Adina Blady Szwajger (1917–1993)
Author of I Remember Nothing More
About the Author
Works by Adina Blady Szwajger
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Szwajger, Adina Blady
- Other names
- Blady-Szwajger, Adina
- Birthdate
- 1917-03-21
- Date of death
- 1993-02-19
- Gender
- female
- Education
- University of Warsaw
- Occupations
- pediatrician
physician
memoirist
resistance fighter
Holocaust survivor - Short biography
- Adina Blady Szwajger was born to a Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland. She was a 22-year-old medical student at the University of Warsaw when the Germans invaded her country in World War II. Her husband Stefan Szpigielman, a law student, was killed by the Nazis. She joined the staff of the Warsaw Children's Hospital and struggled to save lives there until the final days of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, when she escaped with false identity papers and served as a courier for the Jewish Resistance. She survived the war and became a pediatrician in Łódź. She kept the most haunting episodes of the war a secret for decades, until after her retirement. She then wrote a painfully honest memoir, which was circulated by the Solidarity underground magazine and then published in English as I Remember Nothing More (1990). Dr. Szwajger remarried to Wladyslaw Swidowski, with whom she had two daughters.
- Cause of death
- cancer
- Nationality
- Poland
- Birthplace
- Warsaw, Poland
- Places of residence
- Warsaw, Poland
Lodz, Poland - Place of death
- Lodz, Poland
- Burial location
- Jewish Cemetery at Okopowa Street, Warsaw
- Associated Place (for map)
- Poland
Members
Reviews
I Remember Nothing More : the Warsaw Children's Hospital and the Jewish Resistance by Adina Blady Szwajger
The whole of my past is like a film tightly rolled up and hidden in a drawer in the dimness of my memory. Only if you happen to touch this roll, the whole film unwinds and shows individual frames. Some of the images are faded, some are wiped out. But they are still there. Sometimes it seems to me that it is all still happening, that we are still living in that time. That is why I have not been able to live as others do. Like those who went out into the wide world and started everything from show more the very beginning. They know how to enjoy a car, a flat, the comforts of everyday life. Or even to enjoy life itself. It doesn't matter, certainly not now. What is important to my story is what happened then. What a normal day was like.
The everyday life of a courier girl.
Adina was twenty-two years old, recently married, and studying to be a doctor when Germany invaded Poland in 1939. During the three week siege of Warsaw, Adina begins her first phase of war work by volunteering at a first aid outpost. After the Soviet invasion and the capitulation of Warsaw, Adina escapes to Lvov, naively thinking to resume her medical studies. By the end of the year, ghettos are being formed and warned that she is on a list of those to be deported to the Gulags, Adina narrowly escapes back to Warsaw. Imprisoned in the ghetto, Adina continues to volunteer, now at a hospital for Jewish children. Desperately ill and starving children are brought to the hospital where tuberculosis and typhus wreck havoc. With few medicines and less food, there is little that the medical staff can do. Officially the daily food ration is 184 calories, but a daily dose of spirits gives the doctors just enough calories to stay on their feet. Then the deportations to Treblinka begin.
Adina manages to survive, although the horrors of the hospital and the actions she was forced to take will haunt her for the rest of her life. She escapes the ghetto with false labor papers and begins the second phase of her war work, as a courier for one of the resistance groups, the ZOB. She arranges hiding places, distributes cash, provides medical care, arranges false documents, all at great risk to her life. During the Ghetto Uprising, Adina has to watch and listen as the ghetto burns and fighters are shot, yet remain calm and inconspicuous as she runs her errands. Then comes the Warsaw Uprising, in which over 150,000 civilians will be killed. Once again, Adina will escape death, but not her memories. Finally, at the age of 71, Adina decides to tell her story and writes this book.
I think it admirable that the author shares her story at last, for the number of Holocaust survivors is dwindling. Stories not told now, will never be told, and another testimony will be lost. Yet I wish she had shared her story sooner, for as she admits herself, after so many years it is hard to keep things straight.
Yes, many years have passed, many things have faded from my memory, and I don't really remember the sequence of events. That is why everything I write is so chaotic... It all happened&emdash;but when? I don't really remember. Only that it all took place in the period before the Warsaw Uprising.
Despite the loose timeline and rambling style, Adina story is interesting and important. The images she describes of her work in the Children's Hospital will remain with me for a long time. show less
The everyday life of a courier girl.
