of the mass murder of the patients of Kobierzyn mental hospital (Kraków), on 23 June 1942, is believed to have personally killed 30 bedridden patients by administering lethal injections. See Mateusz Szpytma, “Bezużyteczne życie,” Od Września do Norymbergi, Filip Musiał and Jarosław Szarek (eds.), Z archiwów bezpieki – nieznane karty PRL, Vol. 18, Kraków: Ośrodek Myśli Politycznej, 2012, p. 50-57; online at the Instytut Pamięci Narodowej [Institute of National Remembrance] site, available under the link.
10. Jan Stanisław Olbrycht (1886–1968), professor of forensic pathology; see his article on this website, English version “A forensic pathologist’s wartime experience in Poland under Nazi German occupation and after liberation in matters connected with the war.”
11. Maria Byrdy, “Z dzia­łalności identyfikacyjnej pracowników Zakładu Medy­cyny Sądowej w Krakowie podczas okupacji.” Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim. 1971, pp.13-14. See also Jerzy Janica, “Historia Medycyny. Profesor Maria Byrdy – okres krakowski,” Biuletyn – pismo Okręgowej Izby Lekarskiej. 2008(2). Białystok: Okręgowa Rada Lekarska w Białymstoku. Available online under the link.
12. Bolesław Popielski, “Zakład Medycyny-Sądowej Uni­wersytetu Jagiellońskiego podczas okupacji hitlerowskiej.” Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim. 1968: 92–98.
13. German for “leader of the resistance movement.”
14. Gusta Dawidson Draenger, aka Gusta Dawidsohn-Draengerowa, aka Justyna (1917–1943), a member of the Jewish resistance movement in Kraków; her memoirs written in prison were published after the War (see Publications at the end of this article), also in Hebrew and English versions, Dawidson, Gusta. Justina’s Diary (Hebrew). Tel Aviv: 1974; Davidson Draenger, Gusta. Justyna’s Narrative. Translated by Roslyn and David Hirsch. Amherst, Mass.: 1996. The Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, online at https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/draenger-gusta-dawidson.
15. The German authorities occupying Poland caught people who happened to be out on the streets in round-ups and sent them to Germany for slave labour. About 2 million Polish citizens are estimated to have suffered this fate.
16. Helena Fikowa (1903–1943), a school teacher, writer, and editor of a literary magazine. Held left-wing views and was involved in the Polish resistance movement. She and her husband were arrested on 28 October 1942. Arrived in Auschwitz on 28 January 1943 and registered as No. 32151. Died in Auschwitz on 5 June 1943. See Archiwum ofiar terroru nazistowskiego i komunistycznego w Krakowie 1939–1956.
17. Stefania Kordasiewicz, arrested in 1941. See Archiwum ofiar terroru nazistowskiego i komunistycznego w Krakowie 1939–1956.
18. Zakład Helclów—a large 19^th-century old people’s home on the opposite side of the street to the Montelupich prison in Kraków.
19. Tarnów, a town 75 km east of Kraków, with a direct railway connection.
20. Zugang—German term for “new arrival.”
21. Block 24 in the women’s section of Birkenau accommodated the women prisoners’ hospital. See Maria Ciesielska, Szpital obozowy dla kobiet w KL Auschwitz-Birkenau (1942-45), Warszawa: Biblioteka Muzeum medycyny WUM, 2015, p. 52, available online under the link.
22. Block 10 was the place where German physicians carried out criminal experiments on prisoners. See also comment 27.
23. Hygiene Institut der Waffen SS Raisko was a sub-camp located in the village of Rajsko, about 3 km away from the main camp of Auschwitz, adjoining an SS agricultural estate.
24. In German concentration camps “selection” meant the short-listing of prisoners for death, either in the gas chambers or by lethal injection.
25. Białówna’s article, “Z historii rewiru w Brzezince” [Episodes from the history of the prisoners’ hospital In Birkenau] was published on p. 164-175 of the 1979 edition of Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim (the Polish version is available on this website). Dr Białówna’s biography is available in English under the link.
