In memoriam Jan Olbrycht

As time goes by, the memory of distinguished scholars fades away, and public awareness of their achievements grows fainter, which is of course unwarranted in view of the enduring values of their legacy. Professor Jan Olbrycht, a survivor of Auschwitz (prison no. 44688) and Mauthausen (prison no. 118152), was one of those outstanding personalities whose interests and work were strictly connected with the subjects addressed in this journal. We have published four papers by him;¹ we re-issued two of his expert opinions on health matters in the Generalgouvernement² (1963), and in Auschwitz (1962), and two accounts (a longer one, 1968, and a shorter one, 1965) of his life in Kraków under German occupation and in the German concentration camps. I would like to recall these invaluable tokens of Professor Olbrycht’s activities, drawing attention to the methodology he employed in his work as a forensic expert and making use of my personal recollections of working with him.³

Prof. Jan Olbrycht acting as a forensic medicine expert during a court trial. Source: The National Digital Archives of Poland. Click the image to enlarge.

I have had the good fortune to work with three of the leading lights in Polish medicine—Professors Maksymilian Rutkowski and Antoni Kępiński (the latter belatedly acknowledged for his achievements), and Jan Stanisław Olbrycht, the third in this group worthy of enduring remembrance. Recalling the times I spent with Professor Olbrycht, my remarks will inevitably stray into my own, very personal, oftentimes intimate reminiscences. Therefore I beg forgiveness if here and there, unwittingly, I fail to steer clear of subjective reflection.

Let me turn the clock back into the remote past, well over half a century. It was 1926 when our paths first crossed. I was a fourth-year student of medicine writing my first scientific paper and experiencing an exalted kind of Weltschmerz. Of course, many a young student goes through this sort of psychological weakness. That was when—I don’t know why—I asked to see Olbrycht for a talk. At the young age of 40, he had been holding a professorship (the second chair of forensic medicine in our faculty alongside Professor Wachholz’s chair) for three years already. Feeling a bit confused, I apologised for being so bold as to come to him with my personal problems. He gave me a short answer, “That’s what I’m here for.” His straightforward, considerate response swept away my nervousness—for of course people don’t become professors of forensic medicine just to listen to the confessions of an immature student—and it sowed the seeds for a long, never ruffled friendship that grew deeper and lasted over 40 years, and for collaboration that became closer and closer as time went on.

The work we did together involved drawing up forensic opinions for three types of court proceedings: criminal cases, civil cases, and cases concerning accidents in which we were asked for an expert opinion by the local regional court handling insurance claims, or by the Social Insurance Tribunal⁴ acting as a court of appeal. Some of the highly important and top-priority criminal cases were those against physicians charged with professional error of judgement or negligence, where the doctor’s honour and reputation, and perhaps his freedom were at stake.

When he was young, Olbrycht spent a lot of time working as a clinician, also in surgery, combining theory with clinical practice. For of course, forensic science spans all the disciplines of medicine; it is grounded in them, it draws its excitement and sap of life from them, and skilfully brings them together with the complex language of the law. Only a forensic scientist who is familiar with the arcana of surgical or gynaecological practice will be able to appreciate the particular circumstances and problems that faced the physician at the start of his work; he will evaluate them ex ante, avoiding an unwarranted judgement ex post delivered from his desk once everything, or almost everything, is clear and self-evident. Almost everything, because sometimes it happens, even when reviewing the matter ex post, even after the post-mortem, that there are still some things which have not been fully clarified.

The expert may neither act on behalf of the defendant, nor support the prosecution, as Olbrycht used to say. Hence, there will never come a time when everybody will be pleased with him. He should make a true and fair judgement, solely on the grounds of the objective facts, but supported by an appreciation of the specific aspects of the physician’s work. Only young and inexperienced forensic experts will straightaway rush to cast the first stone for errors of medical judgement and inappropriate treatment resulting from misdiagnosis.

Olbrycht went deep into the heart of the matter: what was relevant was not whether the doctor had committed an error of judgement in his diagnosis and consequently applied the wrong treatment, but whether he had been sufficiently diligent and painstaking, shown sufficient concern for the well-being of the patient entrusted to his care, and whether he had used all the resources available to help him arrive at the right diagnosis. Man is a fallible creature, and unfortunately medical science is limited by strictly defined bounds. Misdiagnosis can happen to anyone, and even the most experienced will sometimes come up against cases which they cannot unravel, especially if untypical symptoms come into play.

