When the first transport of female political prisoners reached Majdanek on 8 January 1943, no hospital existed in the camp. The barracks assigned to the women were unfinished, their windows without glass, the floors covered with snow. Among the prisoners was Dr Stefania Perzanowska, a 46-year-old internist from Radom. Within days, she began organising what she called a hospital, despite having almost none of the resources the term implies: no equipment, no medicines, no sanitation, no security. Over the following year, it grew to treat several hundred women.
For Perzanowska, medicine was not confined to clinical practice. Throughout her career, it was tied to a broader sense of professional and civic responsibility. That understanding shaped her actions both before the war and during her imprisonment at Majdanek.
Before the war
Stefania Perzanowska was born in Warsaw in 1896, into the first generation of Polish women admitted to university medical faculties. In 1915 she enrolled at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Warsaw, a decision shaped both by academic ambition and by a conviction that medicine offered a direct form of service to society at a time when Poland's political future remained undecided.
Her studies coincided with the final years of the First World War and the campaign to restore Polish independence. She joined the Polish Military Organisation (Polska Organizacja Wojskowa, POW) and later served in the Voluntary Women's Legion during the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–1921, first as a medical orderly, then as a military doctor. This early experience of wartime medicine taught her to work under pressure, to make decisions with incomplete information, and to improvise when supplies ran short — skills she would draw on again more than two decades later.
Perzanowska qualified as a physician in 1926 and specialised in internal medicine, training in several Warsaw hospitals before being appointed head of the internal medicine department at the Municipal Hospital in Radom. She treated patients as individuals whose dignity warranted protection regardless of prognosis, a principle that became increasingly relevant once the war reached the hospital's wards. By the time the German occupation deprived physicians of medicines, instruments and professional protection, Perzanowska already relied on three things the occupation could not remove: clinical judgment, personal integrity, and the trust of her patients.
Medicine under occupation
German occupation altered the daily practice of medicine in ways few could have anticipated. Hospitals continued to operate, but under conditions of fear, shortage and surveillance. Physicians treated illness alongside its concealed consequences: injuries hidden from the authorities, exhaustion, malnutrition, and the psychological strain of life under occupation. Professional ethics, previously safeguarded by institutions, became a matter of individual decision, exercised daily.
In Radom, neutrality was not a viable option. Drawing on her military background, Perzanowska joined the underground structures of the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK). She trained medical personnel for the clandestine health service, organised communications, and used her apartment as a contact point for the resistance.
This commitment led to her arrest. On the night of 10–11 November 1942, the Gestapo searched her apartment during a broader operation against the Polish resistance in Radom. Underground correspondence stored there was not discovered, but Perzanowska was detained and interrogated on multiple occasions. Fellow prisoners recalled her composure: she spoke with women returning from interrogation, assisted those who could not cope with the strain, and attempted, even within a cell, to maintain a degree of order.
In January 1943, following several weeks of imprisonment, Perzanowska was deported with other political prisoners to Majdanek. She arrived without the instruments, medicines or institutional authority normally associated with medical practice. What she brought instead was experience, discipline, and the conviction that patient care remained possible under any circumstances. This conviction underpinned one of the most extensively documented instances of medical resistance within a German-Nazi concentration camp.
Order at Majdanek
The transport reached Majdanek on 8 January 1943. The women were marched through snow from the railway station in Lublin to a newly constructed section of the camp: unfinished, unheated, its windows without glass. Disease was not incidental to imprisonment here; it functioned as one of the camp's operating mechanisms.
Perzanowska's initial response was organisation. She encouraged the women to maintain what hygiene the absence of water allowed: washing with snow, checking one another for lice. These measures constituted the first line of defence against epidemics that, in a concentration camp, could kill by the hundreds. For Perzanowska, medical practice began before treatment, in the imposition of order on conditions designed to produce chaos.
When typhus cases began to appear, she identified the symptoms before the characteristic rash developed. The SS physician on duty dismissed her assessment. She maintained her diagnosis. Once the outbreak could no longer be denied, camp authorities authorised an isolation barrack, motivated by the risk of contagion among the guards rather than concern for the prisoners. That barrack became the nucleus of a hospital that would eventually span several buildings and treat several hundred women.
Perzanowska insisted on calling the facility a hospital, rejecting the camp's official term, Revier. The distinction carried practical weight: a hospital implied care, professional accountability and the possibility of recovery, while retaining the term meant retaining medicine's ethical function in an environment designed to eliminate it. As she later documented, the women were fully aware of how far their conditions fell short of basic medical standards. They continued to call it a hospital regardless.
The hospital's foundation was its staff, not its facilities. Perzanowska assembled physicians, trained nurses, pharmacists, medical students, and dozens of volunteers without formal training who acquired their skills on the job. She identified individual strengths quickly, delegated responsibilities, and maintained a working culture of trust under sustained pressure. In her later account of Majdanek, she devoted as much space to her colleagues as to her own role, recording the names of those who worked alongside her. She described the hospital's operation as a collective undertaking rather than an individual achievement.
