The women’s hospital at Auschwitz-Birkenau

After long months of confinement in the Montelupich prison in Kraków and in Tarnów prison, the first transport of 127 Polish female prisoners arrived in the Auschwitz main camp, the so-called Stammlager, on 27 April 1942. They were given camp numbers from 6784 to 6904, as there were already German and Slovak women prisoners in Auschwitz.

Before being accommodated in Block 8, the newcomers experienced their first camp shock in Block 1—they were ordered to strip naked and leave all their clothes, then they had to go in the “mikveh,”¹ i.e. a bath full of dirty water, and present to a Slovak prisoner-doctor to be inspected. After registration they received underwear, summer camp gear, wooden clogs, and a headscarf. As a result of wearing summer gear and having already lost their physical and mental immunity during their previous imprisonment, they started to catch various diseases and developed a fever. Only exceptionally would a sick inmate be allowed to stay in the block during the day; most of them, even those with a high temperature, had to go out to do a heavy, exhausting outdoor job.

In June 1942, some prisoners were admitted to the camp hospital, in Block 3 or a newly built barrack.

For a short time in the first days of June, one of the female prisoners went missing, so all the Polish women had their heads shaved, and some of them were sent to the Strafkommando (penal commando) in the Budy sub-camp;² on 12–13 August 1942, the remaining group was transferred to Birkenau Camp A. On the way there, those in the group who were sick and weak were killed.

The Polish women sent to Budy were accommodated in the attic of the farmhouse and in a room in the local school. They were forced to work in the fields, clearing ponds and reaping hay. Dredging fish ponds was extremely exhausting and brought on various diseases. Many a time they had to work standing up to their shoulders in water. Moreover, there were very few food bowls in the camp and they were not properly washed, which was one of the reasons why inmates got Durchfall (bloody diarrhoea).

It was very risky to admit you were sick, so you had no choice but to go out to work. You could count on fellow-inmates’ friendly help and hide behind a haystack, in a furrow next to the weeds or behind a row of reeds on the bank of the pond, which could bring you some relief.

On the night of 14 August 1942, the Polish women were sent away from Budy to Block 1 of Camp A in Birkenau.

The Birkenau blocks had been built with bricks and mud by Russian POWs. Inside there were triple bunk beds called koje, “berths,” in the camp jargon, and the space that was enough to serve as a stall for a horse had to accommodate 15–18 prisoners.

If you had the lowest berth, you had to crawl into it on all fours and stay huddled up or lie down all the time. The middle berth was so high up that it took a lot of gymnastics to get there. It was even more difficult to climb up to the top berth, but at least you could sit comfortably in its front part, because its back touched the roof.

Each berth housed five or six prisoners who had to lie still, as moving around would have been extremely difficult.

Lighting: the only light we had came in through tiny windows; there were also candles that prisoners managed to smuggle in; in early 1943, there were just one or two light bulbs in the entire barrack.

There was no proper flooring, just a dirt floor. The barrack was bug-infested and inmates had lice.

In August, September and October 1942, the hospital consisted of Blocks 23 and 24, the Schonungsblock (a preventive block);³ Block 26 accommodated mothers with children, and Block 25 was designed as an extermination facility and Leichenhalle (mortuary). All the other blocks were prisoners’ barracks and utility buildings.

Up to that time, there were no female prisoner-doctors. Sanitary care was provided by a German civilian midwife called Schwester Klara⁴ and her assistants, nurses (Pflegers) and cleaners who were prisoners, as well as “asocial” German and Slovak inmates, who had a black triangle badge denoting their status on their prison gear.

The hospital barracks did not differ much from the prisoners’ blocks except that before they had been used as horse stables. The horse boxes were dismantled. They were lit by narrow windows high up, just under the roof.

Initially, there was no electric light in the barracks; later one or two bulbs were installed for the entire barrack. The heating was provided by a heater running along the middle the barrack. It was built of bricks and had two chimney chutes running along its entire length, with a hearth at either end, i.e.at the front and rear of the barrack. The prisoners had to use their wits to “organise”⁵ enough coal to heat the barrack. The barracks were fitted with wooden “berths” and the mattresses and blankets were extremely filthy.