26. SS-Hauptsturmführer Bruno Weber (1915–1956), physician and bacteriologist head of the Raisko Institute of Hygiene; conducted criminal experiments involving psycho-tropic drugs on prisoners, and took part in selections on the ramp. After the war and investigation was conducted against him but he was never prosecuted.
27. Block 10 was the place where criminal experiments were conducted by on women prisoners. See the biography of Dr Adelaide Hautval and Maria Ciesielska, “Experimental Block No. 10 in Auschwitz,” Medical Review Auschwitz: Medicine Behind the Barbed Wire. Conference Proceedings 2018, p. 59–76; available online under the link.
28. Blitzmädel—member of a Nazi German girls’ organisation; Aufseherin—German term for a female prison guard.
29. Block 10 was walled off from other parts of Auschwitz I.
30. Magda Hellinger (b. 1916-?), a Jewish woman from Slovakia, was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942 and survived. See https://snaccooperative.org/ark:/99166/w6gj0n2f and https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/id-card/magda-hellinger.
31. Ludwik Fleck (1896–1961), a Polish Jew, philosopher and professor of microbiology at the University of Lwów in pre-war Poland; worked with Rudolf Weigl producing typhus vaccines, which helped him to survive the War and confinement in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. After the War he returned to Poland and eventually emigrated to Israel. See Maria Ciesielska, “Ludwick Fleck - profesor mikrobiologii i filozof (1896-1961)”. See also http://www.ludwik-fleck-kreis.org.
32. See Maria Ciesielska, Szpital obozowy dla kobiet w KL Auschwitz-Birkenau (1942-45), Warszawa: Biblioteka Muzeum medycyny WUM, 2015, p.52. Available online under the link, p. 20 and 33; Dr Mąkowski is mentioned as a physician who saved lives in Auschwitz, in a book by the Polish novelist Zofia Posmysz, a survivor. Cf. http://koczowniczkablog.blogspot.com/2016/08/zofia-posmysz-ten-sam-doktor-m.html.
33. Dr Jan Reyman (1902–1984), Polish chemist and footballer, Auschwitz survivor. Deported in 1942, he worked in the SS Institute of Hygiene. Testified as a witness before the Polish Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes. Cf. Zapisy terroru (Chronicles of Terror), online at https://www.zapisyterroru.pl/.
34. “Block Ten: Passages from an Auschwitz prisoner-doctor’s memoirs.” The original article was published in Nauka i Sztuka, 1948; 4 (9), pp. 80–90.
35. Das Regierung des Generalgouvernements—the government of the part of the German-occupied territories of Poland known as the Generalgouvernement, i.e. the areas not directly incorporated in Germany but left to operate separately under a German administration headed by Hans Frank.
36. Dr Adam Szebesta (aka Schebesta, 1893–1973), neurologist and social campaigner; veteran of the 1939 defensive campaign against the German invasion of Poland, subsequently arrested by the Germans, but as of 1940 a senior official of the Kraków division of the Polish Red Cross, one of the very few Polish social institutions the Germans allowed to continue activities. Organised aid for Polish civilians and prisoners held in German jails. See http://pck.malopolska.pl/dr-adam-schebesta-szebesta/.
37. The German security police.
38. 18 January 1945.
39. In 1950 all the medical faculties in Poland were separated from their parent university and re-established as independent entities. In 1993, after the fall of the Communist regime, the Kraków Medical Academy was reincorporated in its alma mater and is now known as the Jagiellonian University Medical College.
40. The head of most the Polish universities and colleges is known as its rector, and the rector’s deputies are known as vice-rectors.
41. At the time the Society’s Polish name was Polskie Towarzystwo Anatomopatologów. Cf. http://pol-pat.pl/index.php/historia-ptpat/.
42. Liga Kobiet Polskich.
43. Founded in 1957 as Towarzystwo Świadomego Macierzyństwa, now known as Towarzystwo Rozwoju Rodziny (the Society for the Advancement of the Family).
44. Krzyż Komandorski Orderu Odrodzenia Polski.

Notes by Teresa Bałuk-Ulewiczowa, Head Translator for the Medical Review Auschwitz project.

      

A publication funded in 2020–2021 within the DIALOG Program of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education in Poland.