A Polish Doctor In The Nazi Camps

Jadwiga Lenartowicz Rylko, known as Jadzia (Yah′-jah), was a young Polish Catholic physician in Łódź at the start of World War II. Suspected of resistance activities, she was arrested in January 1944. For the next fifteen months, she endured three Nazi concentration camps and a forty-two-day death march, spending part of this time working as a prisoner-doctor to Jewish slave laborers. A Polish Doctor in the Nazi Camps follows Jadzia from her childhood and medical training, through her wartime experiences, to her struggles to create a new life in the postwar world. Jadzia’s daughter, anthropologist Barbara Rylko-Bauer, constructs an intimate ethnography that weaves a personal family narrative against a twentieth-century historical backdrop. As Rylko-Bauer travels back in time with her mother, we learn of the particular hardships that female concentration camp prisoners faced. The struggle continued after the war as Jadzia attempted to rebuild her life, first as a refugee doctor in Germany and later as an immigrant to the United States. Like many postwar immigrants, Jadzia had high hopes of making new connections and continuing her career. Unable to surmount personal, economic, and social obstacles to medical licensure, however, she had to settle for work as a nurse’s aide. As a contribution to accounts of wartime experiences, Jadzia’s story stands out for its sensitivity to the complexities of the Polish memory of war. Built upon both historical research and conversations between mother and daughter, the story combines Jadzia’s voice and Rylko-Bauer’s own journey of rediscovering her family’s past. The result is a powerful narrative about struggle, survival, displacement, and memory, augmenting our understanding of a horrific period in human history and the struggle of Polish immigrants in its aftermath.

Gisella Perl’s memoir is an extraordinarily candid account of women’s extreme efforts to survive Auschwitz. It was the first memoir by a woman survivor and established the model for understanding the gendered Nazi policies and practices targeting Jewish women as racially poisonous.

“[Dr. Reicher] lived through the Second World War in Poland, dodging bullets, uprisings and deportations—not to mention betrayal, starvation and airless hideouts—in a manner more reminiscent of a talented outlaw than a mild-mannered dermatologist . . . It is the impressive simplicity of the good doctor’s writing that makes [t]his book resemble [Victor] Klemperer’s, and the detailed observations of its report that makes it emotionally memorable. . . . William Carlos Williams once said that people who prize information are perishing daily for want of the information that can be found only in poetry. By the same token, there will never be a time when we will not need the information that an important, evocative book like Country of Ash provides.” —VIVIAN GORNICK, Moment magazine Country of Ash is the starkly compelling, original chronicle of a Jewish doctor who miraculously survived near-certain death, first inside the Lodz and Warsaw ghettoes, where he was forced to treat the Gestapo, then on the Aryan side of Warsaw, where he hid under numerous disguises. He clandestinely recorded the terrible events he witnessed, but his manuscript disappeared during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. After the war, reunited with his wife and young daughter, he rewrote his story. Peopled with historical figures like the controversial Chaim Rumkowski, who fancied himself a king of the Jews, to infamous Nazi commanders and dozens of Jews and non-Jews who played cat and mouse with death throughout the war, Reicher’s memoir is about a community faced with extinction and the chance decisions and strokes of luck that kept a few stunned souls alive. Edward Reicher (1900–1975) was born in Lodz, Poland. He graduated with a degree in medicine from the University of Warsaw, later studied dermatology in Paris and Vienna, and practiced in Lodz as a dermatologist and venereal disease specialist both before and after World War II. A Jewish survivor of Nazi-occupied Poland, Reicher appeared at a tribunal in Salzburg to identify Hermann Höfle and give an eyewitness account of Höfle’s role in Operation Reinhard, which sent hundreds of thousands to their deaths in the Nazi concentration camps of Poland. Country of Ash, first published posthumously in France, was translated from the French by Magda Bogin and includes a foreword by Edward Reicher’s daughter Elisabeth Bizouard-Reicher.

Auschwitz was one of the first books to bring the full horror of the Nazi death camps to the American public; this is, as the New York Review of Books said, "the best brief account of the Auschwitz experience available."

1943: Polish underground fighter John Wiernicki is captured and beaten by the Gestapo, then shipped to Auschwitz. In this chilling memoir, Wiernicki, a Gentile, details "life" in the infamous death camp, and his battle to survive, physically and morally, in the face of utter evil. The author begins by remembering his aristocratic youth, an idyllic time shattered by German invasion. The ensuing dark days of occupation would fire the adolescent Wiernicki with a burning desire to serve Poland, a cause that led him to valiant action and eventual arrest. As a young non-Jew, Wiernicki was acutely sensitive to the depravity and injustice that engulfed him at Auschwitz. He bears witness to the harrowing selection and extermination of Jews doomed by birth to the gas chambers, to savage camp policies, brutal SS doctors, and rampant corruption with the system. He notes the difference in treatment between Jews and non-Jews. And he relives fearful unexpected encounters with two notorious "Angels of Death": Josef Mengele and Heinz Thilo. War in the Shadow of Auschwitz is an important historical and personal document. Its vivid portrait of prewar and wartime Poland, and of German concentration camps, provides a significant addition to the growing body of testimony by gentile survivors and a heartfelt contribution to fostering comprehension and understanding.

Fifty years after the liberation of the concentration camps, this memoir by Lucie Adelsberger, a Jewish female physician shipped to Auschwitz and put to work in the infirmary of the infamous death camp's Gypsy section, serves as a haunting reminder of the horrors perpetrated by the Nazi regime. In this memoir, Adelsberger vividly describes the Hell that was Auschwitz, uniquely capturing the ordeals suffered by women, who were especially vulnerable once they reached the camps. Throughout her moving memoir, Adelsberger depicts the methods the Nazis used to degrade and dehumanize Jews and other holocaust victims, robbing them of their dignity, their freedom, and oftentimes their lives. Her poignant testament to the human suffering and the human spirit at Auschwitz will stir readers deeply.

Reprint. Originally published: New York: Holocaust Library, c1978.