Podcast - Samuel Kassow - Epidemics in the Warsaw Ghetto - GEOP_Karolina Zagórska

[00:00:00] Welcome to What's New, What's Next? Jewish studies in the time of the pandemic. My name is Samuel Kassow from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, USA. And my topic today is epidemics and medicine, the struggle against epidemics in the Warsaw Ghetto.

[00:00:30] And since I'm not a doctor or medical historian, I want to say right off the bat that in addition to my own work, the Ringelblum Archive in the Warsaw Ghetto, I've relied very heavily on three scholars Miriam Offer, Levi Stone and Charles Rolland. So much of what I have to say is opposed to their work. I want to start this short talk with a reference to an amazing document that was written by Leyb Goldin in the Warsaw Ghetto, and that was found in the boxes of the Ringelblum Archive. Leyb Goldin did not survive the war, but he left an essay called "Chronicle of a Single Day", which was written in August 1941 before there was any knowledge or awareness of the final solution. And Goldin's character had reached the point where he had no more money, where he had no more possessions to sell, where his only meal of the day was the soup kitchen. And he counted down the hours in the minutes, five hours, four hours, three hours until he would get out of bed, go and get that one bowl of soup that he was now totally fixated on. And he knew that when you've reached that point where you depend on the soup kitchen where you're only getting five hundred six hundred calories a day, you will starve to death, you'll starve but very slowly in two months or three months.

[00:02:16] And on his way to the soup kitchen, he sees Jews at various stages of starvation, knowing that he himself will be there in a very short time. Some are stumbling. Some are lying down on the street here and there. There's a corpse already stripped, covered with newspaper. He knows that unless the war end soon that will be his fate. And he writes, We have become just like animals. He thinks we're no longer human. But then on his way back, he sees something that startles him. He passes a store front, brightly lighted, and there in full view, there are doctors operating on a child. Why are they doing this? He asks, why are they trying to save this kid? Why are they to what are they bringing him back? But then it dawns on him that whatever you may say and whatever you might think, animals don't operate on their own. Humans do, but not animals.

[00:03:19] And so the dogged struggle waged by the doctors and nurses in the Warsaw Ghetto under terrible conditions where most doctors are very little and we're and we're quite a few themselves, are on the verge of starvation at a time when the Germans have broken up the great Jewish hospital, the Chisti Hospital, where they had looted the equipment of Jewish hospitals and clinics to do medical work. This was an act of dedication and of defiance and of obligation. And so perhaps the struggle of Jewish doctors against disease should be recorded in the wider story of Jewish resistance. Now, not all Jewish doctors were saints. Some became totally corrupt. One notorious physician who exploited the suffering of his fellow Jews went to the Umschlagplatz, the way station to the Treblinka death camp with seven million. What is in his suitcase.

[00:04:22] There were doctors who took bribes to exempt from forced labor or from the dreaded "parówki" the disinfection baths, which were sadistic, humiliating and basically useless. But we should think of a graphic image written down by the head of the health service of the Judenrat in the Warsaw Ghetto, Dr. Israel Milejkowski, who perished in 1943, and Milejkowski wrote for the Ringelblum Archive that when the historian of the future looks at the Warsaw ghetto, he might do well to think of the image of a big boiling kettle. When you look at the image of a big boiling kettle, the top level is certainly visible, it's seething, it's boiling, it's roiling that top level, that visible level, Milejkowski called the corruption, the demoralization of the ghetto, the police, the informers, the speculators, the people who are benefited from the suffering of their fellow Jews.

[00:05:42] But then Milejkowski continued, if you look if you make the effort to look deeper.

[00:05:53] You see something else, you see more people, hundreds of thousands of people helping each other in house committees, families helping their neighbors, people struggling to maintain their human dignity in the face of oppression and German attempts to humiliate and dehumanize them. And we can say that an objective look at how the doctors of the Warsaw Ghetto fought epidemics impels us to look at their story with respect and empathy and at the same time to understand that for the most part, the medical profession in the Warsaw Ghetto passed the moral test.

