Howard Fischer
Uppsala, Sweden

“Despite extreme hardship and abject terror, the nursing school in the Warsaw Ghetto continued to provide the highest level of nursing education possible.”¹

The Warsaw Jewish Nursing School was established in 1923 as part of the Czyste (“clean” in Polish) Jewish Hospital. The school received support from the Warsaw city government and overseas Jewish organizations. It was the only Polish nursing school that accepted Jewish students. Using an American nursing curriculum, students had 1,100 hours of lectures, 70 hours of laboratory study, 400 hours of practical demonstrations, and 56 hours of practical work in hospital dietetic kitchens. They saw patients at the Czyste Hospital and the Bauman-Berson Children’s Hospital. The complete nursing course lasted twenty-eight months.

The Germans invaded Poland in 1939, and in 1940 the Jews of Warsaw—about 400,000 people—were forced into a ghetto, with a surface area of 1.3 square miles (3.4 square km).

Malnutrition, overcrowding, and typhus killed people daily. Those who remained were to be deported to concentration camps, which started in 1942. On arrival at the camps, those capable of working were assigned to labor groups, and the others were killed.

The nursing school moved into the ghetto in 1941. The school got permission to continue teaching, the only exception to the Nazi prohibition of educational programs in the ghetto. Perhaps the Nazis did not see the education of women as a threat. Also, nursing was not a program attracting the potentially troublesome Polish intelligentsia, if any were still alive. The ghetto contained many people infected with typhus, and the Germans thought that nurses might prevent its spread beyond the ghetto.

After the move into the ghetto, the nursing curriculum was shortened to one year. To keep morale up and to keep her students busy, Luba Bielicka-Blum (1906–1973), the Jewish nurse who headed the school, enforced strict discipline. The nurses had to wash their pink-and-white uniforms and white aprons, despite a shortage of soap and intermittent lack of water. The nurses and students were asked to perform morally wrenching, questionable acts. When the Nazis started shooting non-ambulatory patients before the deportations, nurses gave lethal doses of morphine to painlessly end their lives.

The school was closed in January 1943. Ben-Safer and Shields conclude, “Perhaps in truly hopeless situations, nursing continues to make a contribution to people’s lives…It is possible to do something, however small, that ultimately, even for a few minutes maybe, still benefits people.”

References

1. Ellen Ben-Safer and Linda Shields. “Courage under adversity: Luba Bielicka-Blum (1906–1973) and the nursing school of the Warsaw Ghetto.” Health and History, 18(2), 2016.
2. Yad Vashem. “Luba Bielicka Blum.” From “A time to heal: The story of the children’s home in Otwock, Poland,” Yad Vashem, World Holocaust Remembrance Center, 2024. https://wwv.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/otwock/staff_blum.asp
3. Linda Negron.The Value of Life and Moral Courage: How Jewish Prisoner Physicians Practiced Medicine behind Barbed Wire. Dissertation, University of Texas at Dallas, 2021. https://hdl.handle.net/10735.1/9329