Episodes from my confinement in concentration camps: some reflections from a biologist

In 1946,¹ shortly after the end of the War, when I received an invitation from the British Council² and had the opportunity to visit several British biology laboratories, I had a long and interesting conversation with J.C. Brash,³ who was Professor of Descriptive Anatomy at Edinburgh University. After we had discussed the scientific matters both of us were interested in, we passed on to personal matters, and Professor Brash, who knew that the Gestapo had arrested almost all the academics of the Jagiellonian University, asked a few questions about this atrocity⁴ – one of the many crimes perpetrated by the Nazi Germans. This one was committed in November 1939, and outraged world opinion. Professor Brash said that in the light of Sonderaktion⁵ one could easily understand all the subsequent notorious instances of genocide committed by the Nazi Germans. I tried to give him a brief account of the circumstances of our arrest and life in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps, for our group as well as for the general mass of prisoners we had occasion to meet. At the end of our conversation I said that although we were all at constant risk of death, and indeed so very many of our senior colleagues died in the concentration camp, or survived with serious health problems, nonetheless for a biologist observing the effects of concentration camp life on himself and others was an important experience. At this remark our discussion started up again. We tried to be as objective as we could, avoiding emotionality. I think it will be worthwhile to draw my readers’ attention to some of the concepts that all biologists working on certain problems concerning human biology would have found fascinating if they had the chance to observe everyday life in a concentration camp and thousands of inmates submitted to the lawlessness that went on there, with their lives hanging in the balance and depending on the whims of an individual in a black uniform.⁶

The previous⁷ century brought the science of biology Darwin’s theory⁸ – unquestionably one of the greatest syntheses in the life sciences. And I don’t just mean Darwin’s ordered presentation of the concept of evolutionary development, but also Darwin and Wallace’s⁹ description of evolutionary processes, in other words the theory of natural selection. But we know that the storm clouds were brewing still in Darwin’s lifetime, and the creator of the theory of natural selection could not find satisfactory answers to some of the critical remarks against his theory. All he could do was to invoke certain statements formulated by his predecessor Lamarck,¹⁰ statements which earlier he had done his best to eschew.¹¹ Nonetheless, Darwin’s original concept was absolutely right. His brilliant intuition did not fail him in his quiet country refuge¹² when he was creating the theory that would shake not just biology, but all the sciences and humanities in general. The criticism of the problematic points in the theory of natural selection was completely invalidated with the advent of genetics, a new branch of biology, and the progress made in physics in the 20^th century. Nonetheless, often we see that a great discovery and advancement may also bring negative consequences and provide a fertile breeding ground for misguided interpretations which deform the original idea. That’s what happened to Darwin’s theory, too.

Transformed Into Corpses. Artwork by Marian Kołodziej. Photo by Piotr Markowski. Click the image to enlarge.

The 19^th century, the age of the amplest rise of colonialism, made an idiosyncratic attempt to come up with a commentary on Darwinism as favourable as possible for itself, with its principle of struggle for survival, and the survival of the “fittest.” Its shallow projection of a misconstrued and oversimplified set of Darwin’s postulates to human society led to the emergence of Social Darwinism, a favourite tool in the claims made by the apologists of conquest and the adherents of inequality on the unequal potential of the different races for development, intellectual skills, and the right to lead an independent life of their own. They also applied the contemporary discoveries in genetics in the same spirit. German imperialism, which revived after the First World War and gave the Nazis the opportunity to come to power, found in Social Darwinism a handy, pseudo-scientific support for its intents. Subsequently the Nazi ideology turned Social Darwinism into a new religion which vindicated all manner of abuse and atrocity for the sake of racial purity and called for the biological destruction of other nations to obtain new Lebensraum¹³ for the Germanic race.