We put forward a postulate that judges’ benches handing down verdicts in proceedings concerning medical errors should be familiar with the practical aspects of clinical and hospital work. One day, the surgical clinic of which I had the honour of being head was visited by members of the general and voivodeship⁵ prosecution in connection with a case involving a foreign body left in a patient’s abdominal cavity during an operation in another hospital. I had the opportunity to show them how easy it was during a complicated operation for a foreign body, for example a piece of gauze, to go unnoticed and vanish in a patient’s abdominal cavity, even though the surgical team had taken the utmost care. However, whenever it turned out that a doctor had been negligent about the care of his patient, or that he had proved himself absolutely ignorant by failing to follow the basic principles of the art and science of medicine—at such times Olbrycht accepted no excuses. The overwhelming majority of cases handled by a prosecutor, and even those that led to court proceedings, did not show that the doctor concerned had committed professional negligence, as the phenomenon is still (albeit unfairly) called. But there are many cases which involve a lapse in the physician’s moral and ethical duty regarding the diligence and thoroughness of his professional conduct. We paid special attention to this point, which made Olbrycht’s expert opinions a genuine school of medical deontology.

So we tried to avoid using the expression “medical malpractice.” Article 419 of the Polish Civil Code of 23 April 1964 laid down an extremely progressive principle. It says, “In a case where, under the provisions of this title, the State Treasury is not liable for damages due to harm or injury caused by a state official in the course of carrying out his duty, the injured party may still claim full or partial compensation from the State Treasury for his loss, if he sustained a bodily injury, or if his health was impaired, or if he lost his provider, whenever in the given circumstances, particularly on account of his difficult material situation, the rules of social coexistence and community life call for such redress.” The rather complicated legal language of this article says that if a serious impairment has been caused as a result of medical practice but was not due to anybody’s fault; in other words, if there is a cause-and-effect relationship between the injury and the doctor’s work, but the doctor cannot be blamed and therefore is not liable, the injured party may still claim compensation from the Polish State Treasury if the rules of propriety and social decorum require such redress. This principle is truly progressive.

In the interwar period (1918-1939) expert opinions in criminal proceedings against doctors were issued jointly by all the members of the Medical Faculty.⁶ A forensic committee would be appointed, which issued its opinion following a discussion of the case. The Faculty Council passed a resolution approving the opinion, which would then be signed by the Dean of the Faculty. In the interwar period, the members of the forensic committee for cases concerning surgery were Maksymilian Rutkowski and Jan Olbrycht. I was interested in such matters and wrote up their opinions. The procedure changed in 1954, under the People’s Republic of Poland. Forensic opinions are now issued by the forensic medicine departments of the medical academies,⁷ which appoint experts to draw up these opinions. So forensic opinions are not as anonymous as they used to be; they are signed by the persons who drew them up. Opinions issued by the Medical Faculty in Kraków have earned an excellent reputation and have become well-nigh incontrovertible. Not surprisingly, courts from all over the country have been asking for Kraków’s opinion on a variety of very difficult cases.

In the 1950s, in connection with a case concerning malpractice involving blood transfusion, we asked Jerzy Sztachelski,⁸ who was the Minister of Health at the time, to issue an instruction to regulate the state of affairs in which the turn of events had put us. It was a period of turbulent growth of the blood transfusion service and was marked by many other shortcomings. Instruction No. 31/60 issued by the Minister of Health, on the administration of intravenous blood transfusion by the injection and drip techniques, using conserved blood and blood derivatives, to be performed by nurses and midwives, was published on 27 June 1960. The instruction sanctioned the existing state of affairs, i.e. the right of nurses to perform blood transfusions, but it defined a specific framework of provisions regulating the procedure.

In 1962 we sent a joint letter to Minister Sztachelski in connection with a rising number of inquiries against doctors for sending patients with head injuries under the influence of alcohol home or to a sobering-up station.⁹ We asked him to remind doctors of the need to examine such persons and keep them under observation in hospital for over ten hours, because the symptoms of alcohol abuse were likely to be superimposed on, and camouflage symptoms of brain damage due to the injury. The Minister gave a prompt response and published our letter in the medical weekly Służba Zdrowia (1962: 44, 3). After our letter, which the same magazine published again a year later (1963: 38, 4), there was a significant reduction in such cases against doctors, despite the rising number of motor vehicles and the spread of alcoholism.

Forensic opinions issued by the Kraków Department of Forensic Medicine continue to enjoy a good reputation, and I hope that it will keep up its fine tradition and consider this aspect of its broad range of activities one of its most important and splendid duties.

Contested claims for a disability pension following an accident constituted a separate category of the matters we handled. Cases of this kind were referred to us by the regional courts handling social insurance claims, chiefly from the Upper Silesian part of what was the Voivodeship of Silesia at the time, and from the court of appeal, that is the Social Insurance Tribunal.

