In January 1943, the first transport of women reached Majdanek in deep snow. The barracks assigned to them had no glass in the windows, no water, no beds worth the name. There was no hospital — not on any plan, not in any German document. Within days, a 46-year-old internist from Radom, deported for running an underground medical network, began building one anyway. Dr Stefania Perzanowska called it a hospital from the first day, and she never stopped calling it that, even when the camp's own vocabulary offered her a different, colder word. That insistence — on a name, on a standard, on what medicine was supposed to mean — would define everything she did at Majdanek for the next year and a half.
Before Majdanek: becoming a doctor
Perzanowska’s medical training began in 1915, during the final years of the First World War, when she enrolled at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Warsaw — part of the first generation of Polish women admitted to study medicine at all. She interrupted her studies to serve, first as a medical orderly and then as a military doctor, in the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–1921. It was there that she learned to work without enough supplies, without enough certainty, and without enough time — lessons she would need again more than two decades later.
She qualified as a physician in 1926, specialised in internal medicine, and eventually headed the internal medicine department at the Municipal Hospital in Radom. Colleagues remembered her as someone who treated a patient’s dignity as inseparable from their diagnosis, whatever the prognosis. When German occupation stripped Polish hospitals of medicine, equipment, and any formal protection for their staff, this had already become the one thing the occupation could not confiscate.
Neutrality was not available to her. Drawing on her military background, Perzanowska joined the underground Home Army in Radom, training clandestine medical personnel and turning her own apartment into a resistance contact point. On the night of 10–11 November 1942, the Gestapo searched that apartment. The incriminating correspondence went undiscovered, but Perzanowska was arrested and interrogated repeatedly over the following weeks. Fellow prisoners later recalled that even in a holding cell, she kept trying to look after the women returning from questioning — an instinct that, within two months, would have an entire hospital built around it.
A hospital that wasn’t supposed to exist
At Majdanek, Perzanowska started with what cost nothing: hygiene. She had the newly arrived women wash with snow and check one another for lice, a first, improvised line of defence against the epidemics that killed by the hundreds in camps like this one. When typhus cases appeared, she recognised the symptoms before the telltale rash — and was overruled by the SS physician on duty. She held her diagnosis anyway. Only once the outbreak could no longer be denied did the camp authorities permit an isolation barrack, and only because the disease now threatened the guards as well as the prisoners.
That single barrack became the seed of a women’s hospital that would eventually span several buildings and treat several hundred patients at a time — 1,200 of them, by two doctors’ count, during one especially brutal stretch in February 1944. Perzanowska staffed it with physicians, trained nurses, pharmacists, medical students, and volunteers who learned their trade on the ward floor. She wore a cloth armband embroidered with a single word, Revier — the camp’s official term for an infirmary — and used it to run something she refused to let be one. A hospital, she insisted, implied care and professional accountability. Revier implied neither. The prisoners kept calling it a hospital regardless.
Instruments were almost nonexistent. One of Perzanowska’s first recorded procedures — a life-saving incision for a throat abscess — was carried out with a kitchen knife, sterilised over an open flame. Surgical scissors, medicine bottles, thermometers: objects unremarkable in any ordinary hospital became, at Majdanek, evidence that treatment could still happen at all. Prisoners made charcoal from burnt bread to treat digestive illness and gathered herbs during outside labour details. Diagnoses relied on clinical judgment because there was rarely anything else to rely on.
Medicine as a form of refusal
Scarcity was not, in the end, the hospital’s hardest problem. The harder problem was a system built to decide, unilaterally, which lives still counted. When the SS ordered hospital staff to bring Jewish patients outside for selection, Perzanowska objected openly, arguing that medical staff had been trained to preserve life, not to help end it. The guards carried out the selection themselves — her refusal changed nothing about that outcome, and cost her a real risk of retaliation. It was one of many decisions, most far less visible, taken in seconds and without any certainty of success: records quietly altered, diagnoses misrepresented, women too weak for labour hidden where hiding was possible.
“Above all, I want to defend the sick — that is my elementary duty. There are also people here who are breaking down easily, even now — they need to be held up too.”
She wrote those words in a smuggled note in the spring of 1944, as rumours of a mass evacuation spread through the camp. They describe, as precisely as anything in her later testimony, what she understood her job to be.
Letters, objects, and a language of their own
Perzanowska’s daughter Zofia was hiding in Warsaw under a false name throughout her mother’s imprisonment. Mother and daughter exchanged nearly 250 letters — official postcards, limited in length and read by German censors, and notes smuggled out by Polish labourers brought in to work on the camp’s expansion, at real risk to themselves. Depending on which route a letter took, the two women used different words for the same things: “the position” for the camp, “Ciufcia” or “C.” for Stefania herself. Small handmade objects travelled the same smuggling routes tucked into returning parcel bags — once, a felt elephant and a heart-shaped pin, made by fellow prisoners, which Zofia wrote back that she carried everywhere. Perzanowska, for her part, regularly redirected part of her own food parcels to patients recovering from typhus, and used the same smuggled notes to request medicine and anatomy textbooks so she could train new nurses on the ward.
The correspondence is, among other things, a record of two people refusing to let a censor’s form dictate what they were allowed to feel. “I won’t fall apart on this day,” Perzanowska wrote to Zofia on 23 August 1943, replying to a parcel of name-day gifts. “I try, in general, to stay hard and not give in to tenderness. Here, there’s no other way — you have to harden yourself, or you break down.”
Bearing witness
When Majdanek was evacuated in 1944, Perzanowska was moved first to Auschwitz, then to Ravensbrück and Neustadt-Glewe, remaining inside the camp system until her liberation in May 1945. She made her way back to Radom, changing trains fourteen times; her mother, released earlier, had reached the same city one day before her. The family’s dachshund, which had spent three years safe with friends, found its own way home on the same day mother and daughter did.
Perzanowska reopened one of Radom’s first postwar clinics for former camp prisoners and their families, and in 1970 published her memoir, Gdy myśli do Majdanka wracają (When My Thoughts Return to Majdanek). True to form, she gave most of its pages not to herself but to the colleagues who built the hospital alongside her, recording their names in detail rather than centring her own account.
She could not change the reality of Majdanek. She spent a year and a half refusing to accept its logic — one armband, one smuggled note, one insisted-upon word at a time.
Inspiring Questions for Classroom Discussion
- Perzanowska insisted on calling her ward a “hospital” rather than accepting the camp’s term, Revier. Why might a single word carry that much weight, and what does her insistence tell us about what she believed medicine was for?
- The objects associated with Perzanowska’s hospital — a reused syringe, an empty medicine tin, a kitchen knife used as a scalpel — are ordinary and almost unremarkable on their own. What does context add to an object like this, and what is lost if we look at it without that context?
- Perzanowska and her daughter used coded language in their letters because official postcards were read by German censors. What does this tell us about the different kinds of truth that could travel through different channels — censored versus smuggled?
- When ordered to help select patients for the SS, Perzanowska refused, though the selection happened regardless. How should we assess an act of resistance that does not change the outcome it opposes?
- Perzanowska’s 1970 memoir focuses more on her colleagues than on herself. What does this choice suggest about how she wanted her story — and the hospital’s story — to be remembered?
Editorial note
This article draws on the ENRS article “To Heal Against All Odds: Stefania Perzanowska and the Hospital That Was Never Meant to Exist” by Dr Monika Haber, and on materials from the State Museum at Majdanek’s edition of Perzanowska’s family correspondence, published to mark the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of All Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes, 23 August.