Nazis Throwing Babies From Second Story of Hospital

Auschwitz is best known equally a place of expiry—a hellish extermination camp, the largest of its kind, where at to the lowest degree 1.ane million people are thought to have been murdered. And then information technology'south strange to recollect of the camp as a place of life as well.

Information technology was, though—thanks to a woman named Stanislawa Leszczyńska. During her ii-year internment at Auschwitz, the Polish midwife delivered three,000 babies at the campsite in unthinkable conditions. Though her story is little known outside of Poland, it is testament to the resistance of a pocket-sized group of women determined to help their fellow prisoners.

Leszczyńska's want to help others is what landed her in Auschwitz in the get-go place. She was born in Lodz in 1896 and spent her early years in relatively peace—marrying, studying for her midwife'south certificate, having children.

READ & Watch More: Lookout the Emotional Reunion of a Concentration Army camp Survivor and One of His Liberators

Adolf Hitler visiting troops nearly Lodz, 1939. (Credit: Heinrich Hoffmann/ullstein bild via Getty Images)

In 1939, everything changed when the Nazis marched into Poland. Suddenly, Leszczyńska lived in an occupied country, and her city—home to the second largest number of Jews in Poland—became home to a ghetto. More than than a third of the metropolis's population was cramped into a tiny area and forced to work for the Nazis.

Horrified by the weather condition in the ghetto, Leszczyńska and her family unit, including her iv children, decided to help. They smuggled imitation documents and food to Jews inside the ghetto as role of a growing Polish resistance.

In 1943, the family'south work was discovered and they were interrogated past the Gestapo. Though Leszczyńska'southward husband and oldest son managed to escape, the younger children and their female parent were arrested. Leszczyńska was separated from her sons, who were sent to different camps to exercise forced labor, and sent to Auschwitz with her daughter, a medical student. Her husband kept fighting the Nazis, simply was killed during the Warsaw Insurgence of 1944. She never saw him again.

READ MORE: 4 Heroes Who Risked Their Lives to Take on the Nazis

Hungarian Jews arriving at Auschwitz, 1944. (Credit: Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images)

When she arrived at the camp, Leszczyńska establish a High german dr. and told him she was a midwife. He assigned her to work in the camp's "maternity ward," a set of filthy barracks that was less a identify to intendance for significant women than a identify to usher them into death.

Well-nigh significant women at Auschwitz were simply sent to the gas chambers. Women who institute out they were pregnant at the camp were sometimes given abortions by Gisella Perl, a medico who helped prevent hundreds of women from giving birth. Oft, when women were discovered to be meaning they were summarily executed.

Others were sent to a infirmary billet to wait out the rest of their pregnancy in squalid weather. "Sister Klara," a midwife who had been sent to the campsite for murdering a child, oversaw the barracks with a woman named "Sister Pfani." They were in charge of declaring babies built-in in the ward stillborn, and then drowning them in buckets, oftentimes in front end of the mothers who had only given birth. Sister Klara'due south role did not include assisting with deliveries.

"This segmentation of labor was one of the well-nigh grotesque examples of the Nazis, on the ane hand, cynically adhering to "legal" standards—non having the disbarred nurse assist childbirths—but on the other hand, assigning her to murder newborn Jewish babies," writes historian Michael Berkowitz.

READ MORE: How the Nazis Tried to Cover Up Their Crimes at Auschwitz

Photos of children and items of habiliment constitute at Auschwitz. (Credit: François Lochon/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images)

When Leszczyńska heard what was expected of her in the macabre maternity ward, she refused. When she was taken to the doctor who oversaw the entire army camp, she again refused. "Why they did not impale her then, no ane knows," said Leszczyńska's son Bronislaw in 1988.

Despite threats and beatings by Klara, Leszczyńska only began caring for mothers and delivering their babies. Despite knowing that nearly babies she delivered would be killed within a few hours, she worked to save as many of the mothers' lives as she could. It was nigh incommunicable work—no running h2o, few blankets, no diapers, piffling nutrient. Leszczyńska speedily learned to have women in labor lie on the rarely lit brick stove in the middle of the billet—the but place that could accommodate a laboring woman. Lice and diseases were common in the "hospital," which would make full with inches of water when it rained.

Leszczyńska, assisted by her daughter and other prisoners, later said she delivered 3,000 babies during her two years at Auschwitz. She continued to refuse to kill babies despite repeated orders to do then, fifty-fifty standing upward to Dr. Josef Mengele, the camp'due south infamous "Angel of Death," who was known for his vicious experiments on twins and other inmates.

READ More: The Jewish Men Forced to Help Run Auschwitz

German women conveying children in a Lebensborn center. (Credit: Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)

Non every baby was immediately murdered: Outset in 1943, some were taken to requite to Nazi couples equally "Aryan" babies under Nazi Federal republic of germany'due south Lebensborn plan, which kidnapped up to 100,000 babies in Poland solitary. Leszczyńska and her administration did their best to tattoo the babies who were taken in the hopes they would later be identified and reunited with their mothers. Other women killed their babies themselves rather than manus them over to the Nazis.

Some not-Jewish women were allowed to keep their babies, but they usually perished quickly due to the atmospheric condition in the army camp. Still, a few Jewish babies were allowed to live, though it's unclear what happened to them. In the words of historian Zoé Waxman, "If a child was immune to survive it was likely to exist for a specific purpose and for a specific fourth dimension."

Leszczyńska felt helpless equally she watched the babies she delivered be murdered or starve to death, their mothers forbidden to breastfeed. But she kept on working, baptizing Christian babies and caring as best every bit she could for the women in the barracks. They nicknamed her "Female parent."

A nurse and children during the liberation of Auschwitz, 1945. (Credidt: TASS/Getty Images)

Of the 3,000 babies delivered past Leszczyńska, medical historians Susan Benedict and Linda Sheilds write that half of them were drowned, another 1,000 died quickly of starvation or cold, 500 were sent to other families and 30 survived the camp. It is believed that all of the mothers and all of the newborns survived childbirth.

In early 1945, the Nazis forced virtually inmates of Auschwitz to go out the camp on a "death march" to other camps. Leszczyńska refused to depart, and stayed in the camp until its liberation.

Leszczyńska'due south legacy lived on long afterwards the liberation of Auschwitz—both in the memories of the survivors whose babies she attempted to give a dignified nascency, the lives of the few children who left the military camp alive, and the work of her ain children, all of whom survived the war and became physicians themselves.

"To this twenty-four hours I do not know at what price [she delivered my infant]," said Maria Saloman, whose baby Leszczyńska delivered, in the 1980s. "My Liz owes her life to Stanislawa Leszczyńska. I cannot think of her without tears coming to my eyes."

Leszczyńska returned to life equally a midwife in Lodz after the war and only began to discuss her fourth dimension at Auschwitz when she retired in 1957. She is yet revered in Poland and has been nominated for sainthood in the Catholic church. But even if she never becomes an official saint, her crucial work in a living hell speaks for itself.

Watch the HISTORY special, Auschwitz Untold, online or in the HISTORY App now.

Listen to HISTORY This Week Podcast: Episode 4: January 27, 1945 Surviving Auschwitz

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Source: https://www.history.com/news/auschwitz-midwife-stanislawa-leszczynska-saint

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