A syringe reused hundreds of times. A tin that once held smuggled medicine. A cloth armband with one embroidered word. This lesson uses the tools of Dr Stefania Perzanowska's hospital at Majdanek — alongside her letters home — to teach students how to "read" an object as a historical source, using Karolina Sulej's methodology for working with material culture.
What the Doctor’s Bag Remembers: Reading a Life Through Objects
What the Doctor’s Bag Remembers: Reading a Life Through Objects
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pdfThe Secret Life of ObjectsAn essay-workshop by cultural anthropologist Karolina Sulej on how to read personal objects as historical sources without turning them into empty icons or dry documents. Includes four ready-to-use classroom exercises.Open in new tab and download
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pdfObjects That Saved LifeNine everyday medical objects — a syringe, a medicine tin, surgical scissors — used by Dr Stefania Perzanowska in the hospital she built at Majdanek. A case study for applying Sulej's method.Open in new tab and download
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pdfDoctor’s Notes by Stefania PerzanowskaExcerpts from nearly 250 letters exchanged between Perzanowska and her daughter Zofia, smuggled and censored, showing how objects, code words, and small gifts carried meaning across the camp wire.Open in new tab and download
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Remember. 23 August: Stefania Perzanowska
There, with no equipment, medicine or sanitation, she organised a hospital for female prisoners, insisting on treating every patient, regardless of nationality or chance of survival, as someone entitled to care. Refusing to hand over patients for selection, she built one of the most extensively documented instances of medical resistance within a Nazi German concentration camp. After the war she resumed medical practice and, in 1970, published her memoir dedicated to the colleagues who worked alongside her.
Remember her.
Every year on 23 August, the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of All Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes, the ENRS recalls those persecuted in the name of totalitarian and authoritarian ideologies.