A Doctor of the World and a Human without Frontiers

Alina Margolis-Edelman

FAMILY AND HOME

Alina Margolis-Edelman was born in Łódź on 18 April 1922, in a family of socially engaged doctors, a background which would surely have a bearing on her life choices.

Her paternal grandfather, Israel Margolis, was a doctor, who came to Łódź from Suwałki and practiced among the lower classes of manual laborers. His two sons also became doctors: Ignacy was an ophthalmologist, while Aleksander, Alina’s father, specialized in digestive diseases. Because of the numerus clausus regulations in place, which imposed limits on the number of Jewish students, he studied medicine in Berlin, Heidelberg, and Munich, graduating in Strasbourg in 1912. During the First World War, he worked at the infectious diseases ward of the Municipal Hospital in Radogoszcz, becoming its director in the interwar period. He was a top activist of the Bund socialist party, ran for the national parliament, and was elected a member of the Łódź Municipal Council in 1919. In the 1930s, he headed the Department of Health and was involved in various projects whose aim was to improve the standard of local healthcare by battling some of the most common diseases, such as trachoma (an eye disease) and tuberculosis. He was also an active member of the Society for Combating Illiteracy.

Alina’s mother – Anna nee Markson – was born in Warsaw, in a family of merchants. Her parents, too, gave a lot of weight to proper education of their children, and all four Markson girls earned university degrees: Anna and Maria, her younger sister, became doctors, Hela was a chemistry graduate, while Eugenia, the youngest girl, became a violinist. Aleksander, their only brother, was an engineer and settled in France.

Anna studied in Moscow, Berlin, and Petersburg, and graduated from the medical university in Bonn, where she was one of only two female students. During the lectures, both were hiding behind the backs of male students, because at that time, professors believed that women should not study at universities. Now a certified pediatrician, Anna took up a position at the Anna Maria Hospital in Łódź (currently the Janusz Korczak Hospital). Two doctors-brothers fell in love with her, and out of them, she chose Aleksander.

The couple’s wedding took place in 1921 in Katowice, where they were able to get married in a registry office. Alina was born the following year, and Olek, her brother, six years later. Both parents were very busy working, professionally and on behalf of the community, and could not spend much time with their children (who were raised by nannies), but they made sure that both Alina and Olek would receive all-round education, stressing the importance of foreign languages and reading. When Alina was in her teens, they would send her on vacation abroad. She wanted to be a teacher, but she became a doctor – a Doctor of the World.

Mum was the doctor-activist type, regardless of the circumstances she happened to face: she worked at the hospital, at school, at a clinic for poor children, she also saw patients at home. At the same time, she lived to the hilt, she partied all night long, danced, played the piano, and invited guests.

It is no surprise, then, that she didn’t see us too often. Sometimes, my brother would peek through the window and ask, ‘Do you think mommy will come see us today?’

Our dad did not attend to us at all either, but I think there was a sensitive side to him: I was told that when I was very little, he cuddled me in his arms night after night so I would stop crying; he always addressed my brother with a diminutive, and whenever he was home, he would sit us on his daybed, and even though he would fall asleep moments later, we still liked it a lot.

My father was a handsome man. He was tall, had black hair and light blue eyes. He was a doctor and the director of a large hospital in Radogoszcz in Łódź. He saw his patients at home, and although he didn’t know a single word in Jewish, he was a member of the Bund, a Jewish socialist party.

He read a lot, and every couple of days, he sent me to the library to get him another book. When he had an evening off, he played the piano, with a musical score always lying handy. Sometimes, he played in duet with mum. He liked opera, and in particular Wagner – he listened to it on the radio, always studying the musical notation in the process. He was a member of the prewar intelligentsia, boasting comprehensive knowledge and interests outside the field of his professional expertise.

Photo caption: Ala, aged seven, and her little brother Olek, whom their father fondly called Olutek. The early practice of a future pediatrician.

Photo caption: Anna Margolis with little Ala

Photo caption: Olek, Alina’s brother, with their father, Aleksander Margolis

Photo caption: A resolute Ala, aged four.

Photo caption: Anna Markson with her university friend, Berlin, 1912.

Photo caption: Ala with her parents and grandma

Photo caption: Ala (wearing a huge knot), aged three, on vacations, Brodnia near Łódź, 1924

WHAT DO YOU THINK? How would you describe Alina Margolis’ family home? How important is children’s education today, and how important was it in the early 20^th century? How would you feel if you were barred from classes only because you are a woman? Look for the definition of the phrase numerus clausus.

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

A Doctor of the World and a Human without Frontiers

Alina Margolis-Edelman

THE YEAR OF ALINA MARGOLIS-EDELMAN

On the initiative of the Marek Edelman Dialogue Center, the Łódź Municipal Council declared 2022 the Year of Alina Margolis-Edelman, a Łódź-born physician and social activist, who was particularly concerned with the well-being of children. A series of events has been planned to mark the occasion, including celebrations of the 100^th anniversary of Margolis-Edelman’s birth in the company her family and friends, various meetings, workshops, and screenings, as well as launching an interactive exhibition called “ABC of empathy”, inspired by Alina Margolis-Edelman’s life and directed at young audiences and their caretakers (teachers and parents), and a traveling exhibition addressed to secondary-school students and adults, called “A Doctor of the World and a Human without Frontiers. Alina Margolis-Edelman”.