[00:06:46] Now, before the war, Polish Jewry had worked had already organized a wide ranging medical system, the taus to deal with children's health, the centers to help orphans, a whole network of hospitals, about 40 in all, a model nursing school in Warsaw. The Chester Hospital was one of the best in Poland. Located in the outskirts of the capital city, the Bersohn Bauman Children's Hospital was one of the best in Europe. More than half of all doctors in private practice in Poland were Jewish. And so this network and this experience was immediately mobilized when the war began and about 800 doctors would end up in the Warsaw Ghetto, which on paper was a pretty good ratio to the overall population. And so when we consider the story of doctors in the Warsaw Ghetto, we should see it as an integral part of the wider story of Jewish resistance, not just armed fighters, not just armed resistance, but resistance through archives, schools, the underground press, daycare, smuggling. The Germans thought they would crush the Jews. And to be sure, many Jews did crack.

[00:08:16] But as a community, there was a widespread struggle to stay afloat. And that hospital, that operation that Goldin witnessed, this was just a key example.

[00:08:30] Now in the Warsaw Ghetto, about a hundred thousand Jews and all succumb to disease and starvation. That was a that was about 20 percent of the ghetto population. A shocking figure. But look at it in another way. If we want to ask, is the glass half empty or half full? Somehow 80 percent of the Jews in the ghetto managed to remain alive until the deportations to Treblinka began. Now, when we try to ask ourselves how many succumb to disease and how many succumb to which diseases, the statistics are very, very imperfect. And in most cases it was difficult to determine whether death was caused by hunger or by disease for what they're worth. I cite some statistics gathered by Miriam Offer and I quote, The ghetto physicians reported about ninety eight thousand deaths from illness between September 1939 and December 1942. From the beginning of the war to December 1942 Typhus accounted for about three percent of all the deaths in the ghetto and hunger for about eighteen point seven percent of the seventy seven thousand one hundred twenty one fatalities for which ghetto physicians did not specify causes. It's presumed that a third were from tuberculosis. If so, hunger and tuberculosis together accounted for a majority of all deaths. Thus, contrary to the German misrepresentation of typhus as the Jewish disease, both morbidity and mortality were caused mainly by hunger and its complications, which were brought about solely by ghetto conditions.

[00:10:31] So, in short, hunger was the biggest killer in the ghetto. TB and its various forms was a widespread and lethal disease. The typhoid fever epidemic, which broke out right after the siege of Warsaw when the water supply was compromised, was quickly brought into harm. Dysentery certainly killed many people, but the point that we're making here is that relatively few Jews died of typhus, but nonetheless, compared to other diseases, this is the disease that the Germans most cared about, as Christopher Browning points out in his important research. The real impetus for the formation of the Warsaw ghetto came from German doctors in occupied Poland who said it was necessary to prevent epidemics. And as we know, the medical profession was a major source of Nazi support, and doctors assumed a privileged place in Nazi visions of a transformed Europe. One Nazi leader said National Socialism is nothing else than applied biology. The doctors will be enlisted in this magnificent project to cull inferior races, to improve the gene pool and to breed for a cleaner Europe when Hitler in Mein Kampf compared Jews to vermin and bacilli. His view was shared by many German doctors.

[00:12:11] One doctor who worked in Auschwitz, Fritz Klein, was asked how did he square his Hippocratic oath with with his selections for the gas chambers? And Klein said he had no problem with that, that the Jews were a diseased appendix in the body of mankind and he was eliminating that man. There was nothing inconsistent with the oath he took to preserve health. So this trope of Jews as spreaders of disease was the major theme of Nazi anti-Semitism. And because typhus was spread by lice, which was associated with dirt and lack of cleanliness, lack of bathing, it was very convenient to see typhus, one as a Jewish disease and two as a disease, which, if the Jews were simply left to roam around, could assume dangerous proportions and infect German soldiers in the Kaunas in the ghetto, in October 1941, when the Germans heard that there was typhus in the Jewish hospital, they lock the hospital and they burned everybody inside. Doctors, nurses and patients. And for many Jewish doctors, it was a matter of life and death to make sure that cases of typhus were not reported to the Germans. The medical team that was appointed to serve with the civil administration of German occupied Poland, headed by Dr. Yuste

[00:14:01] W. was very, very anti-Semitic and in a various memoranda, they called on the German authorities to keep Jews from wandering around in a medical conference records of October 1941. We see from the protocol that most doctors applauded when the suggestion was made to deter Jews from leaving the ghettos by shooting. And indeed, in November 1941 the first Jews were executed in Warsaw simply for the fact that they left the ghetto to go try to find food for their families.

