Tape number two, an interview with Ms. Noemi Makower.
My name is Joanna Wróblewska.
I would like to go back to the period of studies.
Could you tell us how many Jews there were in medicine compared to other students?
There were about twenty-odd people.
I was…
Excuse me, how many people were there in a year?
In total, there were over a hundred soldiers.
And there were about three hundred people together.
Two hundred and fifty-three hundred, more or less.
There was a number of classes, that's why there weren't many of us.
However, I had a very good high school diploma,
and a very good competitive exam,
which I had with me.
I wasn't accepted right away, at the age of seventeen.
My father was a military colleague of the then dean.
If I remember correctly, it was Professor Paszkiewicz.
My father went to him and asked him why he wasn't accepted.
To which the professor said,
"Your daughter is still young, let her play for another year."
I was studying novelistics that year,
and I had an adventure there.
Namely, there was a lecture on ancient French grammar.
It was terribly boring.
There were a few dozen of us, maybe twenty-odd people.
And a teacher, a lecturer, let's say,
because it's hard to say, a teacher from a higher university,
asked who would like to give a lecture on ancient French grammar,
which she was going to give.
No one answered.
I want to say that I was, as always, in a red dress,
because that's how my mother always dressed me, in red.
She looked around the room and said,
"Well, then you will take care of me."
Of course, I didn't come to the next classes.
I enrolled in biology.
I was accepted, I did my first year,
and then I passed some medical exams.
I would like to ask what was the attitude of Polish students
during the anti-Semitic upheavals?
Did you have any Polish friends who tried to protect you among the students?
I would like to point out that the soldiers behaved very positively,
while Polish students, I would say,
outside, I don't know what was in their hearts,
but outside they behaved indifferently.
And I think that some of them were simply cowards.
The best proof is that those who wore Polish uniforms,
they behaved very positively.
How did your family, small family, mother, father and mother,
how did you normally spend your holidays?
We generally spent our holidays on the Otwock line,
Warsaw-Otwock, in Michalin, and later in Otwock,
at my grandfather's, who had his villa there.
The holidays were very pleasant.
We drove in a wooden cart,
we had all our necessities,
because my mother ran a household,
and the holidays lasted for over two months.
And I enjoyed my free time there, we played a lot,
children, it was fun.
There was also my first love.
That's how it started in Otwock.
Did you have a large family, did you have many cousins?
A very large family.
My mother had 11 siblings.
Six brothers and five sisters.
All of them died in the ghetto.
Later.
So during the holidays you met your cousins, aunts, uncles?
No, at my grandfather's, when the holidays were in Otwock,
I met my family in Otwock, partially.
And yes, we had friends, various children.
Was there kosher cuisine in your grandfather's house,
or did they speak Jewish at all?
I can say that I don't remember.
I only remember one thing for sure, that there were seders.
I had to ask questions,
because I was very much liked by my grandfather.
I still remember today.
I still remember what this seder looked like.
My grandfather was very handsome, tall,
he had a beautiful silver beard.
He died in Otwock.
Not in Otwock, I'm sorry, he fled from the ghetto in Otwock.
He died in Warsaw at the age of 84.
After your studies, before the war, you said that you got married.
Who was your first husband?
My first husband was a friend, a doctor,
who graduated from the medical school in Zurich at that time.
His name was Mieczysław Fromm.
Of course, he was Jewish.
He was a very nice, nice, intelligent boy.
We met at the hospital in Czysty,
and during the first period I was doing various tests,
including eye tests.
And I got a sample from my hand.
Mietek said, "Oh, a fight-lap".
And that's how our friendship began.
Then he came back to Zurich.
He finished his studies there.
He always sent me flowers for my birthday.
He was the son of a family,
a religious family,
but not too religious.
And these people, during the ghetto,
were my closest friends.
I want to go back to the period before the war.
Which year did you get married?
In which year?
Two years before the war, in 1935, in the synagogue.
In 1937, I'm sorry.
In 1937, of course.
Was it a religious wedding?
It was a religious wedding, yes.
And my friends, who knew that I was a religious person,
laughed at me a lot during the wedding.
Was your husband religious?
Or did he come from a religious family?
He wasn't religious at all.
Where did you live after the wedding?
We lived in a room,
assigned to us by our parents.
We were very comfortable.
My husband was already a doctor,
and I finished medical school.
Was it your parents or your husband's parents?
Both of my parents.
I lived there until we were exiled to the ghetto.
How do you remember the day when the war broke out,
when you found out?
I remember that day tragically.
Bombs were exploding in front of my eyes.
The bomb hit a house in the neighborhood.
We were standing by the window.
And that was the beginning, I remember.
I don't remember anything else.
Only later.
Did your family plan any escape, moving?
No, no.
My father had a sixth day of mobilization.
He was getting ready for it.
He was in a hurry to go to war with the Germans.
But he fell into Soviet hands, as it turned out later.
When did you move?
What happened after the war?
To the ghetto.
The ghetto was announced by the Germans
in October 1994.
No, in November 1994.
October 1994, I said it right.
But we moved in November 1994.
In 1940.