There were only four Scheisskübel (latrine buckets). The dirt floor was always wet and slimy with spilled excrement. In addition, there was no running water; again the inmates had to “organise” water by bringing it from the kitchen in whatever containers they had; later water was delivered in barrels, but there was never enough.

Treatment was limited to lying in bed. The nurses and cleaners provided only a small amount of care. Dr Stefania Kościuszkowa⁶ was the first to do the Nachtwache (night duty). Actually, she worked as a cleaner since at the time Polish prisoner-doctors were not allowed to work as medical professionals. Dr Janina Węgierska was admitted to the hospital after being beaten for attempting to examine fellow-inmates.

On 16 September 1942, a selection of patients was made during the general roll-call. Those selected were sent in Block 27 for further assessmentand dispatch, either to the hospital or the gas chamber.

The first wave of epidemic typhus broke out in late September 1942. At first, the disease was thought to be fluor malaria. One of the sources of the mass scale of lice infestation was the Entläusungskammer (delousing chamber). The prisoners who worked there had to examine and sort the clothes left by Jewish prisoners, and afterwards dispose of them in the Gaskammer (incinerator).⁷ The clothes collected in the barrack were full of lice. As the number of typhus cases escalated, the hospital admitted more and more patients. The following doctors and nurses from the men’s hospital were ordered to help in our block: Dr Rożkowski, Dr Kotulski, Dr Zbożeń, Dr Jerzy Reichman, Anicet Włodarski, Julian Kiwała, Zbigniew Rybka, the Czechoslovak nurse Luba and Roman Gabryszewski. They stayed for a very short time, only to diagnose the disease, perform minor procedures, apply dressings and distribute basic drugs, such as aspirin, Tannalbin⁸ and charcoal, smuggled in at a considerable risk. The block leaders allocated official, very small amounts of lignin cellulose tissue, paper bands used as bandages, strips of gauze, medicinal clay ointment and potassium permanganate.

Patients went for weeks without being washed. The shortage of water and Durchfall (acute diarrhoea) were a major source of distress for those suffering from typhus. They could quench their thirst (partly and at the expense of healthy prisoners) with the help of other inmates working in the kitchen and in the family barracks. Patients made wet compresses in a primitive way, using a headscarf and their own urine.

The hospital blocks, which were designed to accommodate 200–250 patients, held 600–800, and sometimes even more patients. The peak figures for typhus occurred in December 1942, June 1943 and December 1943. Patients had to share bedding: three or four to a narrow bunk; four to a bottom bunk, three to a middle bunk, and two to a top bunk.

It was not until 1 February 1945 that women prisoner-doctors who had just arrived at the camp were sent to the hospital. Dr Zdena Nedvédová from Czechoslovakia, Dr Ernestyna Michalikowa; Dr Janina Węgierska and Prof. Janina Kowalczykowa⁹ were now officially allowed to work in the hospital. This was the time when the male prisoner-doctors stopped coming in from the men’s camp. Also the German “asocials” (prostitutes) stopped doing nursing duties in the women’s hospital because they were accused of abusing patients and theft. Polish and Yugoslav women as well as inmates of other nationalities took over as nurses.

Admissions were conducted in the dispensary by German inmates Orli Reichert¹⁰ and Gerda Schneider, and the Slovak Enna Weiss,¹¹ some non-medical staff, or the Lagerarzt (the SS doctor; the appointment was successively held by Bruno Kitt, Fritz Klein, Hans Wilhelm König, Werner Rohde, and Josef Mengele).¹²

Prisoners with a temperature under 38°C were not admitted to the hospital. So those inmates who were ill hid in the barracks during the day, with the knowledge of, and protected by the Stubendienst (the prisoner responsible for the maintenance of the block), but they had to appear at roll calls. As they received no treatment, the mortality rate rose rapidly.

