Dr Mojżesz Pelc

Future physician and Auschwitz prisoner No. 19066 Mojżesz Pelc was born on 6 May 1888 in Radomyśl Wielki near Tarnów in Lesser Poland, which was part of Galicia in the Austrian partition.¹ His father Jakub was a paramedic, and his mother was Sara née Sztirer of Zawichost near Sandomierz (the Kingdom of Poland in the Russian partition).

The Pelc family came from the environs of Drohobycz in Eastern Lesser Poland, but in 1840 almost all the family perished in a cholera epidemic, and Leib Wolf Pelc, one of the few survivors, moved to Radomyśl Wielki, where he founded and ran a barber’s shop. His son Jakub wanted to become a paramedic, and as there were no training courses for paramedics in Lesser Poland at the time, in 1876, at the age of 16, he left for Stopnica near Kielce in the Congress Kingdom of Poland and spent six years there training to be a paramedic. Next he worked as a medical assistant at the local powiat² hospital. Later he returned to Radomyśl, where he worked and started a family.

Dr Mojżesz Pelc. Source: Przegląd Lekarski—Oświęcim, 1988. Click the image to enlarge.

His son Mojżesz Pelc was an exceptionally talented and diligent pupil. He attended the Hetman Jan Tarnowski Grammar School in Tarnów and completed his secondary education in 1906. Next he read Medicine at the University of Graz and did specialist medical courses in Vienna, obtaining the Doctor Medicinae Universae degree³ in 1912 as a specialist in surgery. Soon he began working in Szczucin, a town located on the right bank of the River Vistula. But after a year he was called up for military service and assigned to an Austrian unit in Dąbrowa Tarnowska to serve as a military physician.

When the First World War broke out in 1914, Dr Pelc was serving in various garrisons in Lesser Poland. In 1915, when the Austrians took the southern part of Congress Poland,⁴ he was in the vicinity of Stopnica near Żabiec. There he met Pola, the daughter of Marek Józef Wahrmann, a landowner. Their acquaintance turned into mutual love and in October 1916 they married in Kraków; Rabbi Thon⁵ officiated at the ceremony.

The Wahrmann family came from Wojsławice near Chełm Lubelski. Marek Józef Wahrmann,⁶ Dr Pelc’s father-in-law, was born in 1877 in Katrniesk in Siberia, where his father Menahem was living with his family in exile after being deported in 1864 by the Russians for his part in the January Uprising.⁷ After returning home from Siberia in 1893, the family continued to cultivate Polish patriotic and insurgent traditions; it was in this spirit that its young generations were brought up, to follow the example of their ancestor, the veteran of the Uprising and Siberian exile.

In 1917 Dr Pelc was transferred from Radom, where he had been serving as a garrison physician, to the Italian front. In October 1917, during the infamous Battle of the Isonzo, torrential rain, mud and strong enemy fire made it very difficult to remove casualties from the battlefield. Yet Dr Pelc and the military nurses under his command treated and carried many wounded soldiers from the battlefield under heavy fire, which was not part of his medical duties. This courageous conduct surprised the German officers from the Bavarian division fighting alongside Austrian soldiers. They certainly did not have a good opinion of their Austrian companions and could hardly believe that this young Austrian doctor was ready to risk his life to carry out a Samaritan service. Dr Pelc’s heroic stance won recognition and was given due credit by the Austrian commanding officers. He was awarded the Iron Cross, a major military distinction.

At the close of 1918, after the defeat of the Central Powers, Captain Pelc and all the other Poles who had been serving in the forces of the Partitioning Empires became part of the nascent Polish Army and helped to disarm and remove the occupying troops from Poland. In 1919 he settled in Kielce and was promoted to the rank of major. He was entrusted with the medical command of an evacuation train.⁸

In 1921, after being demobilised, Dr Pelc started working in the civilian health service. He said he had had enough of the sight of blood and amputating arms and legs, and so he left surgery and specialized in internal and children’s diseases. When he was working in this field, he published several articles on diabetes and children’s diseases in specialist medical journals. In Kielce Dr Pelc soon built up a reputation as a very good, experienced and conscientious physician as well as an outstanding social activist, working in charity organizations and holding several prestigious offices in them. He earned the local people’s trust and appreciation, so he was elected him to the city council for several terms.

