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  • A Polish Doctor in the Nazi Camps: My Mother’s Memories of Imprisonment, Immigration, and a Life Remade by Barbara Rylko-Bauer
  • Anna Muller
A Polish Doctor in the Nazi Camps: My Mother’s Memories of Imprisonment, Immigration, and a Life Remade. By Barbara Rylko-Bauer. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014. 416 pp. Hardcover, $26.95.

Many of us—historians, sociologists, and writers—have been touched by extraordinary people whose lives we feel compelled to document. Yet we are often hesitant to embark on projects that are deeply personal and emotional. Medical anthropologist Barbara Rylko-Bauer found herself in such a situation: on the one hand, she feared that the story of her mother—a Polish Nazi resistance [End Page 172] member and inmate of various Nazi concentration and forced labor camps—would fall into oblivion; on the other hand, she felt some reticence about undertaking such a study given her personal connection to the subject. Rylko-Bauer’s book, A Polish Doctor in the Nazi Camps, aims to discuss these two different but equally fascinating stories: her work is both the story of the life of Jadwiga Lenartowicz Rylko—a woman who in her late 70s had a strong spirit and a proclivity to remake her life even while facing serious obstacles—and also the story of Rylko-Bauer’s journey through many countries and archives in order to craft and provide historical context for her mother’s oral history. Investigating various state documents, private letters, maps, photos, interviews, and memoirs and conducting her own interviews in addition to her mother’s, Rylko-Bauer undertook an “intimate salvage archeology, a last-minute rescue of precious knowledge of the past” (14).

Jadwiga Lenartowicz Rylko was born and raised in Łódz in a relatively prosperous family that was able to enroll her and her two sisters at the university in Poznań. In 1930, she began studying medicine. The outbreak of the war surprised the young doctor in Łódź, where she participated in the Polish anti-Nazi resistance. In January 1944, she was arrested and sent to Ravensbrück, beginning her journey through concentration camps. From Ravensbrück she travelled through the system of the Gross-Rosen forced labor camps, during which time she was assigned the role of camp doctor. In early 1945, when the war was drawing to a close, the Nazis forced surviving inmates at Gross-Rosen to march through Germany. After six weeks of this murderous march, Rylko was registered at the Flossenburg Concentration Camp (even while facing an advancing Red Army, the Nazi authorities were still registering new prisoners).

The story of prisoners traveling through the dark world of concentration camps is relatively well known. Less known, however, are their fates in the postwar years, when masses of former prisoners struggled with decisions of what to do, where to go, and how to rebuild their lives. The image Rylko-Bauer provides is one of countless individuals on the go, returning home, searching for new jobs, dealing with the loss of family members, and even travelling for pleasure: a story of life emerging in the midst of rubble and ruins. It is a history that the author recounts beautifully, doing so, in part, thanks to the oral histories she collected—the interviews help recreate the sense of urgency of that unique moment.

Although the author had expected otherwise, the end of the war was rather anticlimactic for her mother, and it is something on which Rylko refuses to dwell: for Rylko it was life—everything that happened after the war ended—that was more important. After the war, Rylko worked in a displaced persons camp near Mannheim as a physician; in 1947, she married. Three years later, she and her husband, along with their infant (Rylko-Bauer), boarded a ship that took them to the United States, ultimately settling in Detroit. Rylko and her husband longed for family in Poland, feeling estranged from the local Polonia, yet [End Page 173] perhaps the most difficult part of immigration for them was the discrepancy between their expectations and their new reality: Rylko’s medical diploma was never recognized, so she had to work as a nurse. It...

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