A Doctor of the World and a Human without Frontiers

Alina Margolis-Edelman

THE WARSAW GHETTO

In Warsaw, Ala and her brother initially lived with aunt Hela (Fiszhaut), their mom’s sister, at Mokotowska street 3 in the Śródmieście district. Alina was enrolled in an underground education* course run by a girl whose father worked at the Italian embassy. Anna Margolis joined her children after a few months and immediately found a job at the Bersohn and Bauman Children’s Hospital, as the head of the tuberculosis ward. On 2 October 1940, the Germans established the Jewish district, that is, the ghetto, and the family moved to a small room in Ceglana street. But the situation was getting more and more dramatic with each passing week.

The Germans consigned more than 450,000 Jews to the ghetto, where the living conditions were extremely harsh, hospitals and shelters were overcrowded, food and medications were running low, and lots of people died of hunger and various diseases. A job at the hospital was a privilege and offered an opportunity for survival. Alina was admitted to a nursing school. This was a unique place – an enclave inside the hell of the ghetto. In their pink dresses and starched white aprons, its students were a sharp contrast to the grey streets of the ghetto, and looked like phantoms out of this world. Alina learned to help the sick: she administered injections and IVs and applied dressings. She mostly worked with children. Perhaps this experience prompted her to start medical studies after the war in order to save lives.

Her brother was too young to work. Thanks to Anna’s friends, he was sheltered on the Aryan side*. He survived the war under a false name – which he retained in the following years – in an orphanage run by monks in Zakopane.

For some time, the doctors and nurses in the Warsaw ghetto were untouchable. However, this changed on 22 July 1942, when the Germans launched a major deportation scheme and took around 300,000 Jews to the Treblinka extermination camp to murder them. Among the deportees were many nurses and doctors, including Janusz Korczak and his associate Stefania Wilczyńska, together with the children from the orphanage which they both ran. Alina Margolis was once arrested in a street round-up and sent to the Umschlagplatz, but she managed to escape and hide. Mrs. Margolis did not want to take any chances and sent her daughter out of the ghetto, to her friends’ place. But three days later – to her mother’s horror – Alina came back. Mrs. Margolis arranged another hiding place for her a few months later. Alina was now using the genuine documents of Alicja Zacharczyk, a girl who was already dead, and stayed at various places. She posed as the daughter of a doctor who was in a concentration camp and nobody had heard from him. She helped to bake cookies and sell them, but she was also involved in underground activities, distributing money among the Jews who were in hiding. In April 1943, when she was watching a burning ghetto from the outside, she did not know that her mom had already escaped and was hiding somewhere in Warsaw.

“We spent half of the time in hospitals. One of them, a children’s hospital, was located in Śliska street, very close to the school, and another one, for adults, was in Leszno street. Then, we also worked at a hospital in the Stawki district. We would walk to the hospital in uniforms. /…/ No wonder we were untouchable for a long time. Policemen did not bother us, and if the Germans did occasionally take one of our girls to the Umschlagplatz, she would always return. Of course, it wasn’t like that forever.

Looking through the window, I spotted Felka at the Umschlagplatz. That day, she was going to jump the wall. A friend of her parents had paid off the right people, and she was supposed to wait by the wall at dusk. She was a fair blonde and friends were waiting for her on the Aryan side. She really could make it. And on this very day, her mother was arrested at eight in the morning. She saw her being ferried in a rickshaw down the empty ghetto streets. Felka chased the rickshaw, the policeman pushing her away and screaming, ‘You’re young, you have to live”. They got to the Umschlagplatz and she rushed straight to the train cars. She made it somehow, at the last gasp. Just as the door was about to shut, she noticed her mother, snuck under the elbow of a Ukrainian guard, and forced her way into the car, which was already bursting at the seams.”

“Time went by, the ghetto was winding down. The school was wrapping up. We were getting out of a cocoon and into the real life, without any protection. Suddenly, we were just like everyone else.”

“When I was leaving the ghetto, mom gave me a small ampule with cyanide. It was white powder that looked like icing sugar. Mom said, ‘Don’t ever lose this, and have it always on you. Should the Germans catch you, should they torture you beyond your limits and push you onto a car, don’t be afraid, just break the ampule and swallow the powder. You won’t be scared any more and you won’t know anything. So don’t be afraid. And never, ever, lose this”.

*underground education – classes and lectures held during the war as a form of defying the Germans, who believed that the Poles should not receive education

*Aryan side – this is what the area outside the ghetto was called during the war. The Jews were not allowed to stay on the Aryan side, but many of them were still hiding there.

WHAT DO YOU THINK? What were the ghettos, which the Germans established during the Second World War? Consult a map of Warsaw to find out how vast an area the ghetto stretched over. Search the Internet for more photographs from the Warsaw ghetto and think of what picture they paint of the living conditions of the Jewish residents of this sealed district. Find out what dangers faced the Jews hiding on the Aryan side and the Poles who helped them. Look for information about Janusz Korczak and the orphanage he ran.

Photo caption: Students of the Jewish nursing school  in Mariańska street

Photo caption: The Bersohn and Bauman Children’s Hospital, where Anna Margolis was head of the tuberculosis ward

Photo caption: The streets of the Warsaw ghetto witnessed increasing poverty

Photo caption: Starving children of the ghetto