We were required to determine the relationship not only between an injury and its after-effects, but also between accidents at work and a variety of diseases. Many of these cases were extremely difficult. There are many diseases the causes of which have not been established, yet we were expected to say whether there was a cause-and-effect relationship between the disease and the injury. It will be enough to consider cancer to realise the enormous challenge this presents for an expert adjudicating a given case. We compiled a set of guidelines for a strategy of cause-and-effect reasoning. This is hardly the place to go into the extremely interesting problem of defining cause in the philosophical, scientific, or legal sense, which is very important in the definition of the cause-and-effect relationship. Another aspect I have to skip here is the question of probability, or high probability on the one hand, and on the other hand too small a possibility of a cause-and-effect relation to be taken into account in an expert opinion. In our opinions we kept our line of reasoning as simple as possible, but our argumentation had to be logical and convincing. We never attempted to rationalise insurmountable problems. In such cases, we made it quite clear that at the current stage of scientific knowledge, there was no explanation for the phenomenon. The judicial authorities did not like such a pronouncement, and quite naturally wanted to get a cut–and–dried answer. Our opinions were published in the social insurance monthly Przegląd Ubezpieczeń Społecznych.

Presumably, and largely thanks to the fact that over the many years of our work together, Professor Olbrycht and I developed an astonishingly congruent pattern of thinking and reasoning (we found this astonishing ourselves)—now, in my recollections of those times and recalling specific cases, I have found it much easier to fathom Professor Olbrycht’s methodology. In this short memorial my observations on his methodology correlate with the next issue I wish to address—our work together on the editing of the first issues of Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim.

The violent caesura of the Second World War devastated Poland biologically and materially. In 1942 Werner Beck,¹⁰ the Nazi German head of the Kraków Forensic Department, had Professor Olbrycht arrested. Beck found Professor Olbrycht inconvenient, especially as he had escaped deportation to Sachsenhausen concentration camp during the notorious Sonderaktion Krakau¹¹ operation on 6 November 1939 because he was indispensable (Byrdy, 1971; Popielski, 1969). Olbrycht spent three years of ordeal in Auschwitz–Birkenau, and subsequently, after the evacuation of Auschwitz in January 1945, in Mauthausem concentration camp. On his return to Kraków in June 1845, he promptly restored and organised the department, which the Germans had ransacked, and assumed the duty of conducting forensic opinions for the needs of the entire country, especially for the Polish Supreme Tribunal in the trials of Ludwig Fischer, the former Nazi German governor of Warsaw;¹² Josef Bühler,¹³ state secretary of the administration of the Generalgouvernement; and of the SS staff of Auschwitz. In this branch of his activities, Olbrycht worked with Judge Jan Sehn (Kieta).

Olbrycht was appointed to Główna Komisja Badania Zbrodni Hitlerowskich w Polsce (the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi German Crimes in Poland). He continued to adhere to the principle that a forensic opinion must be based solely on the facts and it must be fully objective and impartial. Notwithstanding his personal experience of the concentration camps, he was able to disregard his emotional reactions. As I have already said, two of his opinions, which offer researchers a rich store of information on the period, were published in Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim and in Volume I of Okupacja i medycyna (Olbrycht, 1971a; and Olbrycht, 1971b).

Jan Sehn, a first-rate criminologist and founder and director of the institute of forensic expertise¹⁴ which has been named after him, was appointed plenipotentiary of the Polish Minister of Justice for the prosecution of Nazi German crimes. He was also a member of the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi German Crimes in Poland and chairman of its Kraków regional branch. Sehn and Olbrycht were deeply committed to the Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim publishing project. They helped to resolve problems and weed out errors, they toned down our emotional reactions and helped us to understand certain phenomena described in the articles. They generously shared their vast resources of erudition and experience with us. I worked closely with Professors Olbrycht and Sehn on this project. Jan Sehn died prematurely at the age of 56 in 1965, while making preparations in Frankfurt–am–Main for a new Auschwitz trial. I would like these few words of appreciation to serve as a commemoration of an unforgettable friend and a tribute to his fine character.