He considered himself a Pole and an adherent of the Judaic religion, and prided himself on emphasising this. His residence was a Polish home. In the family records there is a note that in 1924 Dr Pelc hosted Józef Piłsudski,⁹ Poland’s first marshal, in his apartment on Hipoteczna in Kielce. They had met during the war when Dr Pelc was serving as an officer. In fact Dr Pelc was always a staunch supporter of Piłsudski.

The doctor’s two sons were given Polish names. Janusz was born in Radom in 1917, and Jerzy was born in Kielce in 1920. They were brought up as Poles and attended the Mikołaj Rej (later known as the Stefan Żeromski) grammar school in Kielce, where they obtained their secondary school-leaving certificates in 1935 and 1937 respectively. Janusz left the country in 1936 and fought in the renowned British 8th Army in Africa and Italy during the Second World War; he is now a well-known engineer in Israel. He keeps in touch with his home country and often visits numerous school friends in Poland. During the War Jerzy found himself in the Soviet Union;¹⁰ in 1942 he volunteered to join the Polish Army that was being organised there, but on his way to an army unit he fell ill with typhus and died.

When the War broke out in 1939, Dr Pelc was in Kielce, and since the Jewish community trusted him as its representative in the city council, the German occupying authorities tried to persuade him to collaborate with them and make him support their efforts to control and kill the Jews of Kielce. In 1940 he was appointed director of the Jewish hospital, which he organized. When the Germans established a Jewish ghetto in Kielce, they appointed him an elder of the Jewish community. However, he was unable to come to terms with the cruel and inhuman orders issued by the German occupying authorities. He stood up in opposition and refused to carry them out. His brave act of defiance aroused respect; even the Germans respected him, calling him der stolze Jude (the proud Jew). He was always true to himself, true to what he had felt and believed he was all his life – a Polish citizen and officer.

In June 1941 the Gestapo learnt of the secret activities carried out by the Polish resistance movement in Kielce since September 1939 to protect former Polish soldiers and young people from deportation to forced labour camps in Germany. Dr Pelc was involved in this underground operation and knew Kielce’s mayor Stanisław Pasteczko since the time he was on the city council, so he asked him to help with the fabrication of bogus “Aryan” identity cards in the city’s executive board for young and healthy Jews, which would enable them to escape from the ghetto and live among the city’s Christian population. They would have a chance to survive the war. Many of these young Jewish people later fought in several of the resistance units operating in the Kielce region.

In June 1941 the Gestapo arrested several persons for these secret activities. The following officials were jailed in the second political department of the Kielce prison: Stanisław Pasteczko,¹¹ the mayor of the city; Jan Ziemba, head of the personnel department of the municipal board; Dr Marian Gustek, director of the municipal hospital; Marian Green, the head of the hospital’s infrastructure; Dr Mojżesz Pelc and Dr Gierszon Harkawi, another physician of Jewish origin, formerly a lieutenant in the 2nd light artillery regiment during the defensive war of 1939. In July 1941 they were all sent to Auschwitz. Dr Pelc was registered as number 19066, and as he was a Polish political prisoner of Jewish origin, he was immediately sent to Block 13, the penal company. Within a few months they were all dead.

During the month he was imprisoned in Kielce and next in Auschwitz, Dr Pelc proved himself a Polish patriot and a helpful friend to other prisoners, which earned him their respect. After the War several articles were published on the Jews of Kielce, in which Dr Pelc was highly acknowledged as a man of integrity. He did not renounce his Jewish origin although he always considered himself Polish. During the First World War he had fought for his country, and afterwards had worked in his profession and rendered outstanding service for the local community, making a considerable contribution to the development of his hometown and his country.

I am publishing this memorial of Dr Mojżesz Pelc of Kielce on the centenary of his birth and want it to be a tribute to him and many other patriotic Polish citizens of Jewish origin. Dr Pelc was killed in Auschwitz for his patriotic and humanitarian work as a Polish political prisoner, long before the general extermination of the Jewish population. In those horrific times for them and their country, they did not succumb to violence but fought for their ideals and were killed by a common enemy.

