Holocaust Woman Who Carried a Baby Out a Day
Auschwitz is best known as a place of death—a hellish extermination camp, the largest of its kind, where at least 1.1 million people are idea to have been murdered. So it's strange to think of the camp equally a place of life besides.
It was, though—cheers to a woman named Stanislawa Leszczyńska. During her ii-yr internment at Auschwitz, the Smoothen midwife delivered iii,000 babies at the camp in unthinkable weather. Though her story is little known exterior of Poland, it is attestation to the resistance of a small group of women determined to help their swain prisoners.
Leszczyńska'southward want to aid others is what landed her in Auschwitz in the first place. She was born in Lodz in 1896 and spent her early on years in relatively peace—marrying, studying for her midwife's certificate, having children.
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Adolf Hitler visiting troops near Lodz, 1939. (Credit: Heinrich Hoffmann/ullstein bild via Getty Images)
In 1939, everything changed when the Nazis marched into Poland. Suddenly, Leszczyńska lived in an occupied country, and her city—abode to the second largest number of Jews in Poland—became dwelling house to a ghetto. More than than a third of the city'south population was cramped into a tiny expanse and forced to work for the Nazis.
Horrified by the conditions in the ghetto, Leszczyńska and her family, including her four children, decided to help. They smuggled simulated documents and food to Jews within the ghetto as role of a growing Polish resistance.
In 1943, the family'southward work was discovered and they were interrogated past the Gestapo. Though Leszczyńska's husband and oldest son managed to escape, the younger children and their female parent were arrested. Leszczyńska was separated from her sons, who were sent to unlike camps to do forced labor, and sent to Auschwitz with her daughter, a medical student. Her husband kept fighting the Nazis, only was killed during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. She never saw him again.
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Hungarian Jews arriving at Auschwitz, 1944. (Credit: Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images)
When she arrived at the camp, Leszczyńska found a High german doctor and told him she was a midwife. He assigned her to work in the camp'southward "maternity ward," a set of filthy barracks that was less a place to care for pregnant women than a identify to usher them into death.
Most meaning women at Auschwitz were simply sent to the gas chambers. Women who found out they were meaning at the camp were sometimes given abortions by Gisella Perl, a md who helped prevent hundreds of women from giving nascency. Often, when women were discovered to be pregnant they were summarily executed.
Others were sent to a hospital barracks to wait out the rest of their pregnancy in squalid conditions. "Sister Klara," a midwife who had been sent to the camp for murdering a child, oversaw the barracks with a woman named "Sister Pfani." They were in charge of declaring babies built-in in the ward stillborn, then drowning them in buckets, oftentimes in front of the mothers who had simply given birth. Sister Klara'south role did not include assisting with deliveries.
"This division of labor was ane of the nigh grotesque examples of the Nazis, on the one manus, cynically adhering to "legal" standards—not having the disbarred nurse assist childbirths—just on the other mitt, assigning her to murder newborn Jewish babies," writes historian Michael Berkowitz.
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Photos of children and items of clothing institute at Auschwitz. (Credit: François Lochon/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images)
When Leszczyńska heard what was expected of her in the macabre maternity ward, she refused. When she was taken to the md who oversaw the entire military camp, she again refused. "Why they did non kill her then, no i knows," said Leszczyńska's son Bronislaw in 1988.
Despite threats and beatings past Klara, Leszczyńska simply began caring for mothers and delivering their babies. Despite knowing that most babies she delivered would exist killed within a few hours, she worked to save as many of the mothers' lives as she could. It was nigh impossible piece of work—no running water, few blankets, no diapers, footling food. Leszczyńska quickly learned to have women in labor lie on the rarely lit brick stove in the center of the barracks—the just identify that could suit a laboring woman. Lice and diseases were common in the "hospital," which would fill with inches of h2o when it rained.
Leszczyńska, assisted by her daughter and other prisoners, later said she delivered iii,000 babies during her two years at Auschwitz. She continued to decline to impale babies despite repeated orders to do then, fifty-fifty standing up to Dr. Josef Mengele, the camp'southward infamous "Angel of Death," who was known for his roughshod experiments on twins and other inmates.
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High german women carrying children in a Lebensborn center. (Credit: Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)
Not every baby was immediately murdered: Outset in 1943, some were taken to give to Nazi couples as "Aryan" babies under Nazi Germany's Lebensborn plan, which kidnapped up to 100,000 babies in Poland lone. Leszczyńska and her assistants did their all-time to tattoo the babies who were taken in the hopes they would later exist identified and reunited with their mothers. Other women killed their babies themselves rather than hand them over to the Nazis.
Some non-Jewish women were allowed to go along their babies, but they unremarkably perished quickly due to the atmospheric condition in the camp. Notwithstanding, a few Jewish babies were allowed to live, though it's unclear what happened to them. In the words of historian Zoé Waxman, "If a child was allowed to survive information technology was likely to be for a specific purpose and for a specific fourth dimension."
Leszczyńska felt helpless as she watched the babies she delivered exist murdered or starve to expiry, their mothers forbidden to breastfeed. Just she kept on working, baptizing Christian babies and caring as best as she could for the women in the barracks. They nicknamed her "Mother."
A nurse and children during the liberation of Auschwitz, 1945. (Credidt: TASS/Getty Images)
Of the iii,000 babies delivered by Leszczyńska, medical historians Susan Bridegroom and Linda Sheilds write that one-half of them were drowned, some other one,000 died chop-chop of starvation or cold, 500 were sent to other families and 30 survived the campsite. Information technology is believed that all of the mothers and all of the newborns survived childbirth.
In early 1945, the Nazis forced most inmates of Auschwitz to go out the military camp on a "death march" to other camps. Leszczyńska refused to depart, and stayed in the camp until its liberation.
Leszczyńska's legacy lived on long after the liberation of Auschwitz—both in the memories of the survivors whose babies she attempted to requite a dignified birth, the lives of the few children who left the campsite alive, and the work of her own children, all of whom survived the war and became physicians themselves.
"To this twenty-four hours I do not know at what price [she delivered my infant]," said Maria Saloman, whose baby Leszczyńska delivered, in the 1980s. "My Liz owes her life to Stanislawa Leszczyńska. I cannot recall of her without tears coming to my eyes."
Leszczyńska returned to life equally a midwife in Lodz subsequently the state of war and simply began to talk over her time at Auschwitz when she retired in 1957. She is notwithstanding revered in Poland and has been nominated for sainthood in the Catholic church. But fifty-fifty if she never becomes an official saint, her crucial work in a living hell speaks for itself.
Watch the HISTORY special, Auschwitz Untold, online or in the HISTORY App now.
Heed to HISTORY This Week Podcast: Episode 4: Jan 27, 1945 Surviving Auschwitz
Source: https://www.history.com/news/auschwitz-midwife-stanislawa-leszczynska-saint
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