Not only was Professor Olbrycht’s contribution of articles, but also his services as our consultant an inestimable help for the editing of the journal. It has to be said that the project to publish it emerged on the spur of the moment to cater for a specific need. There were no models we could look to and follow. Around 1956 there was a significant rise in the number and rate of medical observations we were conducting on groups of concentration camp survivors. There were several factors stimulating this upsurge—the Auschwitz survivors’ club,¹⁵ ZBoWiD,¹⁶ and the psychiatrists from the Kraków Psychiatric Clinic, especially Antoni Kępinski. Another person who played a paramount, indeed the key role in promoting the project was Dr Stanislaw Kłodziński, who had already been examining survivors for lung diseases. This was the group of people who collected the materials which we published in Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim. From there, we went on to get eminent physicians and scientists—persons like Professor Olbrycht—to work with us.

Towards the end of his life, at the age of 81, Professor Olbrycht finally agreed to make a written record of his personal experience of, and reflections on the concentration camps. We had been encouraging him to do this for a long time, and for a long time he had resisted, arguing that as a forensic scientist he had always based his statements on objective facts, not on subjective experience. But finally he produced a detailed review of the facts in the light of his personal experience, which was subjective but crucially significant as well, a component of the facts. His remarks on Block 11 (Death Block), on his work in the camp’s pharmacy, on the influence of the psyche on the soma, and on the fact that sometimes in the conditions of the concentration camp a burglar could turn out to have more human qualities than many an educated person—these and many other of Olbrycht’s descriptions and accounts make his article a gripping read (Olbrycht, 1968; and reissue, Olbrycht, 1971c).

This invaluable article shows Professor Olbrycht’s sense of responsibility and his modesty. He concludes the article with his gratitude to those who persuaded him that there was a need for him to make a written record of his memoirs of the War and the concentration camps. Here is a quote from the publication, which is now fairly inaccessible:¹⁷

However, I would like to apologise for not keeping my promise to venture on writing the whole truth about man cast into an inhuman existence. It would not be an easy task at all, and would require the consideration of diverse, complex factors such as hunger, egoism, violence, poverty, faith, inhuman conditions, extreme exhaustion, lust for power, fear of losing one’s office and status, the survival instinct, the determination to survive, etc., etc.—all acting on their own or in combination with each other. It would require a superior literary talent. One could not create a clear and true picture unless one got to the gist of all these very different factors. Personally as a physician, in other words someone with a training in the natural sciences, I feel that the key element among all these diverse factors is the survival instinct, one of the most powerful instincts. Let the specialists with the right qualifications in the relevant disciplines answer this fascinating but difficult question. (Olbrycht, 1968, 91)

This was Olbrycht’s last publication. It appeared in the January 1968 issue of Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim, a few days after his death, and was reissued in Okupacja i medycyna, Volume I of an anthology of articles from Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim,(Warszawa: Książka i Wiedza, 1971). In point of fact, Professor Olbrycht attached a great deal of importance to this article, which nowadays stands out from other recollections of the War because of its documentary value, notwithstanding the fact that it was written in the form of a memoir. When he was seriously ill and hospitalised, he still continued to give us detailed instructions regarding his article at the proof-reading stage. He was so fastidious about precision that he insisted we check the first name of a prisoner called Woźniakowski. He had to have the smallest details verified beyond all reasonable doubt. It will be no exaggeration to say that Professor Olbrycht’s Auschwitz article will be one of his most important publications, because of its unquestionably timeless quality, while his scientific achievements may well prove to have a transient, time–dependent value.

And finally, if I were to venture on a few general remarks on Professor Olbrycht’s character, I’d say that he was always sympathetic and friendly to his co-workers and students, but also demanding. He held very progressive and democratic views. He was not an obedient non–entity for the university authorities, without an independent opinion of his own, a typical opportunist. On the contrary, whenever he spoke up, he was forthright but always objective. Sometimes this gave rise to tension and earned him dislike and adversaries, on the traditional principle of veritas semper odium parit (truth always begets hatred), which he used to invoke, but I should add that truth also arouses respect and admiration. His experience was colossal and he was hardly ever wrong, but whenever he was, he owned up honestly and acknowledged his mistake, referring to another of his favourite Latin aphorisms, sapientis est sententiam mutare in melius (it is the attribute of a wise man to change his opinion for the better), not to cling on obstinately to an ossified view which has been proved wrong. Only pusillanimous people want to give themselves an air of infallibility; only mean people always say everything is clear and self-evident. Great minds never hide the bounds to their knowledge; they are always modest and have a sense of their own imperfection.

Professor Olbrycht had a wholesome sense of humour, despite his apparent strictness. Nonetheless, in his last years he was prone to showing his emotions, and that is why he did not want to attend the annual memorial meetings of the Kraków branch of the Polish Medical Association for the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. He did not want to attend his own jubilee celebrations, either, and the one held to mark the golden jubilee of his work in scholarship took place without him being there. He used to quote Professor Kazimierz Morawski,¹⁸ who said that people in Kraków could expect two things: their death and their jubilee. He fended thoughts of death off with the help of his friends; he fended off the idea of a jubilee on his own, because it reminded him of his age, and he still wanted to be young and active.