[00:14:49] Now, while the Germans saw typhus as a Jewish disease, the fact was that before the war, typhus was quite rare among Polish Jews that occurred mainly in the poor villages of eastern Poland. But where people bathe regularly when they wash their clothing regularly, it was very unlikely to happen. But the German invasion of Poland resulted in massive impoverishment and displacement.

[00:15:16] Many refugees and the conditions for typhus quickly reappeared, and very quickly, the Germans began to hang posters all over the country showing a louse the face of a bearded Jew with the caption Typhus, lice, Jews avoid Jews and keep yourself healthy. Even before the Warsaw Ghetto was established, the Germans proclaimed an epidemic danger zone. In Warsaw, which was the of course, happened to be the home of the majority of the population.

[00:16:03] Now the Warsaw Ghetto had ideal conditions for the spread of typhus. There were one hundred fifty thousand refugees who were dumped into the ghetto. They may have been middle class and even rich yesterday, but all of a sudden, with no warning, they were thrown out of their homes and provincial towns, dumped into the ghetto with no money and no possessions put into terrible refugee centers, which sometimes contain two or three thousand people. And they were doomed to a slow death by starvation and disease. There were 9 to 10 people to a room in the refugee centers. The crowding was even worse. A critical point to remember is that there is very little coal in the Warsaw Ghetto, meaning very little heat, meaning that in the winter pipes froze.

[00:16:57] Toilets didn't work. Heaps of feces and filth accumulated in many buildings which were religiously recorded by German film crews and propaganda crews. Bathing facilities were totally inadequate. The streets in the ghetto were extremely crowded, and the crowding was exacerbated by a diabolic German policy of creating choke points where you could only get from A to B. by going a roundabout way, which forced you into a very narrow point.

[00:17:30] So even if you yourself kept clean by some miracle, it was hard to avoid brushing against people on the street who who had lice. The official food ration, the official food ration was only 200 calories a day, so only massive smuggling kept the ghetto afloat. Adam Czerniaków, the head of the Judenrat estimated that about 90 percent of the calories in the ghetto were smuggled in. The price of food,

[00:18:00] therefore, it was very, very high. So how did Jews feed themselves? Well, a hundred thousand Jews in the ghetto or on the verge of starvation and about to die. A hundred thousand were very poor and about two hundred thousand were staying afloat, could afford a doctor, could afford health care, and about twenty thousand were in the top economic rock. They were the smugglers. They were speculators. They had developed home industries which traded with the Aryan side. How did Jews raise the money to buy food?

[00:18:37] Keep in mind that a loaf of bread, a kilo of bread costs 12 zlotys later, 15, 20, 16 zlotys. A Jew working in an ordinary job could only make six zlotys a day to feed a family of four in a normal way, cost about a thousand zlotys a month. So what other Jews do? They sold possessions. If you were lucky enough to have lived in the ghetto before the war, didn't have to move. Keep your possessions and you would sell them off bit by bit until the day came when you ran out of things to sell and then you moved a step lower.

[00:19:18] You were closer to death. And as the epidemics raged, the Jews mounted a wide ranging effort to fight back the Judenrat' health department.

[00:19:32] The person, Bauman Children's Hospital, the Chisti Hospital was broken up and it was forced into the ghetto, where it was housed in various buildings where if a tuberculosis patient needed an X-ray. He'd be put in a cart and taken in the open air a mile to another place to get an X-ray. So it was real chaos. But nevertheless, you had various heroic figures who managed to organize a response, and that response was marginally effective.

[00:20:16] Now, what the Germans, as I said, most cared about was typhus and the German doctor who directly supervised the Jews, the Jewish doctors in the ghetto, and the Jewish doctor who was most directly concerned with the type of epidemic, was a gentleman named Dr. Wilhelm Hagen, who proceeded to a distinguished career after World War Two. Now, Hagen was a former socialist. He was no rabbit Nazi. He showed it a great deal of sympathy for the Polish population and indeed, his sympathy with the Poles got him into trouble with the SS and he left Warsaw in 1943.