The Nietzschean concept of the Übermensch¹⁴ (Super-Human) was one of the sources on which Hitler drew for his ideas. I am not going to elaborate on this point, because so much has been written about it, and so many facts have already been presented. Yet I cannot refrain from recalling that in their concentration camps the Nazi Germans exploited prisoners as human guinea pigs in numerous experiments carried out without prisoners’ consent. Many of these practices were conducted by individuals with a reputation as serious scientists, who held appointments in concentration camps as physicians or researchers. In 1946 a French professor in Paris told me that when French troops entered Strasbourg, they discovered a large collection of specimens of human tissue obtained from concentration camp prisoners. These samples were used in experiments to see whether cancer cells were transfusable or to observe changes caused by various toxic substances. What I found particularly surprising was the evident reluctance of some Western biologists and physicians I had the opportunity to talk to in Kraków straight after the Second World War to discuss the subject of concentration camp prisoners. I think that turning a blind eye even to the most flagrant instances of savagery is not the best way to prevent such tendencies that adulterate scientific opinion from emerging in the future and being exploited for purposes which have nothing whatsoever to do with humanitarianism or real science.

Contrary to what the layman might think, the contemporary ideas of evolutionism and genetics are fully compatible with humanitarianism in the best sense of the word. Concentration camp prisoners made up a vast community of human beings who were treated as outlaws living in deplorable conditions. Their oppressors were constantly trying to disparage their human dignity. You might expect that given such conditions of communal life, the human individual who had become merely a number sewn onto his prison gear or tattooed on his arm would lose many of the characteristic features of his personality. Yet that did not happen.

The problem which ever since Galton’s¹⁵ times had been not only a source of scientific research but also of anxiety must have preoccupied every biologist who observed the behaviour of individual concentration camp prisoners, who came from different classes of society, had been brought up in very different social milieus and subjected from early childhood to widely different influences. The spotlight was constantly and glaringly on the antithetical notions – heredity versus environment, nature versus nurture – and all the time we were witnessing facts which many of us found perplexing and hard to explain. Take an individual whose CV prior to confinement in the concentration camp could not have elicited a great deal of admiration and who might have been expected to succumb completely to absolutely egoistic instincts in the difficult conditions in the camp, where an extreme struggle for survival of the worst possible kind reigned supreme – what made such an individual rise to the heights of genuine humanitarianism, altruism, and true patriotism? Now take another individual who had previously held a distinguished place in society and lived in a highly cultivated environment – what made him forget about it all in the concentration camp and sink into a deplorably egotistic form of behaviour? Would facts like these mean that the inherited legacy an individual had received from his parents had a decisive impact on his conduct; while all of the culture he had acquired from his environment perished under the unbearable pressure of conditions in the camp, cast off like a thin film only loosely sitting atop the hereditary core of his personality? I think such a conclusion would be contrary to the scientifically objective point of view in biology. I will need to justify my claim.

The contemporary view in genetics no longer considers the characteristics that used to be called inherent, nowadays known as hereditary characteristics, are the opposite of acquired characteristics. Every characteristic is the resultant of the operation of hereditary determinants, a person’s genes acting in specific environmental conditions, albeit certain genes which determine certain characteristics always determine those characteristics in the same way, whatever the conditions, providing they are conditions in which the foetus and individual can develop. For example, if an individual was conceived with a specific set of genes determining the characteristic we call the blood group, then no environmental factor will ever change his blood group. But things are quite different with many other characteristics, especially the ones we call psychological traits, which are of key importance in the makeup of an individual’s personality. It would be wrong to try to estimate the percentage ratio of hereditary to environmental factors in any given characteristic. According to Dobzhansky,¹⁶ what matters is the extent to which the differences we observe between different individuals depend on their genotype, in other words the complete set of their genes, and to what extent such differences are due to environmental factors. So what we have are two variables, what’s more variables which are liable to change so much that it would be well-nigh impossible to conduct rigorous scientific observations on them.

Thanks to the fact that humans reproduce by sexual reproduction, and each of us is heterozygous and has a very large number of genes, the number of genetic combinations possible in a human population is virtually infinite, as we know from genetics. Hence every human individual is different from all the other humans, and even if one pair of parents could have millions of offspring, they would still not exhaust the pool of potential gene combinations. So it is only due to an unusual, rare occurrence that we may see genetically identical individuals – identical twins, also referred to as monozygotic twins. Identical twins are the result of a single egg fertilised by a single sperm splitting, in other words they come from a single zygote.