Adina was twenty-two years old, recently married, and studying to be a doctor when Germany invaded Poland in 1939. During the three week siege of Warsaw, Adina begins her first phase of war work by volunteering at a first aid outpost. After the Soviet invasion and the capitulation of Warsaw, Adina escapes to Lvov, naively thinking to resume her medical studies. By the end of the year, ghettos are being formed and warned that she is on a list of those to be deported to the Gulags, Adina narrowly escapes back to Warsaw. Imprisoned in the ghetto, Adina continues to volunteer, now at a hospital for Jewish children. Desperately ill and starving children are brought to the hospital where tuberculosis and typhus wreck havoc. With few medicines and less food, there is little that the medical staff can do. Officially the daily food ration is 184 calories, but a daily dose of spirits gives the doctors just enough calories to stay on their feet. Then the deportations to Treblinka begin.
Adina manages to survive, although the horrors of the hospital and the actions she was forced to take will haunt her for the rest of her life. She escapes the ghetto with false labor papers and begins the second phase of her war work, as a courier for one of the resistance groups, the ZOB. She arranges hiding places, distributes cash, provides medical care, arranges false documents, all at great risk to her life. During the Ghetto Uprising, Adina has to watch and listen as the ghetto burns and fighters are shot, yet remain calm and inconspicuous as she runs her errands. Then comes the Warsaw Uprising, in which over 150,000 civilians will be killed. Once again, Adina will escape death, but not her memories. Finally, at the age of 71, Adina decides to tell her story and writes this book.
I think it admirable that the author shares her story at last, for the number of Holocaust survivors is dwindling. Stories not told now, will never be told, and another testimony will be lost. Yet I wish she had shared her story sooner, for as she admits herself, after so many years it is hard to keep things straight.
Yes, many years have passed, many things have faded from my memory, and I don't really remember the sequence of events. That is why everything I write is so chaotic... It all happened&emdash;but when? I don't really remember. Only that it all took place in the period before the Warsaw Uprising.
Despite the loose timeline and rambling style, Adina story is interesting and important. The images she describes of her work in the Children's Hospital will remain with me for a long time. show less
I Remember Nothing More: The Warsaw Children's Hospital and the Jewish Resistance by Adina Blady Szwajger
This is one of the most haunting Holocaust memoirs I've read, and I've read a lot of them. The author was a newly minted pediatrician at the Warsaw Ghetto Children's Hospital and went on to sneak over to the Aryan side of the city and join the resistance. Curiously, she writes little about herself -- you know nothing about her life before the war and next to nothing about her family, though she does describe her husband's death and mentions that her mother was deported to Treblinka.
The most show more searing episode in this story: During the liquidation of the ghetto, while the Nazis were shooting bedridden patients and throwing into trucks those that could still walk, Dr. Szwajger went to the tuberculosis ward and gave the children each an overdose of morphine, telling them it would take their pain away. She had promised to stay with the children until the end, so she waited until they all went to sleep, then she ran for her life. But decades later she was haunted by the thought that maybe one or two of them woke up later, alone.
Though this book is frustratingly vague at times and it ends abruptly, I think if I could recommend only five books to someone who wanted to learn about what the Holocaust was like, I Remember Nothing More would be one of them. I applaud the author for her courage to finally tell her story. Very few people are left alive who remember it firsthand; Dr. Szwajger herself died in 1993. show less
The most show more searing episode in this story: During the liquidation of the ghetto, while the Nazis were shooting bedridden patients and throwing into trucks those that could still walk, Dr. Szwajger went to the tuberculosis ward and gave the children each an overdose of morphine, telling them it would take their pain away. She had promised to stay with the children until the end, so she waited until they all went to sleep, then she ran for her life. But decades later she was haunted by the thought that maybe one or two of them woke up later, alone.
Though this book is frustratingly vague at times and it ends abruptly, I think if I could recommend only five books to someone who wanted to learn about what the Holocaust was like, I Remember Nothing More would be one of them. I applaud the author for her courage to finally tell her story. Very few people are left alive who remember it firsthand; Dr. Szwajger herself died in 1993. show less
The title gives a hint as to what this book is like. While any new account of the Holocaust is valuable, she has forgotten a good deal in the 40 years since the war. As such what is lacking in detail and feels fragmented. This is exacerbated by the book's chronology, which is not always linear and sometimes hard to piece together. Though by no means unreadable, this book is nevertheless best left to Holocaust scholars and historians.
A strangely written book, bits of memories of the awful experiences of a Jewish doctor who had to work in the ghetto and in Warsaw amongst people hidden in holes, rooms paid for dearly, who lost her husband, and who had to commit euthenasia. I really have to stop reading this but it draws me too strongly.
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- Works
- 1
- Members
- 162
- Popularity
- #130,373
- Rating
- 3.8
- Reviews
- 5
- ISBNs
- 10
- Languages
- 3