[00:21:02] So in other words, Hagen had the reputation of a liberal. But how did this, quote unquote, liberal doctor treat the Jews? Yes, he believed that if the Nazis increased the food supply to the ghetto, that would be an effective measure against typhus. Yes, he understood that something more than one hundred thousand refugees into the ghetto certainly did not help fight the disease. But in the bottom line, he still believed, along with his more toxified colleagues, that typhus was a Jewish disease, that it was caused by Jewish habits and Jewish filth. And he, too, advocated draconian punishments to keep Jews from leaving the ghetto and spreading the disease. And one of the worst things that Hagen forced the Judenrat to do was to impose quarantines on entire buildings and entire blocks, quarantines which doomed the residents locked up inside the buildings to starvation because people were not even allowed to bring in food. And then there were the dreaded parówki, the compulsory disinfection where an entire building was emptied of its inhabitants.

[00:22:24] And they had to go to these pathetically inadequate disinfection and shower facilities where they were stripped naked and often they had to wait naked, sometimes in the open air in winter for 24 hours without food. And by the time most of them got to the showers, the cold had run out and the water was cold. And of course, all these people milling together instead of limiting the disease, these procedures actually spread the disease.

[00:23:02] For some reason, the typhus epidemic began to abate in the early months of 1942, and a lot of research is going on, trying to figure out why Dr. Ludvig Hirschfeld, who played a major role in the efforts to fight typhus in the ghetto, he was an he was an eminent professor, doctor not liked by the Jews because he was a convert.

[00:23:34] Hirschfeld himself theorized that perhaps measures taken by the doctors in early 1942 began to have a positive effect on the epidemic, ending the quarantines, establishing treatment in individual buildings, localized isolation rooms and so on.

[00:23:57] But the fact is that by the time the liquidation of the ghetto began in the summer of 1942, typhus was becoming less of a problem. I want to end my talk about Jewish doctors in the Warsaw Ghetto by talking about the Bersohn and Bauman Children's Hospital for Jewish Children, which was founded in 1878 and in the ghetto.

[00:24:29] It was led by the legendary Dr. Anna Braude Heller, who stated her post until she was killed in 1943. There was another doctor in the children's hospital, Adina Blady-Szwajger, who later became an underground courier and survived the war. And the Germans ordered the final liquidation of the Children's Hospital on September 12th, 1940, to Dr. Szwajger decided to poison all the children and spare them the horrors of Treblinka.

[00:25:03] There was a nurse, Dora Binyamin, who gave the Anick Shahbazi revealing document.

[00:25:09] And in this document, reread that on the night of March 3rd, 1941, Biedermann and her assistant were deluged with work. They had to wash, feed and give injections to 50 children and all of a sudden the telephone rang. Ten new children had arrived. There were no beds, blankets or clothing. The hospital had no heat. Each bed already contained two children. Binyomin was told to add a third child to each bed. They just arrived from a small town. They all had measles. In one bed, three small children lay in a pile of waste. All three were crying and I quote, A swollen five year old is lying in the corridor, is dying of hunger. He came to the hospital yesterday to swollen eyes, hands and feet like little pumpkins. We did all the tests. Kidney, heart trouble. It's neither. The child barely moves his lips and asked for a piece of bread. I give him something to eat. Maybe he'll swallow, but no. His throat is swollen. Nothing goes down. It's too late. The doctor asks, Have you eaten something at home? No. Do you want to eat now? Yes. After a few minutes for the last time, he says a piece of bread.

[00:26:25] And with these last words, he dies.

[00:26:30] We all know the story of Janusz Korczak, how he refused to leave, how he refused to leave his young charges and marched with them to the Umschlagplatz and from there to Treblinka. But the story of Korczak is not an isolated one. There were many doctors and nurses who might have been able to try to save themselves, go to the Aryan side, but they, too, stayed with their patients and charges until the bitter end. And this is a story that we would do well to remember. Thank you.

[00:27:04] Thank you for listening to what's new. What's Next. Jewish studies in the time of Pandemic. Check out POLIN Museum's website for new podcasts in the series. For regular updates

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[00:27:28] This podcast series is a part of the Global Education Outreach Program supported by Taube Philanthropies, the William K.Bowes Jr. Foundation and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland.