A healthy baby girl was born one cold day in January 1941 in the Jewish ghetto of Shavli, a town in northern Lithuania. In ordinary circumstances, the birth of a baby would have been welcomed and celebrated by the family and the community, but these were no ordinary times. Shavli was under German occupation. The German Security Police forbade giving birth in the Jewish ghetto, and to disobey the rule meant severe punishment for the entire community and, possibly, death for the family and the physicians assisting at the birth. Newborns were killed by an injection of poison. On this occasion, however, it was decided that the quickest way to do it was to ‘drown the baby’ as ‘injections of potent poisonous drugs powerful enough to kill an adult had not produced quick results with newborns.’ Astonishingly, it took the physicians ‘a total of six minutes’ to carry out the dreadful act, ‘twice the amount of time necessary to kill an adult by suffocation’ (p. 170).
Dr Aaron Pik, a Lithuanian physician, recounts this harrowing story in his diary from the period he spent in the Shavli ghetto during the Holocaust. He also notes the deep moral and ethical dilemma facing the physicians involved. According to the halakhah (Jewish Law), protecting the life of the mother takes precedence over the life of the baby, and it was believed that in such terrible circumstances religious commands should mandate the physicians’ reluctance to disregard medical ethics and the Hippocratic oath. But, between 1939 and 1945, medicine held out hopes of survival for Jewish women, men and children, and Jewish physicians in Nazi-occupied Europe were able to restore a sense of order in the life of their communities. Pik’s is a remarkable diary and a unique historical source, and one which Miriam Offer uses brilliantly in her chapter dealing with various aspects of Jewish medical practices in the Shavli ghetto. This chapter is one of the twenty included in a volume on Jewish medical resistance in the Holocaust, edited by the renowned scholar of medical ethics, Michael A. Grodin. Grouped into four parts, the chapters are preceded by a Forward, written by the Holocaust survivor and esteemed Rabbi Joseph Polak, a Preface, co-authored by Grodin with Allan Nadler, and the editor’s Introduction.
The main focus of the volume is on Jewish medical resistance in the most well-known ghettos in Poland and Lithuania (Warsaw, Lodz, Kovno, Vilna and Shavli) and in the notorious Nazi concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Terezín. As highlighted throughout the volume, the fear of disease and attempts to contain the spread of infection and contamination dominated the Jewish communities and the physicians protecting their health and lives. This is clearly demonstrated in the chapters included in the second part, which deal with the organisation of health care and preventative medicine in the abovementioned ghettos. The chapters included here combine brilliant historical scholarship and analysis with personal accounts of various Jewish physicians, which, in some cases, are narrated and contextualised by their children. In terms of the former, two chapters stand out: the discussion by Charles G. Roland (1933–2009) of the health and living conditions in the Warsaw ghetto and Solon Beinfeld’s portrayal of the Jewish medical community and its efforts to prevent the spread of diseases in the Vilna ghetto. As for the latter group, it is worth mentioning the following: the chapter written by Alexander Sedlis (1921–2014), who served as a physician in the Vilna ghetto hospital; Jack Brauns’s chapter on medicine in the Kovno ghetto, which is based on the notes left by Jack’s father, Dr Moses Brauns, an epidemiologist entrusted with the ghetto’s health plan; the emotional recollection by Lily Mazur Margules (1924–2012) of her father, David Mazur; and, finally, Claude Romney’s account of the work of her father, Dr Jacques Lewin, in the infirmary in Auschwitz and Ebensee.
One recurrent theme percolates throughout these chapters: namely, that of devotion and care for the individual, the family and the community amidst the most horrendous circumstances in which the life of the Jews meant little or nothing to the German military and, indeed, the Nazi doctors. We are reminded of the latter group in Part 3 of the volume, which focuses on medical experiments in the concentration camps, including those conducted by Carl Clauberg on Dutch Jewish women and by Horst Schumann and Joseph Mengele on Greek Jewish men and women. Yet, as Yitzchak Kerem aptly points out, there were also prisoner physicians, such as the Pole Wladislaw Dering, who did not hesitate to conduct unethical experiments on his fellow prisoners.
Commendably, the volume also brings forth the remarkable endeavours of Jewish female physicians in the ghettos and concentration camps. Aleksander Blum’s discussion of the Jewish nursing school in Warsaw based on his mother’s memoirs offers some insights into how leading female physicians and nurses carried out their duties under the German occupation. Similarly, Diane Plotkin discusses the work carried out by Dr Hadassah Bimko-Rosensaft (1912–97) in Bergen-Belsen, in late 1944–early 1945, particularly her devotion to the children in the camp. She continued her work even after the camp was liberated by the British in May 1945 and remained in contact with the children who survived the Holocaust until the end of her life.
The geographical scope of the volume expands in the fourth part to include other locations than those in Poland and Lithuania. Following on from Oliver B. Pollak’s chapter on Felix Bachmann’s medical memoir of Terezín in Vienna (which also includes the noteworthy short medical reports he wrote there), Alexander and Arkady Bielostotzki look at physicians in the Soviet city of Dniepropetrovsk, whilst Ster Elisavetski focuses on the Jewish physicians who organised medico-sanitary services in Soviet partisan units acting in Ukraine. These chapters are an inspired addition to the volume, as more research is indeed needed about other examples of Jewish medical resistance in the Holocaust. Two such instances immediately come to mind: the Jewish hospital in Kolozsvár/Cluj during the period between 1940 and 1945 and the typhus and dysentery epidemics in Transnistria during 1941–2. Extending the compass of research to include the Jewish medical resistance in Hungary and Romania, for instance, could only be beneficial.
Certainly, this volume will prompt new edited collections and monographs to be written about this important topic, which only recently has received the scholarly attention it deserves. As Yulian Rafes remarks in the Afterword, there are a great many nuances of the ethical and human dimensions of Jewish medical resistance, before and during the Holocaust, that require substantial analytical and archival research as well as empathy and understanding. This volume represents a salutary step in the right direction. It is an important and indispensable contribution not only to the history of Jewish medical resistance during the Holocaust but to the history of medicine and medical ethics more broadly. Not only the specialists but also the wider reading public deserve to know about it.