More and more Polish female prisoner-doctors arrived in the camp and gradually they took over in the hospital; in March 1943 they were appointed to admissions.

The hospital was so busy and overcrowded that it was not divided up into separate wards. Besides epidemic typhus there were cases of typhoid fever, dysentery, severe angina, pneumonia, sporadic cases of diphtheria, scarlet fever, arthritis, ear infections, second and third degree frostbite, scabies as well as pediculosis (lice infestation). In addition, there were cases of diarrhoea and pemphigus.

The general appearance of the hospital barrack was dreadful. Drowsy patients sitting on the beds—naturally those who had the strength to sit—searching for lice and other insects and crushing them with their fingernails or against the bed.

Whenever possible, patients were segregated and those with the same condition were put in the same room, for example, the “diarrhoea room” was a smelly corner of the barrack, poorly lit by the solitary light bulb in the middle of the barrack. The women in that corner turned into Muselmänner;¹³ their lips had a white cake of Bolus alba (medicinal clay) on them and, if they had any strength left, they would be drinking potassium permanganate solution.¹⁴

The rats were a terrible plague in the hospital. At night not only did they gnaw the corpses piled next to the door of the barrack, but they also climbed into the top bunks and bit into the buttocks, noses or limbs of very sick patients.

The first Entläusung (delousing project) was carried out on 6 December 1942 on the premises of Camp B in the men’s camp. Its real purpose was not disinfection but a kind of “natural selection” of female prisoners. First their clothes were put on hangers and sent to the Gaskammer. They returned still damp, full of lice, and the tags with their prison numbers were missing. Male prisoners shaved the women’s heads, and then the women were sent to the steam room. Next, with faces bloodshot and sweating because of the heat, they were driven into a shower room with a concrete floor and no window panes. They were doused with some sort of disinfectant, had to put on their still wet clothes, and wait for a long time to get back to their apparently “clean” blocks. That was when the Jewish women still in the camp were selected for the gas chambers. Such delousing activities carried out on the first day with sub-zero temperatures resulted in vast numbers catching colds, pneumonia, pleurisy or TB. The second Entläusung was carried out in July 1943. Sick women prisoners were washed in tubs in front of the barracks—at least 50 patients bathed one after another in the same bathwater. They had to take off their prison gear before bathing and returned to their barracks in their underwear. The hospital staff were told to strip and escorted naked through the camp to the Sauna.¹⁵

A second outbreak of typhus came in December 1943 and affected the female SS guards and deputy commandants, which forced the camp doctor to take systematic preventive anti-epidemic measures.

On his orders, prisoners had to leave their barracks for disinfection, and bags saturated with some sort of special disinfectant were applied to the mattresses and blankets, which quickly killed the insects.

Initially, the prisoner-doctors and nurses faced an extremely hard task. None of the newly admitted patients was fully aware of how little the hospital could do for them, so they were disappointed. They expected the hospital to be just like the hospitals they had seen before their imprisonment, or at least to have some sort of a surrogate for a hospital.

Besides medical care, the nurses had to bring in the meals three times a day, take the latrine buckets out to the sewer pit, and dispose of the corpses in the truck outside the hospital block. Whenever there was a rise in mortality, they had to take the corpses to the mortuary in Block 25. It was not until 1944 that conditions improved slightly: the barracks got brick floors, which made them easier to keep clean. However, there was a water shortage for the whole of my time in Camp A, despite the fact that each barrack had a separate area designated for washing and toilet facilities. Earthenware water troughs and toilets were installed, but prisoners were allowed to use them only for about four days, after which time the latrine buckets were back again.

The prisoner-doctors earned their fellows’ trust thanks to their attitude, work, medical skills and experience, and solidarity. They reorganised work in the hospital and finally set up special wards: one for tuberculosis patients, one for other infectious diseases, two for internal diseases, one for surgery, one for gynaecology and obstetrics, a children’s unit, a room for diarrhoea patients, a Schonungsblock for convalescents, a dispensary and admissions room, and a staff room.