He was a genuine, recognised, untainted authority, a true and undeniable embodiment of the two supreme values—scientific authority and authority in the realm of ethics and morality.

***

Translated from original article: Bogusz, J., “Ku pamięci Jana Olbrychta.” Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim, 1979.

1. This article is based on my lecture entitled “O współpracy z Janem Olbrychtem w opinionowaniu” delivered at the scholarly meeting in tribute to Professor Jan S. Olbrycht on the tenth anniversary of his death, which was held on 21 February 1978 in the lecture theatre of the Department of Forensic Science at the Kraków Medical Academy.^a
2. Das Generalgouvernement (GG)—the name Germany gave to the part of Poland it occupied but did not directly incorporate in Germany. The GG was governed by a German administration under Has Frank.^b
3. In this memorial I have omitted many of the details of Professor Olbrycht’s biography, because they have appeared in several publications on his life and scholarly achievements. See Kobiela, 1966; and Bogusz, 1966.^a
4. Trybunał Ubezpieczeń Społecznych, the supreme court ruling on social insurance claims in the People’s Republic of Poland, 1946–1976. https://www.szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl/de/zespol/-/zespol/51876?_Zespol_javax.portlet.action=zmienWidok&_Zespol_nameofjsp=jednostki&_Zespol_resetCur=false&_Zespol_delta=15^b
5. A voivodeship is the first-tier territorial administrative division in Poland, and its chief administrative officer is called a voivode.^b
6. The Medical Faculty of the Jagiellonian University, presumably for the City of Kraków.^b
7. In 1954 the authorities of the Communist government of People’s Poland implemented a reform of the system of higher education which involved the removal of medical faculties from the universities and the establishment of new institutions called “medical academies.” In the 1990s, after the fall of the Communist system, some of the medical academies were reincorporated in their original universities.^b
8. Jerzy Sztachelski (1911–1975). Polish physician and Communist politician, Minister of Health, 1961–1968. https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerzy_Sztachelski^b
9. The term for the notorious institution known under the People’s Republic as an izba wytrzeźwień can best be translated as a “sobering-up station.” Its squalid and seedy conditions do not deserve to be called a “detoxification centre.”^b
10. For more on SS Hauptführer Werner Beck, see Olbrycht’s autobiographical article on this website; its English translation is at https://www.mp.pl/auschwitz/journal/english/223383,a-forensic-pathologists-wartime-experience. See also Item 516 (p.74) in Akta Badawczo-Dochodzeniowe Głównej Komisji Badania Zbrodni Hitlerowskich w Polsce (n.d.), 1945-1964. (Records of Investigation and Documentation of the Main Commission to Investigate Nazi Crimes in Poland (n.d)); https://collections.ushmm.org/findingaids/RG-15.155M_01_fnd_en.pdf.^b
11. On 6 Nov. 1939 the Germans arrested nearly 200 Cracovian academics and sent 173 of them to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where many died. To round up the victims, the Germans played a ruse, summoning them to attend Obersturmbannführer Müller’s purported lecture. After the War Müller was tried by a British military court and sentenced to 12 years in prisons (of which he served 6), but his involvement in Sonderaktion Krakau was not mentioned at the trial.^b
12. Ludwig Fischer (1905–1947), was tried in Poland, found guilty of crimes against humanity, sentenced to death and hanged in 1947. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Fischer^b
13. Josef Bühler (1904–1948), was tried in Poland, found guilty of crimes against humanity, sentenced to death and hanged in 1948. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_B%C3%BChler^b
14. Instytut Ekspertyz Sądowych im. Prof. Jana Sehna w Krakowie.^b
15. We have not been able to identify the full name of this organisation. Agnieszka Dauksza lists a number of Polish survivors’ associations, online at https://rcin.org.pl/Content/63023/WA248_82857_P-I-2524_dauksza-doswiadczenie_o.pdf^b
16. ZBoWiD, Związek Bojowników o Wolność i Demokrację (the Society of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy), the main Polish war veterans’ association under the People’s Republic.^b
17. Fortunately, all 31 annual issues of Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim, and a growing number of English translations of the articles published in them are now available online.^b
18. Kazimierz Morawski (1852–1925), Polish historian and classics scholar, professor and rector of the Jagiellonian University. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazimierz_Morawski_(philologist)^b

a—Author’s notes translated from the original; b—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 Education and Science in Poland.