Jewish Medical Activity in the Ghettos under the Nazi Regime: Characteristics and Broad Historical Context

Earlier we mentioned the passive and quiet heroic stand of the educators and primarily that of Dr. Korczak . . . The conduct of the doctors and nurses at the Jewish hospital . . . was similar . . . a few dozen doctors and nurses stood guard and did not abandon the patients until the very last moment. When . . . more than 1,000 patients were loaded onto the train cars, a small number of doctors and nurses went with them. Such was the behaviour of the people who were viewed as subhuman by the Nazis.

emanuel ringelblum, Ketavim aharonim

Research on Jewish medicine in the ghettos and camps began during the Holocaust itself. It was initiated by Jewish physicians and scientists in various locations, who suffered alongside their fellow Jews under the Nazi regime. They observed and documented levels of morbidity and mortality and the medical services that were established. Jewish physicians who survived the Holocaust and a small number of historians continued this documentation and memorialization project, mainly in the two decades after the war. However, with the rise of academic research on other aspects of the Holocaust and as those who had been active in this field grew old and died, research on Jewish medicine was shunted to the margins. A change has occurred in the last three decades, and since the 1980s interest in the topic has been revived.

This chapter describes the main characteristics of Jewish medical activity during the Holocaust which have emerged from the studies published to date. It proposes an explanation for this phenomenon, which is shown to be unique compared with other cases of genocide, in a broad historical context.

Research on medicine during the nazi era and the holocaust

Following Raul Hilberg, most Holocaust scholars differentiate between ‘perpetrators’, ‘victims’, and ‘bystanders’, even though this division might be problematic because of possible overlap and/or other potential categories.¹ Most ‘perpetrator researchers’ ignored the Jewish aspect; most ‘bystander researchers’ focused on the behaviour and attitude to the fate of the Jews by governments, populations, organizations, and so on; and most ‘victim researchers’ focused on the Jews. Most of the latter were Jewish, including prominent scholars from Israel, who viewed these events primarily as part of Jewish history, despite their general awareness of the other frameworks. Thus, each area of research was turned mainly inwards, with some exceptions.²

A similar division has been made between research on Nazi medicine and research on Jewish medicine during the Holocaust. Research on Nazi medicine has undergone a notable revival over the last three decades. Studies have focused on the development of theories of eugenics, their inclusion in the conceptualization of racial theory and its implementation under the Nazi regime in special research institutions, and public health systems developed by Germany as a modern state. They accentuated the conceptual exclusion of the Jews from the German race, in particular, and the racial hierarchy, in general, ultimately leading to ‘justification’ for their extermination.³ Another focus was on human experimentation, mainly in the concentration camps on victims deemed as ‘life unworthy of life’. The material collected for the trials of the Nazi physicians in Nuremberg in 1946 and 1947 was an important source for this research.

Jewish medicine during the Holocaust was researched largely by physicians who were not professional historians but whose main interest lay in medical fields.⁴ As mentioned, this topic generated great interest in the two decades after 1945. Dr Meir Marek Dworzecki was a physician in the Vilna ghetto and the camps who survived. After the war, alongside his work as a physician, he researched the Holocaust in general and its medical aspects in particular and taught the first university courses in the field. His writings had a tremendous influence on researchers of medicine and the Holocaust in Israel but only a small number have been translated into English.⁵ This was followed by a twenty-year slowdown, until interest in the field was reawakened in the mid-1980s, which has continued until today.⁶ This research focused on the medical systems in several large...