Polish prisoners from the men’s camp smuggled various medications into the hospital.

On the pretext of improving patient mobility, Dr Władysława Jasińska was given permission to use an X-ray apparatus, which let the doctors provide better diagnoses and treatment. In addition, they managed to obtain dietary food for the patients.

The prisoner-doctors and orderlies did their best to save lives, which were under a constant threat from the SS doctors and their strict and ruthless orders. To keep patients in care for longer, they transferred them from one block to another for further treatment. Also, they managed to hide those inmates whose lives were endangered, keeping their full medical records; in return such prisoners would do the night shift, though of course it was risky both for the doctors in charge of the block and the staff.

In July 1944, the Germans started to evacuate prisoners along with some of the prisoner-doctors and auxiliary staff to Germany.

In late November 1944, all of Camp A and Camp B were moved to the Roma Family Camp, which was left vacant after all the Romani prisoners had been gassed. The hospital was transferred to Camp B2.

On 18–20 January 1945, as the front was approaching, the Germans began to close the camp down. On the night of the 17^th–18^th, they ordered the hospital staff to hand over all the medical records, which gave rise to a tense atmosphere. Patients knew that the Majdanek camp had been set on fire before it was closed down,¹⁶ so they were desperate to escape. They cut up their blankets to make clothes, backpacks and slippers to be ready to leave.

Two trains carrying patients left on the night of the 17^th and in the morning of the 18^th. The next night the nearby Effektenblöcke (warehouses for prisoners’ personal property) were set on fire, and the water and power supply were cut off. Only patients with the most serious conditions, children, and a few volunteer staff were left in the camp. The same happened in the men’s sector.

At last the Soviet army arrived. Sadly, mortality was very high in the last few days before liberation.

Today I can compare the activities of prisoner-doctors, nurses and orderlies in the concentration camp with the work of medical professionals in normal hospitals.

As an experienced specialist, I fully appreciate their enormous efforts as well as their truly dedicated and selfless work. Their attitudes and activities were a form of resistance movement; they did not grasp for power and had no political ambitions of the kind some doctors have nowadays.

In those extremely difficult and primitive conditions, the Polish prisoner-doctors transformed two terrible hospital barracks into ten specialist wards and also trained their auxiliary staff.

The following persons deserve at least a mention [for some of those mentioned, their biographies, originally published in Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim, have already been translated and published on this website; follow the links to read them—Website Editor’s note]: 1) Dr Stefania Kościuszkowa, 2) Dr Ernestyna Michalikowa, 3) Dr Maria Werkenthin, 4) Dr Irena Białówna, 5) Dr Celina Chojnacka, 6) Dr Zofia Garlicka, 7) Dr Jadwiga Jasielska, 8) Dr Władysława Jasińska, 9) Dr Jadwiga Kobierska, 10) Dr Irena Konieczna, 11) Dr Janina Kościuszkowa, 12) Prof. Janina Kowalczykowa, 13) Dr Katarzyna Łaniewska, 14) Dr Wanda Perzanowska,¹⁷ 15) Dr Wanda Tarkowska, 16) Dr Alina Tetmajer, and 17) Dr Janina Węgierska.

Sadly, I can’t recall the names of a few other persons.

***

Translated from original article: M. Nowakowska, “«Szpital kobiecy» w obozie w Oświęcimiu-Brzezince.” Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim, 1961.

Notes

The academic value of the article lies in the fact that it presents one of the early stages of research into the women’s hospital in Birkenau. Apart from the significance of the article as a historical source, it should be noted that a number of inaccuracies can be found in the text, and that due to the passage of time it is relatively rarely cited in present-day studies.^a