Sometimes this process may lead to multiple births – triplets, or even quintuplets, for example the Canadian quins.¹⁷ You might think that nothing could be simpler than to observe pairs of identical twins brought up together or in different environments, in order to obtain an ultimate answer to the question of the contribution heredity makes to the development of an individual’s personality, versus the contribution of environmental factors. Yet even here we come up against difficulties. There are two reasons for this. First of all, we must bear in mind that a “human environment” is composed of extremely complex factors; and secondly, environmental factors active in the earliest stages of a person’s life may have an influence on his development. And let’s not forget that the environment in which the foetus develops, that is his mother’s body, is certainly not a neutral environment.

It has been shown that the mother’s genotype may have a fundamental influence on the development of the foetus. On the other hand, there is no doubt that the development of certain psychological traits depends on the level the individual’s physical development has reached. It has been observed that when one of a pair of identical twins was given a special treatment for a fairly long time at the age of forty-plus weeks, to stimulate his mobility, perceptibility etc., while the other twin was not exposed to such influences, then in spite of this, as soon as the twins were again given the same treatment, the neglected twin started to develop intellectually at a faster rate and soon caught up with his sibling and no differences could be observed between them any longer.

A biologist cannot deny the existence of inborn, hereditary differences between individuals, and so he cannot go along with those who claim that all people (except for pathological cases) are absolutely equal in terms of their dispositions. Yet this standpoint has nothing to do with the claim at the root of all racist theories, that human beings are irreversibly determined by their genetic inheritance. In the opinion of Mahatma Gandhi, published in a book of his sayings entitled All Men are Brothers,¹⁸ although we are all equal, that is we are all born with the right to the same start, we do not all have the same capacities. Every unprejudiced biologist and psychologist will agree with Gandhi. Genetic diversity does not stand in opposition to the equal chances which each of us should enjoy and which we can use to the full if our education takes our genetic diversity into account, not only by socialising us but also by helping to develop our individual talents and interests. If we accept that we are all genetically different from each other and that human genes behave flexibly depending on their environmental conditions, we can venture on an optimistic assessment of human nature in general, and of our efforts to make progress by improving our environmental conditions.

Probably the biggest problem for someone who is neither a biologist nor a geneticist in understanding the position genetics takes on the development of the personality of the individual is the relationship between the modern corpuscular approach to an individual’s hereditary substance and the harmonious structure and function of an organism as a whole. We say that the determinants for the various inherited characteristics such as eye colour, the colour and structure of an individual’s hair, etc., are separate. Each of our genes is an independent, and to a large extent autonomous unit. How is it, then, that usually the whole collection of an individual’s genes making up his genotype comes together to give a harmoniously composed and properly working entity – the organism? To explain this phenomenon I shall not go into a lengthy exposition on genetics, but instead I shall resort to an example to help the reader understand how the genes work together, and the effect of environmental conditions. Like all comparisons, this one should be treated as a very distant analogy which certainly cannot be said to correspond to all the complex relations in a system as elaborate as a living organism.

Let’s compare the genes to the ships of various types and kinds that make up a large fleet sailing out to meet an enemy fleet. Each of the units has a specific position with respect to the other members of the fleet, each is independent to a certain extent, yet the position and operations of each unit are regulated by orders from the flagship with the commanding officer of the entire fleet on board. And here we see a difference between the operations of the genes and the individual vessels making up a war fleet. There is no “flagship” gene to give orders to particular genes like the flagship in a fleet of warships. But thanks to their evolutionary history all the genes are fully integrated with each other and work so well together that there is no need of superior genes to issue orders. An emergency or a breakdown of one of the vessels may throw the entire fleet out of balance and result in a bad outcome. Similarly, a change in one of a living organism’s genes gives rise to a mutation. And just as an emergency in one of the vessels may bring disastrous consequences for the whole fleet, so a mutation in one gene may prove lethal, in other words it may kill the entire organism. Damage may be done not only if there is a breakdown in one of the vessels, but also if a vessel loses its position and sails off from its proper track. One false move by an individual unit may bring unforeseeable consequences for the whole fleet.

