The most detailed study ever undertaken into the fate of more than 800 Jewish doctors who devoted themselves, in many cases until the day they died, to the care of the sick and the dying in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Maria Ciesielska, MD, PhD, is head of the UNESCO Unit at the Faculty of Medicine at the University in Haifa and a renowned specialist in the history of medicine.Nates Tali :

Tali Nates is the founder and director of the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre and chair of the South African Holocaust & Genocide Foundation. She is a historian who lectures internationally on Holocaust education, genocide prevention, reconciliation and human rights. Nates has published many articles and contributed chapters to several books, among them God, Faith & Identity from the Ashes: Reflections of Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors (2015), Remembering The Holocaust in Educational Settings (2018) and Conceptualizing Mass Violence, Representations, Recollections, and Reinterpretations (2021). She won many awards including the Kia Community Service Award (South Africa, 2015), the Gratias Agit Award (2020, Czech Republic) and the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Award (2021). She was one of the founders of the Holocaust and Tutsi Genocide Survivors groups in Johannesburg. Born to a family of Holocaust survivors, her father and uncle were saved by Oskar Schindler. The rest of the family was murdered.Friedman Jeanette :

Jeanette Friedman, a member of The Society of Professional Journalists, established her own company, The Wordsmithy, Llc. in 1979. That same year, she also founded Second Generation North Jersey for sons and daughters of Holocaust survivors. At The Wordsmithy, Ms. Friedman ghostwrites, edits and publishes books, most of them Holocaust memoirs, nursing books from handwritten manuscripts to the printed page. Her own book, Why Should I Care? Lessons from the Holocaust, written with David Gold, received critical acclaim from Holocaust educators. She also trains students to interview survivors for Names Not Numbers, a middle school Holocaust Education program. Friedman served on the NJ Governor’s Task Force for Holocaust Education under Gov. Tom Kean and is one of the founders of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. She was a Second Generation advisor to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council and founder of an online group that exchanges information about current events, the Holocaust, character development in children and multicultural and ethnic understanding. From 1990-2004, she served as executive editor of the magazine Lifestyles. In addition to maintaining The Wordsmithy, Friedman continues her volunteer work in human rights/Holocaust education and is developing a Human Rights/Holocaust resource center for the Pocono Mountain region of Northeast Pennsylvania.Albinski Luc :

Luc Albinski is the co-founder of Vantage Capital’s mezzanine business which offers long-term, growth capital to mid-size businesses across Africa. Brought up in a Polish-Catholic home, Luc learnt about his Jewish origins in his early twenties. His interest in Holocaust and genocide history springs from his personal story as a son of a Holocaust survivor as well as from his on-the-ground involvement with a non-profit during the Bosnian conflict.

Dr. Maria Ciesielska is a specialist in Family Medicine and a university lecturer with a doctorate in medical history. A keen personal interest in learning more about the fate of her Jewish peers in Warsaw during the Holocaust motivated Maria to publish an award-winning book on this topic in 2017 after years of research.

“Ciesielska, however, a specialist in family medicine and an expert in the history of medicine, has delved into the various archives in Poland, producing highly impressive findings. She presents a new, preliminary database, which will serve as a foundation for additional studies and is a significant contribution to commemorating Jewish doctors, both men and women. …Ciesielska’s findings are impressive and an invaluable achievement. Her methodically written book follows a chronological development placed in broad historical contexts and enriched by diverse sources. …Maria Ciesielska’s book sheds light on the ‘other side of the coin’ in its description of Jewish doctors. They left behind a written legacy that is also still relevant today. Their stories provide food for thought on the potential of maintaining ethical and professional strength, even in the most difficult circumstances, and of the ability to resist the forces of evil while continuing to provide patients with devoted medical care in impossible and unexpected conditions. The book also draws attention to the dozens of non-Jewish doctors, who assisted their Jewish colleagues while risking their own lives. Although their numbers were few, their inspirational actions were extraordinary.”

— Miriam Offer, Western Galilee College, Israel, Holocaust and Genocide Studies

“This meticulous account of the Warsaw Ghetto’s medical community, doctors, nurses, and pharmacists, is a long overdue tribute to an era’s unsung heroes. Drawing extensively on archives, with appendices and a photo gallery listing over seven hundred individuals, backgrounds, specialties, hospital affiliations, the author sheds light on a subculture that emerged in 1940, following the ghetto’s establishment, and their dedication under the most hellish of environments to saving or helping Jewish lives. …This poignant but well-researched book is essential for Holocaust collections.”

“…Doctors of the Warsaw Ghetto is a signal contribution to the growing scholarship on Jews in the medical fraternity during the Holocaust, and it has several virtues to commend it: its comprehensive, multifocal treatment of the subject; its attention to every dimension of medicine and healthcare in the Warsaw Ghetto; its recourse to hitherto unused source material; its profiles of specific doctors; and its inventories (in the appendices) of the names of the ghetto’s doctors. But besides being a work of meticulous research, The Doctors of the Warsaw Ghetto is a poignant tribute to the Warsaw Ghetto’s unsung medical ‘fighters.’ It was in this memorial spirit that Ciesielska, discussing her book in an article by the Jewish Book Council, remarked, ‘I don’t know if you can say Kaddish over a book. If it is possible, please do.’”

— Scott Abramson, Northwestern University, Contemporary Jewry

“The strength of this book is in this intertwining of history and memory, in giving personal accounts of events with names and photographs of those doctors and nurses who worked in the Warsaw Ghetto…For readers who belong to the generation of postmemory [it] help[s] to diminish temporal distance and facilitate identification and affiliation. Every library should have a copy of this outstanding book.”

— Henrietta Mondry, University of Canterbury, New Zealand Slavonic Journal

“[The Doctors of the Warsaw Ghetto] sheds light on the influence of doctors, nurses and other health workers on daily coping while attempting to survive and save lives. The book broadens the perspective regarding participants in the Uprising. Ciesielska describes dozens of doctors and nurses who, rather than fleeing for their lives following Aktions in the ghetto, stayed behind to treat their patients in the bunkers, where nearly all of them died; a type of ‘white-coat rebellion’ alongside the armed struggle. These medical services also reflect the doctors’ and nurses’ ethical decisions made under extreme tragic circumstances during the ghetto’s final stages. … This book is a must read for researchers of the Holocaust, the history of medicine, in general, and particularly Jewish medicine. Its appendixes pose an interesting research challenge for further study.”

— Miriam Offer, Social History of Medicine

“It goes without saying that the Nazis had no interest whatsoever in the well-being and health of the captive Jewish inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto. But because they feared that diseases and epidemics might spread beyond it and endanger German personnel and afflict the general Polish population, they provided a bare modicum of assistance to Jewish hospitals, health services, doctors, nurses and pharmacists.

Innumerable books have been written about the Holocaust in Poland, but precious few have dealt with this important but overlooked issue. Maria Ciesielska’s The Doctors of the Warsaw Ghetto… examines it in voluminous detail from the moment the ghetto was established in November 1940 until it was destroyed during the uprising in April 1943.”

— Sheldon Kirshner, The Times of Israel (blog)