The “ABC of empathy” exhibition, commissioned in October 2022 at the Dialogue Center in Łódź (located at Wojska Polskiego street 83), is an illustrated tour with a very special guide, in Alina Margolis-Edelman herself, or rather the little girl called Ala that she once was. An interactive space of intellectually stimulating games offers young audiences a thought-provoking experience, which will encourage them to ask questions about the world and its ethics, as well as engage them in a discussion on pressing global issues. The exhibition impresses upon a child the importance of caring about people, animals, and the whole world as a place which future generations will inherit from us.

The Alina Margolis-Edelman Award was founded in 2011 by the Empowering Children Foundation and Fundacja Zeszytów Literackich [the Literary Palimpsests Foundation]. It goes to persons with extraordinary track record of helping children and, starting in 2022, to non-governmental organizations which are particularly devoted to supporting children. In the Year of Alina Margolis-Edelman, the recipients of the award were Paulina Bownik and Mariusz Kurnyta, who helped refugee children at the Polish-Belarusian border, and the Słonie na balkonie [Elephants on a balcony] foundation, which helps children recover from traumas and mental breakdowns.

The exhibition “A Doctor of the World and a Human without Frontiers” is part of the project “The Year of Alina Margolis-Edelman”.

The project has received partial funding from the Culture Promotion Fund at the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and from the subsidy of the City of Łódź

OUR PARTNERS:

Empowering Children Foundation

Soundsitive Studio Society

Honorary patronage: The Embassy of France, Warsaw

Exhibition curator and author of the texts: Joanna Podolska

Graphic design: Adam Sikorski

Polish proofreading: Magdalena Wrzesień

English translation: Maciej Grabski

Exhibition coordinator: Jolanta Lechowska-Białecka

Project coordinator: Kamila Majchrzycka-Szymańska

Print:

SPECIAL THANKS:

We are grateful to Anna Edelman and Aleksander Edelman, for sharing family photos and documents, and for their continued help with the project.

The following people also contributed to the organization of the events held as part of the Year of Alina Margolis-Edelman:

Anna Latko, Françoise Gayral, Lisa Gayral, Tomas Gayral, Zofia Lipecka, Maria Keller-Hamela, Monika Sajkowska, Michał Szymańczak, Bożena Grzywaczewska, Marianna Grzywaczewska, Liliana Sonik, Janina Sonik, Agnieszka Holland, Edyta Wróblewska, Krystyna Zachwatowicz-Wajda, Lucyna Wiszniowska, Krzysztof Talczewski, Maciej Sadowski, Seweryn Blumsztajn, Zofia Winawer, Bożena Kisiel, Zbigniew Domagalski, Maciej Sztąberek. Thank you!

Photo and video materials:

Private collections

State Archive in Łódź

The Marek Edelman Dialogue Center in Łódź

The Museum of Independence Traditions in Łódź

POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews

The Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute

Soundsitive Studio Society

References:

Alina Margolis-Edelman, Ala z elementarza [Ala from the Reading Primer], Aneks, London 1994.

Alina Margolis-Edelman, Moralność czasu Holokaustu [Morality during the Holocaust], „Tygodnik Powszechny”, issue 50-51, 2001.

Jestem nigdzie [I am nowhere]. Natasza Kozłowska-Coudert’s interview with Alina Margolis-Edelman, „Tygiel Kultury”, issue 3, 1998.

Myśmy tam żyły jak w jakimś raju [Our life there was like a beautiful dream ]. Anka Grupińska’s interview with Alina Margolis-Edelman, „Tygodnik Powszechny”, issue 19, 2004.

Anna Bikont, Ala z Elementarza [Ala from the Reading Primer], „Wysokie Obcasy” issue 38, newspaper supplement, Gazeta Wyborcza, issue 295, 1998.

Joanna Muszkowska-Penson, Alina Margolis-Edelman i nagroda jej imienia [Alina Margolis-Edelman and her memorial prize], „Gazeta Wyborcza”, 2014.

Barbara Engelking, Jacek Leociak, Getto warszawskie. Przewodnik po nieistniejącym mieście [The Warsaw Ghetto. A Tour of a Nonexistent City], Polish Center for Holocaust Research, Warsaw 2013.

Michał Trębacz, Aleksander Margolis (1888–1939). Lekarz, społecznik, polityk [Aleksander Margolis (1888–1939): A Doctor, Activist, and Politician], [in:] Bohaterowie trudnych czasów. Zbiór VIII [The Heroes of Difficult Times. Volume 8], Biblioteka „Kroniki Miasta Łodzi”, Łódź 2013.