A Doctor of the World and a Human without Frontiers

Alina Margolis-Edelman

ALIVE AGAIN

The war was yet to end when Alina Margolis and her mom returned to Łódź. Soon, she was joined by Marek Edelman. The couple took up residence in Mostowa street (presently Zelwerowicza street) and enrolled in medical studies. Actually, it was Alina who enrolled both of them, but Marek did not oppose. During the first few months, in the evenings, Marek dictated to Alina a report from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which was released in November 1945 in Łódź as Getto walczy [The Ghetto Fights]. At the same time, they were also looking for Elżunia, daughter of the late Zygmunt Frydrych, one of the ghetto fighters. They found her and brought her to Łódź. Her stay was supposed to be brief, but her departure was delayed. The girl started to get used to them and even addressed Alina as “mom”. But in 1946, the couple took Elżunia to Sweden, where she was welcomed by her family, who had come from New York to adopt the orphaned girl saved from the Shoah. Poland suffered from postwar poverty and did not offer a sense of security. Alina and Marek spent two months on a foreign journey: traveling from Sweden, they visited Belgium, France, and Italy. In all those places, people tried to persuade them to stay, but they returned to Poland, where they believed their future was.

In the years immediately after the war, Łódź served as Poland’s capital, because Warsaw was demolished. Political and cultural life in the city was in full swing. The youth wanted to reclaim some of the time which the war had taken from them, so they studied, played politics, partied, and started families. At that time, the Edelmans’ inner circle included Tamara Kołakowska and Leszek Kołakowski. Tamara was a medical student, while Leszek studied philosophy. Soon, he became assistant to Prof. Tadeusz Kotarbiński, the first president of the University of Łódź. Back then, Kołakowski was an ardent Marxist and organized political talks for students. Alina secretly attended them and even planned to join the communist party, but Marek stopped her – he had already seen communism for what it was. He was repeatedly summoned by the public security service and interrogated for long hours. Work was their distraction from communism.

Both graduated and went on to become brilliant doctors: Marek was a cardiologist, and Alina, following in her mother’s footsteps, became a pediatrician. The couple married in 1951 and their son, Aleksander, was born the same year. Five years later, they had a daughter, Ania.

Alina specialized in treating diabetes in children and broke new grounds in that field in Poland. She made a number of trips to France to educate herself still further, and then opened a clinic for diabetic children in Rabka. She also organized camps, during which she taught children how to administer insulin. Her own children were jealous, because she spent more time with her little patients than she did at home, and Aleksander even learned how to inject himself to emulate them. Alina later admitted that she had not been a very good mother, because she had devoted more time to her work than to her children. The only exception was the holiday season: in the summer, the Edelmans would go to the lakeside, and in the winter, they would ski in the mountains. After one of Alina’s visits to France, the family bought a car, a German P70, whose body was made of plywood. By the Polish standards, this was a luxury, but Aleksander recalls that the family was not exactly flush with cash.

Photo caption: Alina Margolis and Marek Edelman in Monte Carlo, 1946

Photo caption: Tamara Kołakowska and Leszek Kołakowski were some of the Edelmans’ closest friends. Photos taken in Wisła in 1950.

Photo caption: Alina Margolis and her colleagues from the children’s hostpital in Łódź

Photo caption: A camp for diabetic children, pictured practicing insulin injections on a teddy bear, Kołobrzeg 1959

Photo caption: Alina and her children on vacation, 1960s

Photo caption: Little Aleksander with his beloved dog, mid-1950s

Photo caption: The Edelmans’ first car, bought with the money Alina had earned in France.

Photo caption: Marek Edelman’s book Getto Walczy [The Ghetto Fights], edited by Alina Margolis, was released by the Bund Central Committee in the fall of 1945. The cover art picture was drawn by Alina’s brother, who retained the name of Jan Kosiński, which he assumed during the war.

We had a very nice flat (in Sienkiewicza street), where a German doctor moved in with his family at the beginning of the war. He was leaving in a tearing hurry, sheet music left open on the piano. Mom moved in there. Germans had also lived at grandma’s place (in Mostowa street), and this is where I moved in with my friend Lusia and Marek. But the German tenants had completely rearranged the place: we found a yellow dotted bedtable and crystal chandeliers. The next day, we removed the crystal droplets. We sold the bedroom furniture for 10,000 zlotys, for which I bought myself high-heeled shoes.

If you could now see the conditions in which we studied in Łódź, you wouldn’t believe that the course actually produced medical doctors. Lectures were held in cinema auditoriums. They taught us mathematics before anatomy, because a mathematician was available before an anatomist was. Very often, we had no place to live, no clothes, and no food. But we were hungry for knowledge and life, and we felt like we could fly! We were quite a collection of people, all of whom had been through a lot: there were guerilla fighters, insurgents, ghetto survivors, and many former prisoners of concentration camps. We studied with Marek Edelman, whom Alina had fallen for, big time. They soon married. After all he’d been through in the ghetto, he was withdrawn and reserved. It took him years to recover his feistiness, for which we would all remember him.

Joanna Muszkowska-Penson

“We had immersed in our work completely. I was taking care of diabetic children and I would go on vacation with these children, not with my own. Children’s diabetes has serious complications affecting your eyes, neurological system, and kidneys, and children die not because of diabetes, but precisely due to these complications. Back then, these kids were my whole world. We managed to open clinics in Rabka and Kołobrzeg. We taught children how to test their urine and blood, and how to administer insulin injections on their own. We told them that from now on, they would live like all the other kids, despite the tests and injections. When I was leaving Poland, the hardest part was to leave them behind, and when I came back much later, it turned out that most of these children had died, and that out course of treatment was not enough to save their lives”.

Alina Margolis

“Back then, children were brought up in a different way. In today’s France, everybody cares a lot, and there is this term enfent roi, ‘child-king’. Our parents – that is, mine and my younger siter Ania’s – did not care about us unless we were sick. Both of them were doctors, idealists working for the cause. They invested their whole time and commitment into treating and saving people. They would not sit us on a lap or hug us. It’s not that they were frigid, it’s just that they paid no attention to us. After all they’d been through, they may have thought that as long as the kids were healthy and fed, they had everything they could ask for. They lived their lives, and we – their children – lived ours. Ania played with other girls, and I played with other boys. We rode a bicycle, went to a park, or to the movies. It was nothing out of the ordinary”.

Aleksander Edelman

WHAT DO YOU THINK? Did you realize how difficult were the conditions in which young people studied in Poland after the war? Find information about Leszek Kołakowski. Think about what Aleksander Edelman said about his parents.