***

To write this paper I have used documents and information kept in the Central Medical Library in Warsaw and from Dr Pelc’s son Janusz Pelc, who is now living in Israel, as well as my own recollections.

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Translated from original article: Sikorski, J. “Dr Mojżesz Pelc.” Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim, 1988.

1. The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was partitioned in 1772-1795 by the Prussian, Russian, and Austrian Empires. Following the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the borders of the three partitioned sectors were revised. The Austrian partition of Poland was called Galicia, whereas the Russians gained Warsaw from Prussia and turned their partition into an allegedly autonomous polity known as the Congress Kingdom of Poland.^a
2. A powiat is the second-tier unit in the territorial division of Poland into administrative and local government regions.
3. Doctor Medicinae Universae (Doctor of General Medicine) was the official title of the degree awarded at the time in the Habsburg Empire to students graduating in medicine.^a
4. During the First World War the three powers which had partitioned Poland fought on opposite sides. The Central Powers, Austria, and Germany (Prussia), fought against Russia, which belonged to the Triple Entente (with Britain and France). For the inhabitants of the Polish territories this meant four years of continuous warfare as the belligerents invaded each other’s lands, but eventually Poland was restored as an independent state.
5. The name is misprinted “Tohr” in the original Polish text. Dr Abraham Ozjasz Thon (1870–1936) was a rabbi,sociologist and political leader. In 1897 he was appointed to the rabbinate of the Tempel Synagogue in Kraków, an office he held until his death. In 1919, following the restoration of Poland’s independence, Dr Thon was elected to Sejm and served in the Polish parliament until 1931. Dr Thon was a charismatic speaker and a distinguished political journalist; he wrote thousands of articles in Hebrew, Yiddish, German, Polish, and English. https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozjasz_Thon^a
6. In a letter from Israel published in a 1991 edition of a Polish local paper, Janusz Pelc gives the name of his great-grandfather as Menachem Mendel Iszemet (Wahrman). Gazeta Kielecka. 1991: 81 (24-26 Apr.), p. 8. http://sbc.wbp.kielce.pl/Content/33946/PDF/Gazeta_Kielecka_1991%20_nr_81.pdf^a
7. Many times during Poland’s non-existence as an independent state, Polish people rose up against the Partitioning Powers, especially Russia, despite reprisals such as the death sentence or deportation to Siberia. The January Uprising of 1863-1864 was one of these insurrections. The Russians punished thousands of insurgents, sentencing them to death or deportation to Siberia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_Uprising
8. The provisions of the Treaty of Riga following the Polish-Bolshevik War of 1919-1921 envisaged the repatriation of Polish nationals left in Soviet Russia after the First World War and the October Revolution. Many of those lucky enough to seize the opportunity to leave Soviet Russia were taken to Poland on evacuation trains. This article was published under the People’s Republic of Poland, which was in the Soviet Bloc, and Communist censorship banned all mention of the Polish-Bolshevik War in publications.
9. Józef Piłsudski (1867-1935), Marshal of Poland. One of the chief Polish military commanders to whom credit is due for the restoration of the country’s independence in 1918 and its successful defence against the Bolshevik invasion in 1920. A member of the PPS Socialist Party, Piłsudski was appointed First Marshal of Poland in 1920 and held the top position in the country’s government. He is now generally regarded as a national hero for his contribution to the restoration of Polish independence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B3zef_Pi%C5%82sudski
10. The original article was published under the Polish People’s Republic and so it is vague due to Communist censorship. It implies but does not say outright that Jerzy was one of the hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens who were deported to the Soviet Union when the Soviets (then Hitler’s ally) invaded Poland on 17 September 1939. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the Polish government-in-exile negotiated with Stalin for the release of the Poles held in the USSR and eventually concluded the Sikorski-Maisky pact, allowing Poles held in the Soviet gulags to be released, establish a Polish army to fight for the Allies, and leave Soviet Russia.
11. For a photo of Mayor Pasteczko, see

a—Translator’s notes; remaining notes by Teresa Bałuk-Ulewiczowa, Head Translator of the Medical Review Auschwitz project.

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