18.09.2022 History, News

The Hippocratic Oath at the Umschlagplatz

Talking Memory Series in a meeting focusing on the difficult choices made by Jewish women and men of medicine working in the inhuman conditions of the Warsaw Jewish Ghetto

Talking Memory Series invites the public to another English language online meeting focusing on the difficult choices made by Jewish women and men

of medicine working in the inhuman conditions of the Warsaw Jewish Ghetto.

These souls were faced with a situation in which their medical judgment could mean life, or death.

The meeting, led by the Museum of Ghetto Fighters, is focused on remembering the Grossaktion eight decades of it took place.

On Sunday, October 18, at 09:00 a.m. will be held to discuss the Hippocratic Oath at the Umschlagplatz – Jewish men and women of medicine at the

Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw.

Among the participants are Dr. Hadas Shasha-Lavsky, director of the Galilee Medical Center, Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre founder and director Tali Nates,

and Dr. Maria Ciesielska from the Medical Review Auschwitz project. Luc Albinski, director of the film Nobody Told Me about his grandmother, Dr. Halina Rotstein,

who was murdered in Treblinka, will be present and his movie screened.

 

Background:

When rumors began to spread that the Jewish residents of the Ghetto will be expelled from Warsaw, extreme social pressure began in the crowded urban space. With life and death hanging in the balance medical staff workers under immense stress asked what will become of their own families, the fate of the patients, and doubted if – under these conditions – they can save lives at all. Medical ethics faced their breaking point when medical doctors were tasked to say – who will live and who perish. Dr. Ciesielska will present the detailed research on the fates of 800 medical doctors who, often, served their patients until their own murder at Nazi hands.

Mr. Albinski is a second generation to Holocaust survivors. His grandmother served the Ghetto residents as a doctor and his mother, Wanda Albinska, escaped in 1942 and hid in an orphanage outside Warsaw during the war years.

She married a Catholic man and her son learned of his Jewish roots in his 20’s. Since then, he had been following the fate of his late grandmother. A Jewish doctor who accompanied her patients to Treblinka. He will share details of his life and film making process.

The film will be available online to those who register online from Thursday, September 15, until the meeting.

Trailer

For registration to the meeting

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