1. In fact, a mikveh is a bath used in Judaism to achieve ritual purity.^b
2. A sub-camp of Auschwitz located at a farm set up on agricultural land covering the localities of Budy, Bór, and, in part, Nazieleniec near Brzeszcze. In various periods, a men’s camp, women’s camp, and the women’s penal company functioned there.^b
3. A Schonungsblock housed prisoners with minor illnesses and convalescents.^b
4. In the Nazi German concentration camps prisoners regarded as “asocial” or “work-shy” wore a black triangle. Schwester Klara was a midwife convicted for infanticide and sent to Auschwitz.^b
5. In the concentration camp jargon, to “organise” something meant to procure it by fair means or foul (usually by stealing it).^c
6. Not to be confused with her sister-in-law, Dr Janina Kościuszkowa, who was also an inmate of Auschwitz-Birkenau. See the English version of Dr Janina Kościuszkowa’s biography on this website.^b
7. On arrival at the ramp, Jewish prisoners had to strip and leave their clothes and belongings behind before being killed in the gas chamber. Later their belongings were searched by a commando of prisoners who had to look for gold and other valuables concealed in the discarded items. The valuables were then stored in the Kanada warehouses, while the discarded items were incinerated in a special facility. The SS guards shot any prisoner caught stealing anything from the piles of discarded clothing. For more information and a bibliography, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanada_warehouses,_Auschwitz.^c
8. Like medicinal charcoal, Tannalbin is an anti-diarrhoeal drug.^c
9. For more information on these women doctors, see Maria Ciesielska, Szpital obozowy dlakobiet w KL Auschwitz-Birkenau (1942-1945), Warszawa: WUM, 2015, availablr online under the link.^c
10. Orli Reichert-Wald (1914–1962), a German Communist and anti-Nazi imprisoned in Auschwitz. See https://www.fembio.org/english/biography.php/woman/biography/orli-wald-reichert.^c
11. See Maria Ciesielska, Szpital obozowy . . ., p.17.^c
12. SS doctors who served as chief physicians in the camp hospitals included Max Popiersch, Siegfried Schwela, Oskar Dienstbach, Kurt Uhlenbroock, and Eduard Wirths in the Auschwitz main camp; Erwin von Helmersen, Heinz Thilo, and Rudolf Horstmann in the Birkenau men’scamp; and Werner Rohde, Fritz Klein, and Hans Wilhelm König in the Birkenau women’s camp. Josef Mengele started out as the chief physician in the Zigeunerlager (Roma family camp), and ended up in charge of all the hospitals and infirmaries in Birkenau. For the list of Nazi doctors see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nazi_doctors#K.^b
13. Muselmann (pl. Muselmänner), “Muslim.” In the Auschwitz prisoners’ jargon, “Muslims” were prisoners whose physical and mental condition had deteriorated so much that they were on the verge of death. See Z.J. Ryn, “The rhythm of death in the concentration camp” (the subchapter on “The death of a Muselmann”) on this website.^c
14. Bolus alba was used as an anti-diarrhoea medication, and potassium permanganate to treat skin infections.^c
15. The Sauna was the main bath-house of Auschwitz; the facility in this passage is presumably the sauna in Birkenau. Cf. http://auschwitz.org/en/type-of-publication/the-architecture-of-crime-thecentral-camp-sauna-in-auschwitz-ii-birkenau,10.htm.^c
16. Majdanek (KL Lublin), which was about 400 km (250 miles) east of the Auschwitz site, was evacuated in April 1944, when the Soviet offensive was approaching the camp. In the summer of 1944 the Red Army stopped and did not continue its offensive until January 1945, when the Germans set about finalising the evacuation of Auschwitz. See http://www.majdanek.eu/en/history.^c
17. Dr Stefania Perzanowska. See Marta Grudzińska, “Dr Stefania Perzanowska, founder of the women prisoners’ hospital at Majdanek concentration camp,” Medical Review Auschwitz: Medicine Behind the Barbed Wire, Conference Proceedings 2019. Kraków: Polski Instytut Evidence Based Medicine, 2020, p. 91-104 (available online under the link).^c

a—general introductory note courtesy of Teresa Wontor-Cichy, Expert Consultant for the Medical Review Auschwitz project; b—notes my Maria Kantor, the translator of the article; c—notes by Teresa Bałuk-Ulewiczowa, Head Translator for thr Medical Review Auschwitz project.