We observe similar things happening if something disturbs the mutual co-operation of the genes. It may be enough for just one gene to mutate for the life of the entire organism to stop. But sometimes something else may occur, albeit far more rarely. Sometimes a manoeuvre by one of the units not envisaged by the commander may turn out to be beneficial for the whole fleet. The corresponding events in a living organism are mutations which prove to be good for the whole organism. For we must bear in mind that sticking hard and fast to a plan made in advance may give disastrous results. The fleet must be flexible in its operations, it has to adapt and react to enemy moves. The best and most precise plan must be modified if the enemy fleet conducts unexpected manoeuvres. Similarly, the mutual operations of the genes must be flexible enough to adjust to the external conditions acting on the organism. The genes themselves do not change, just as the vessels making up the fleet are not suddenly replaced by other vessels; what changes is the way individual units work and impact on the whole entity.

I hope this very rough-and-ready comparison between the way the genes work and the operations of individual vessels making up a fleet will provide a useful point of departure for the assessment of certain phenomena which biologists had the opportunity to observe in concentration camps.

Since every individual differs genetically from other individuals, his reactions must be different, too, or at least his impulses will be different from those that arise in an individual with a different genotype in response to the same conditions. Of course, due to the external influences which shaped the individual’s phenotype, that is due to the way he was brought up and the impact of culture, two different individuals may react in the same way, but for one of them the reaction may be more natural than for the other, who may need to make an effort to react in the same way. A calorie deficit was a common experience for concentration camp prisoners; we all felt hungry, but not to the same extent, and so giving up a piece of bread and offering it to a fellow-prisoner did not mean exactly the same thing for all prisoners. Those who had a greater genetically determined calorific need but gave up their food deserve to be commended more than those who were “naturally” better prepared to put up with hunger.

On the basis of research conducted by many authors on mono- and dizygotic twins brought up together or separately in entirely different social conditions, we have been able to determine certain relationships between the influence of hereditary and environmental factors. To put it in a nutshell, environmental factors have the least effect on those of an individual’s features which are connected with his morphological characteristics. A far greater environmental influence on the individual is observed on features which we measure, for instance by intelligence tests; and the largest environmental impact may be observed on certain other personality traits, for example on an individual’s characterological traits. Another important detail comes to light in the work of diverse researchers. The later the research chronologically, and the more critical the researcher was with regard to his data, the stronger and clearer the environmental impact. Of course, this cannot override the role of heredity, which still is significant even in the most flexible human behaviour. Behavioural flexibility is particularly observable in human sexuality.

A variety of types of the sexual deviation referred to as homosexuality occurred quite frequently in the concentration camps. We know that two attempts have been made to explicate homosexuality. One of them may be termed the psychodynamic theory based on the views of Freud¹⁹ ; the other is known as the genetic theory and tries to give a genetic explanation. Freud’s theory focuses on unconscious psychological processes. An individual’s sexual development may be readily disturbed in connection with his experiences in early childhood. In Dobzhansky’s opinion, the two theories need not be mutually exclusive:

Let’s suppose that all the individuals who develop a deviant sexual behaviour later in their lives shared the same special experiences in relation to their parents. But would that mean that such experiences must necessarily give rise to sexual deviation in all the individuals who went through them? Does it not happen only to those individuals who are carriers of certain genotypes which are not at all rare in human populations?²⁰

This opinion complies with everything we know about all of an individual’s characteristics as his genotype’s reaction to the conditions in which he is in, of course including all the social and cultural conditions which are particularly significant for his development. To support the hypothesis that genetic factors should be taken into account, I shall refer to Kallmann’s²¹ observations. If we compare dizygotic (fraternal) twins, i.e. a pair of twins derived from two different egg cells fertilised by two different sperms, in other words genetically different twins, we observe that in spite of being brought up in the same conditions, only one twin may show a homosexual tendency, while the other twin’s sex drive is normal. In 37 out of 51 pairs of dizygotic twins {examined by Kallmann}, one of the twins was a homosexual; while in 44 pairs of monozygotic (genetically identical) twins, he found that in every pair both twins had the same sexual orientation. Moreover, in those pairs which were homosexual the degree of homosexuality was exactly the same in both twins. Given such data, one could hardly deny that genetic factors were significant and say that only the psychodynamic theory was right as regards the explication of disorders in sexual development.

