Polish Martyred Physicians

This database contains information about 2,465 Polish-Jewish physicians who perished during the Holocaust.

General Information about the List

The “Medical Alliance - Association of Jewish Physicians from Poland” was created to assist physicians and their families who emigrated from Poland to the United States after the Nazis invaded Poland.  The Alliance was started by a group of Polish physician immigrants living in New York, who arrived in the U.S. one or two generations before the WWII period.

Of the more than 3 million Jewish Poles that perished during the Holocaust, approximately 3,000 were physicians.  It was the goal of the Alliance members to memorialize those physicians who perished during the Holocaust.  The published volume was the product of the work of the original members of the Alliance, the original US members and those physicians who successfully immigrated to the US after the Nazi invasion.  Therefore, this volume can be likened to a yizkor book for Polish Jewish physicians.

The full bibliographic citation is:

Falstein, Louis.  The Martyrdom of Jewish Physicians in Poland.  Studies by Leon Wulman and Joseph Tenenbaum.  Research and documentation by Leopold Lazarowitz and Simon Malowist.  (New York: Published for Medical Alliance-Association of Jewish Physicians from Poland, by Exposition Press, 1963).  xii, 500 p., ill.  OCLC: 528142.

Part Three of the volume is entitled “Martyred Physicians”.  It is an alphabetical listing of 2,465 summaries of Polish physicians who were known to have perished or disappeared during the Holocaust.  Each listing has a short summary of basic biographical information about the physician and the details of the physician's death if known.

What is in the Database

Information was extracted from the summaries and into the following fields.  Not all records had the same amount of information.  The goal of this project was to include as much information as possible on each individual; therefore, the "Other Information" field contains many valuable genealogical details.

This database contains the following fields:

Page number Surname Alternate surname Second Alternate Surname Given Name Alternate Given Name Maiden Name Date of Birth Place of Birth

Date of Graduation Graduated From Medical Specialty City Where Practiced Institution Practiced At Date of Death Place of Death Other Information

Notes on the above fields

• Alternate surnames and given names may be due to physicians being known by both their "Polish" name and their "Yiddish" name.

• Female physicians' surnames are listed in the surname column only if they were noted as "nee."  There were many female physicians who had hyphenated surnames, but we did not assume the second name was a maiden name.

• There were a number of physicians who went to more than one university.  Either both were listed in the "Graduated From" field, or if there was a special reason, it might be included in the "Other Information" field.

• There were a number of physicians who practiced in more than one location and then may have moved a number of times during the occupation.  The original location is listed in the "City Where Practiced" field and the subsequent cities and the reason for their moves are listed in the "Other Information" field.

• "Other Information" includes all other biographical information available, including alternate reports of the physician's death, movements to and from ghettos during the occupation, relationships to other physicians, secondary universities attended for additional specialties, secondary cities where practiced and details reported about deportation dates and places.

Acknowledgements

This list was compiled by Nolan Altman and is a result of the data sharing agreement between Yad Vashem and JewishGen.

Thanks to JewishGen Inc. for providing the website and database expertise to make this database accessible.  Special thanks to Susan King, Warren Blatt and Michael Tobias for their continued contributions to Jewish genealogy.  Particular thanks to the Research Division headed by Joyce Field and the volunteer project coordinators.

Nolan Altman
October, 2003

Searching the Database

This database is searchable via both JewishGen's Holocaust Database and the All Poland Database.