Yes, in 1940.
But the bandages were brought in in October.
In October 1920 the forced bandages were brought in to the Jews.
That was less than a month after the German army entered.
What did you do then?
Did you work in the hospital?
Yes.
From the beginning.
I worked as a nurse in the old-fashioned hospital.
Later, I moved to the surgical ward in Leszno 1 together with the hospital.
It was a four-storey building with an alcohol monopoly.
All of our surgical wards were there.
There were three floors.
Our first ward occupied the first floor.
On the fourth floor were the rooms of the local doctors.
I worked in the hospital until the Germans announced the resettlement.
We couldn't get to Leszno anymore, so the Jewish hospital was moved to Umschlag.
My husband didn't let me go there anymore.
I'd like to tell you a bit more about this hospital. It was a wonderful hospital at that time.
I think it was one of the most beautiful hospitals in Warsaw.
It had a fantastic, beautiful operating room. It was all white, with a shiny white washbasin and a beautiful operating table.
There was a hanging lamp, of course.
There, among other things, I performed my first surgeries.
I started with the hemorrhoids surgery.
I was given anesthesia there.
There I received patients on duty, on the days of my duties.
I had a lot of them.
I had a lot of friends there, among our common friends, I mean the doctors.
During the first period, in 1939, the duty hours were relatively calm.
There weren't many wounded.
However, in the following years, and especially during the eviction period, we literally bathed in blood.
During the first period, what kind of wounds did the wounded patients have?
They were all gunshot wounds.
Most of the wounds were in their limbs and bellies.
Of course, we always discovered the wounds near the holes.
I remember one lady who had a wound in her belly.
All the internal organs were outside.
Despite all these big wounds, we continued to operate.
The duty of a doctor is to save a life, even the most dangerous one.
After that, there were no more surgeries.
The people who left the hospital after the surgery were sent to concentration camps.
There, they did a terrible job in the mud, in the water, in the forest.
They cut down trees with very bad food.
Very bad.
So the camp was a threat to everyone.
I will never forget the patient I was receiving.
He was showing all the symptoms of intestinal inflammation.
The head of that duty, a forty-something-year-old man, phoned me.
He told me to come upstairs, because he recognized the intestinal inflammation.
He told me to examine the patient one more time.
I came upstairs and examined him one more time.
All the symptoms were fine.
He had a high fever, around 40 degrees.
What surprised me was that he didn't look me in the eye.
Every patient wanted to read the doctor's verdict.
Good or bad.
He didn't look me in the eye.
And he was giving me anesthesia.
It was a different kind of anesthesia.
There were no smart devices like they are now.
I was put on a mask.
At some point, the patient took off the mask and said,
"I won't let you operate on me."
Dr. Rothau, who was a blood donor, was very nervous.
He started spitting.
He said, "Doctor, spit if you don't want to."
He said, "Doctor, if you don't let me operate on you, you'll die."
I said, "I won't let you operate on me."
And I couldn't do it.
Dr. Rothau recommended that I bring an operating book,
in which the patient signed that he refused to operate on me.
It turned out that his fiancée was a nurse, a hospital nurse,
who had given him propidone before.
That's why he had a high fever.
She taught him various symptoms of liver disease.
But at the last moment, he took his knife and ran away.
He simply ran to his bed.
Unfortunately, the patient died tragically.
At home, due to the fact that he had an old fireplace,
it was affected by propidone.
He got pneumonia and died because of it.
When it comes to hospital experiences,
as more and more wounds were brought,
and the abdominal wounds were getting bigger and bigger,
the operating order was limited.
But it was not to the point of not being operated at all.
Only those cases, for example,
when the lady with the ulcers on top of her head,
they were not operated on anymore.
In any case, the surgeries were carried out all day long.
Were those patients not operated on anymore?
How were they treated?
No, they were patients.
They were very rare cases.
They were not wounds,
because if they were, the wounds were stitched up.
Only very large wounds, as I said.
A doctor's duty is to save a life.
And that was the only way to save a life.
Let me tell you about two more very interesting cases.
At the same time, they were very tragic.
Two children were brought to my duty.
The boy was 10 years old, the girl was maybe 12.
From the beginning, the girl was the head nurse.
She said that she couldn't undress,
and it was obvious that she was bleeding.
So I said that it was necessary.
We had to examine her.
They were in a hurry, because they had a family in Otwock,
and they had some supplies for that family.
It turned out that the German soldiers had detained them at your place.
Two children were killed.
Two children ran away,
and the other two were sent to a regular service
and were taken to the hospital.
Finally, I asked one nurse to leave.
Only the duty nurse and I were left.
And I slowly undressed the girl.
She was covered with a bandage.
I'm sorry, not with a bandage but with a bow tie.
The bow tie was in one place.
It was so tight that it made her very nervous.
It was a commodity for sale.
Finally, after many persuasions, I undressed her completely,
but I hid the bandage under the pillow.
- The bow tie? - Yes.
So that no one could steal it.
It turned out that she wasn't seriously wounded.
We sewed up the wounds, which were just skin wounds.
It was hard for her to undress the boy.