If we are to speak of the hereditary factors determining characteristics, especially psychological characteristics, we should take care not to oversimplify, or misconstrue the role of the genes. Quite obviously, it would be absurd to speak of a gene for courage, a gene for uprightness, or a gene for honesty; it would be equally wrong to speak of a gene or genes for intelligence, or attempt to identify the genes responsible for the outstanding qualities marking out a given individual. An individual’s genotype works as an integral entity, and hence the entire, collective system of all the individual’s genes impacts on his characteristics. According to G. Evelyn Hutchinson,²² an individual’s hereditary substrate which, given the right conditions, facilitates the development of a predisposition for homosexuality, has an impact primarily on “the rates of development of neuro-psychological mechanisms involved in identification processes and other aspects of object relationship in infancy.”²³

I think that in the research which has been carried out so far on the mutual influences between heredity and environment, biologists have not given sufficient attention to the relationship between environmental impact and its ontogenetic period. If an individual is to acquire a culture, he must be physically mature enough for it. However, in man cultural and social influences may start already in early childhood. Man is the only living species capable not only of creating and transferring culture, but also of assimilating it. I will not be wrong to assume that the assimilation of culture that occurred in our very ancient ancestors was such a great achievement for them that natural selection must have preferred genotypes which developed this characteristic already in infancy. In this way social inheritance conditioned by human genotype became a workstation for natural selection. Hence we may assume that those environmental influences which an individual experienced in the earliest stages of his life are much more firmly rooted and far more enduring that characteristics he acquired later. Taking this approach will help us understand many of the ostensibly paradoxical facts of life in the concentration camps. Prisoners tended to lose the ontogenetic cultural influences they acquired at a later stage in their lives, while those they had acquired at an earlier stage were able to survive even the greatest trauma and could save the individual from being overpowered by his primitive, instinctive reactions. This happened even if the influences the individual had acquired later were not so advantageous.

If this opinion is correct, then it should give us a lot of optimism about man and his future. This optimism comes from two sources. First, human biology has moved a long way from rigid adherence to genetic determinism, especially in the sphere of psychological characteristics; and secondly, often the impact of educationally beneficial influences in childhood plays the crucial role in the individual’s subsequent development. For many this opinion may sound like a truism. But if a vox populi opinion can be backed up by biological data and scientific grounds, it will be far more cogent. Man is the only living product of Nature capable not only of examining the world that surrounds him and discovering and understanding the processes to which he owes his origin, but he also strives to manage and direct his future development on the basis of the commands of his heart and mind. Dobzhansky begins one of the chapters of his last book, which is on the biological evolution of mankind,²⁴ with a motto from Dante’s Inferno. I would like to use the same motto to conclude this short essay on some of the reflections that come to a biologist in connection with his experience of a concentration camp:

Bethink you of the seed

whence ye have sprung; for ye were not created

to lead the life of stupid animals,

but manliness and knowledge to pursue.²⁵

***

Translated from original article: Skowron, S. “Z pobytu w obozach koncentracyjnych. Refleksje biologa,” Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim, 1963.

