Reviewing: “White Coats in the Ghetto: Jewish Medicine in Poland During the Holocaust,” by Miriam Offer. Yad Vashem Publications. 2020. English. Hardcover. 702 pages. ISBN-13: 978-9653086029.
The author of this fascinating book is Dr. Miriam Offer, a senior lecturer at Western Galilee College, Akko, Israel, who teaches the history of medicine during the Holocaust in the Sackler Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University.
A number of studies have focused on Nazi medicine and physicians, and the special German research institutes that were able to implement racial doctrine and eugenic theories through the sophisticated German health systems. Medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners, who were viewed as “unfit to live,” but suitable enough to serve as guinea pigs in medical research, have also been the subject of serious studies.
Research on Jewish medicine during the Shoah has, for the most part, been devoted to the medical systems in several of the large ghettos in Poland, Lithuania, Germany and other countries, and in Theresienstadt. Issues such as the sanitation and medical structures that are touted as examples of Jewish persistence and resoluteness are emphasized. Offer said lauding these achievements reminds one of the attitude described by Israeli historian Amos Goldberg: “This image of the victim with his or her interiority intact and with the ability to maintain inner freedom under all circumstances dominates the historical and public discourse of the Holocaust.”
Offer’s groundbreaking account of the creation of the Jewish medical system in the Warsaw Ghetto, the largest ghetto under German control, is extremely important. On October 12, 1940, the Germans ordered the Jews to move to a designated area in Warsaw, which they sealed off in November 1940. Clinics, laboratories, hospitals and pharmacies were established in the ghetto. With the aid of physicians, health measures were enacted, and training facilities for medical and nursing personnel were founded. They even conducted medical research on typhus and hunger.
This system did not occur ex nihilo, she said. It was based on the “autonomous and separate” Jewish infrastructure that developed particularly between the world wars. This should not be surprising. In 1931, there were 4,488 Jewish self-employed physicians throughout Poland, and 2,256 Jewish pharmacists and laboratory employees, about one-fourth of all practitioners in the country. When the Germans invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, there were 800 Jewish doctors in Warsaw, a significant figure considering there were more than 400,000 Jews in the ghetto at its highest.
A separate Jewish medical system emerged as a result of Polish antisemitism. Many Jews who wanted to study medicine were forced to go to Germany and Austria. Upon their return to Poland, they were able to apply the latest methods in medicine and nursing practices in Jewish medical institutions, especially in Warsaw. Due to the size of the Jewish community in the city, they were “at the forefront of modern medicine.” This cutting-edge infrastructure enabled the Jewish medical community to deal with the challenges of disease and other medical issues they confronted in the ghetto.
The detailed information we have about the medical issues the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto confronted is the result of the extraordinary documentation from two reasons, Offer notes: One is the high standard of Jewish medicine, and the other is the compelling desire to document the Germans’ attempt to eradicate the Jewish people from the face of the earth.
This study raises a number of questions which Offer asks and answers: “Why did the ghetto medical staff invest such a massive share of their efforts and resources, which were so limited, to treat patients who were doomed to die no matter what?” and “What was the point of sustaining all of the institutions, activities and studies, if everyone in the ghetto was destined to die?”
Dr. Alex Grobman is senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and on the advisory board of The National Christian Leadership Conference for Israel (NCLCI). He lives in Jerusalem.