The boy was also covered with a bandage.
His bandage didn't heal at all.
But hers did.
So she was very worried that the goods would be damaged.
He stayed with us for a few days.
Three days, I think.
After all the aggressive acts, they were released.
They were taken to Otwock, where their family was waiting.
The second situation was different.
They brought a couple of married women, two suicide bombers.
They took a very well-known sedative and fell asleep.
Unfortunately, we had to wake them up.
All the injections were done, and they both woke up.
They were very unhappy, because at first they thought
that they were waking up to a new life.
But in the meantime, they were back to the old life.
What year was it?
It was a year before the Great Action,
which took place in 1941.
So it was the beginning of 1941, the first half of 1941.
When it comes to hospital equipment and access to medicines and equipment...
There was a wonderful surgery nurse, who was usually a hamster.
So there was a lot of bandages, a lot of dressing materials.
And the tools were beautiful.
So I thought then, and I think at that time,
that it was one of the best-equipped hospitals, you know, at the beginning.
Right? Because then, slowly, these materials were exhausted.
When it comes to medicines, did you have access to them?
Patients had to buy a lot of medicines themselves,
because they were too expensive for the hospital.
But there were some medicines, but there were fewer and fewer of them.
More and more wounded, fewer and fewer medicines.
I was talking about children and suicides.
Now I would like to talk about one patient.
When I was busy with suicides,
a man came from Źwierna, who had been receiving patients for years,
so he was very professional.
And he said, "Doctor, quickly!"
I said, "What quickly? A new man is being born!"
And a woman was brought in, and he had already received the port.
A child was born.
At first, I said, "What? At such a moment?"
And then, a tired woman, barely breathing.
I thought she deserved some comfort.
I told her, "Maybe he'll grow up, because he was a boy,
not a man who will make up for our suffering."
There were very varied, very different shifts.
But as the action progressed, there were more and more bloody shifts.
More and more limbs had to be amputated.
Did your husband also work in the hospital?
Yes, but he was a doctor on the internal ward.
The internal ward was transferred from the clean ward to the bed ward.
I'm talking about your first husband now.
No, my first husband left Warsaw two days after my father.
That was in September, at the beginning.
Because there was a speech by Użykowski on the radio.
Was it Użykowski?
I'll remember the name in a moment.
It turned out it wasn't Użykowski, it was someone else.
There was a speech on the radio about the diversity.
Namely, all young men were told to cross the Poniatowski Bridge and go east.
And rockets were falling on that bridge.
So it was a typical speech on the diversity.
My husband got to Lviv and wanted to see my father there.
But my father was already in Brześć, I'm sorry, not in Lviv.
But my father was already in Tarnopol with his hospital
and he ended up in Soviet captivity.
I found out about it later, of course.
Did you have contact with your husband at that time?
Did he write letters? Could you write letters to him?
My first husband sent me letters from Lviv.
From his work in the Soviet Union.
Full of love and longing.
He really wanted to come back to Warsaw.
When he tried to come back, the Russians caught him and sent him to Karelia.
It was on the Finnish border.
He had a well-treated but still fresh tuberculosis.
So I was very afraid of him because he was drowning in the mud in Karelia.
And then he was sent to a very good place.
He was a doctor in a prison in Siberia.
The air there was great for the lungs.
He worked there until I managed to advertise him
and he came back to Poland, to the army, to the 2nd Polish Army.
How did you meet your second husband?
It all started at the beginning of the war.
My husband and his mother left Łódź.
Then they got to Warsaw in various means.
My husband was a doctor.
His name was Henryk Makower.
He lived with our neighbours in Chłodna 2.
They were very close friends.
It turned out that his mother was...
Sorry, what were their names?
Makower, Henryk Makower.
What were their names?
Jaszuńscy.
My second husband's mother's name was Dorota Debora Makower.
He came to me with an official visit
because he wanted to do his internship in Chłodna 2.
It was customary to ask a doctor who already did his internship there.
I did my internship as an internist.
After your father's death.
After my father's death, yes.
When he came in, he made a very good impression on me.
He was tall and handsome.
I told him that it would be better if he did his internship in another house
and not in the one that already had a doctor.
What did he say?
"You see, my mother is so tired and ill
and she has a cousin who lives opposite your house
and I would like to hug her.
So I would like to ask you to agree to it."
Of course, I couldn't do it.
I had to agree to it.
He told me not to worry
because he was about 10 years older than me.
"I will help you with your internship
and you will get a pension,
which was a source of income at that time."
And that's how they moved in.
From the ceremonial visits of my younger friend, we got to know each other.
Very soon, we developed a strong bond of feelings,
especially from my side.
My husband kept emphasizing that he experienced a great blow in Łódź.
He had a woman there whom he loved very much
and to whom he was very disappointed.
To the point that, as they say, he had an ice axe instead of a heart.
And my task was to melt this ice axe.
Very early on, I fell in love with him despite my great love for my first husband.
So my mother always said to him,
"What about you? How do you behave?
What would your father say about it?"
We will stop here.
Yes.
Thank you.
The End
© PTA / TVP