1. Today homosexuality is defined as a romantic or sexual attraction, or sexual behaviour between persons of the same sex, and it is one of the three main sexual orientations (alongside heterosexuality and bisexuality) on the sexual continuum. In the first half of the 20th century psychiatrists considered homosexuality a psychopathological phenomenon. The first research showing that a person’s sexual orientation was a complex resultant due to the influence of genetic, hormonal, and environmental factors, and not of choice, was carried out in the 1960s. In the 1970s the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, where previously it had been classified as a deviation. The World Health Organisation did not revise its definition of homosexuality in the International Classification of Diseases until 1992. Homosexuals come up against prejudice and discrimination, and over the centuries have frequently experienced violence (e.g. in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union). Currently homosexual relations are an offence under the law of 74 countries and territories all over the world.
2. The British Council “invitation” probably entailed a scholarship. Citizens of Soviet bloc countries were not permitted to travel abroad unless they had an “invitation” from a foreign institution or private person, which meant that the “inviting” party undertook to cover the costs of the invited person’s maintenance and (usually) travel expenses while abroad.
3. James Couper Brash (1886-1958), a leading British anatomist and embryologist. During the First World War he served in the rank of major in the Royal Medical Corps and was awarded the Military Cross for bravery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Couper_Brash
4. On 6 November 1939 the German authorities occupying Poland arrested the senior academic staff of the Jagiellonian University and other institutions of higher education in Kraków – a total of 182 men, most of them senior academics – and sent them to Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg concentration camp. For more on the arrests, known as Sonderaktion Krakau, see the Jagiellonian University’s monthly magazine Alma Mater 178 (2015) Online at https://almamater.uj.edu.pl/archiwum-2015?p_p_id=56_INSTANCE_Df4E&groupId=2910359&articleId=109265933 See also the article by Jan Miodoński on this website
5. The Germans codenamed the operation for the arrest of the professors “Sonderaktion Krakau.”
6. “An individual in a black uniform” – an SS man.
7. I.e. the 19th century
8. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution states that evolution happens by natural selection. Individuals in a species show variation in physical characteristics. Those individuals most suited to their environment survive and, given enough time, the species will gradually evolve.
9. Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913 was a British naturalist who independently proposed the theory of evolution by natural selection.
10. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), French zoologist, creator of the Lamarckian inheritance theory, that a parent organism can pass on to its offspring physical characteristics it acquired by use or disuse during its lifetime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism
11. Darwin proposed natural selection as the main mechanism for development of species, but did not rule out a variant of Lamarckism as a supplementary mechanism, which he called “pangenesis”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism
12. Down House, Darwin’s home in Kent (UK). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OjBoNQpezU
13. Lebensraum – literally “living space”, a German term popularised especially under the Nazi regime associated with the plan to evict the indigenous inhabitants of Eastern Europe and colonise the region with German settlers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum
14. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) introduced the concept of the Übermensch, the “Super-Human,” as the ideal for which humans should strive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cbermensch
15. Francis Galton (1822-1911), British anthropologist, behavioural geneticist and one of the pioneers of eugenics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton
16. Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900-1975), Ukrainian (naturalised American) geneticist and evolutionary biologist). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodosius_Dobzhansky
17. Presumably the Dionne quins, born in 1934. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionne_quintuplets
18. The book All Men are Brothers a compilation of the sayings of the Indian statesman Mahatma Gandhi, is available on the internet, but I have not been able to find the passage Skowron cites in this edition. https://www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/AllMenAreBrothers.pdf
19. The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) created a psychoanalytic theory of personality arguing that human behaviour was the result of the interactions among three component parts of the mind: the id, ego, and superego. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-psychology/chapter/psychodynamic-perspectives-on-personality
20. The original Polish text marks this passage as a quote from the work of Dobzhansky, but does not specify its title. I have back-translated the passage from the Polish version.
21. Franz Josef Kallmann (1897 – 1965), German American psychiatrist and geneticist. The surname is misspelled in the Polish text.
22. George Evelyn Hutchinson (1903 – 1991), British (later naturalised American) ecologist. The surname is misspelled in the Polish text. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._Evelyn_Hutchinson
23. The original Polish text marks this passage as a quote from the work of Hutchinson, but does not specify its title. The citation comes from “A speculative consideration of certain forms of sexual selection in man” (The American Naturalist 1959;93:81–91). https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/282059
24. Perhaps Mankind Evolving: The Evolution of the Human Species (Yale University Press, 1962).
25. Dante, Inferno Canto XXVI. The Eighth Circle, Fraud. Translated by Courtney Langdon. https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/langdon-the-divine-comedy-vol-1-inferno-english-trans#lf0045-01_head_004 Skowron quotes the passage in Edward Porębowicz’s Polish translation. Not having access to Dobzhansky’s book, I have used Langdon’s English version of the passage.

Note 1 by Maria Ciesielska, Expert Consultant for the Medical Review Auschwitz project. Remaining 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.