The ethics of healing
The hospital's identity rested as much on its limitations as on its achievements. Medicines were scarce to the point of near non-existence. Surgical instruments were improvised. Diagnoses depended on clinical experience rather than laboratory testing. Prisoners produced charcoal from burnt bread to treat digestive illness, gathered medicinal herbs during outside work assignments, and carried out procedures with whatever tools were available. Outcomes depended on ingenuity, cooperation, and detailed practical knowledge of the human body.
Scarcity, however, was not the hospital's central challenge. The greater threat came from a system that required physicians to accept a framework in which certain lives no longer qualified for protection. Perzanowska rejected this framework without exception. Every patient, regardless of nationality, age or likelihood of survival, remained in her assessment a person entitled to care. In maintaining this position, she defended both her patients and the ethical foundation of her profession.
This position was tested directly. When the SS ordered hospital staff to bring Jewish patients outside for selection, Perzanowska objected openly, stating according to later accounts that medical staff had been trained to preserve life, not to participate in its termination. Camp guards ultimately carried out the order themselves, but her refusal carried substantial personal risk. Within the camp, professional ethics had no institutional protection remaining. Their continuation depended entirely on individual decisions, repeated under pressure.
Other forms of resistance were less visible. Medical records were altered to prevent selection. Diagnoses were deliberately misrepresented. Women too weak for forced labour were concealed where possible. These decisions were frequently made within seconds, based on incomplete information, under continuous risk of discovery, without any assurance of success.
Perzanowska treated healing as extending beyond disease management. Survivors recalled both her discipline and the atmosphere she maintained around it: a measure of stability within an environment defined by fear. Patients encountered consistent routines, attentive staff, and confirmation of their status as human beings, contrary to the camp's prevailing logic. This sense of hope was not extended as reassurance; it was built through competence, consistent action, and the assurance that no patient would go without care.
Within a system designed to reduce individuals to identification numbers, the hospital remained one of the few environments in which women were treated as patients rather than prisoners. At Majdanek, this distinction functioned as one of the more consequential forms of resistance available to prisoners.
Bearing witness
When Majdanek was evacuated in 1944, Perzanowska was transferred first to Auschwitz, then to Ravensbrück and Neustadt-Glewe, remaining in the camp system until her liberation in May 1945. After the war, she resumed medical practice, but also undertook the documentation of her camp experience. Like many survivors, she recognised that the camps had aimed to erase memory with the same deliberateness they applied to ending lives. Recording that memory became, for her, a continuation of her earlier professional obligation.
In 1970 she published her memoir, Gdy myśli do Majdanka wracają (When My Thoughts Return to Majdanek). The book's structure reflects its author's priorities: rather than centring her own experience, Perzanowska devoted most of its pages to the women she had worked alongside, reconstructing the hospital's organisation in detail and recording the names of doctors, nurses and volunteers who had served there.
She wrote with clinical precision, attentive to detail and consistently avoiding exaggeration. She did not conceal the suffering, the difficult decisions, or the patients who could not be saved. At the same time, her account does not present the camp solely as a site of destruction. It documents, alongside the violence, evidence that solidarity remained possible within a system built on coercion, and that medical practice retained purpose even when deprived of its usual instruments.
The legacy of care
Stefania Perzanowska died in 1974. The questions raised by her documented work at Majdanek have retained their relevance. Her account demonstrates that medicine functions not only as a technical discipline but as a moral practice, shaped by decisions made once clinical knowledge alone is insufficient. At Majdanek, medical care could mean pain relief, the protection of patient dignity, the maintenance of hope, or simply a refusal to abandon another person. These actions did not alter the broader course of the war. They altered individual outcomes, and in doing so preserved forms of humanity that the camp system was designed to eliminate.
Each year, on 23 August, the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Totalitarian Regimes commemorates not only those who died under totalitarian rule, but those who refused to let such systems define what it meant to be human. Totalitarian regimes targeted more than individual lives: they undermined trust, solidarity, professional ethics, and the ordinary social bonds that sustain a community. Perzanowska's case remains significant for this reason. Resistance did not always take the form of armed conflict. It could mean insisting on the correct term for a medical facility, declining to abandon a patient, or maintaining professional ethics in an environment engineered to dismantle them.
She could not change the reality of Majdanek. She refused to accept its logic.
Remember her.
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References
- Ciesielska, Maria. Stefania Perzanowska (1896–1974), lekarka i więźniarka obozu w Majdanku. Acta Medicorum Polonorum, vol. 2, 2012.
- Grudzińska, Małgorzata. “Kiedy ceną za odwagę jest ludzkie życie – lekarze zatrudnieni w szpitalach obozowych Majdanka.” In Cena odwagi. Między ocaleniem życia a ocaleniem człowieczeństwa, edited by Adam Bartuś and Piotr Trojański. Oświęcim, 2019.
- Kłodziński, Stanisław. “Dr Stefania Perzanowska.” Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim, no. 1, 1981.
- Perzanowska, Stefania. Gdy myśli do Majdanka wracają. Warsaw: Państwowe Muzeum na Majdanku, 2022 (first published: Lublin, 1970).
- Perzanowska, Stefania. “Szpital obozu kobiecego na Majdanku.” Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim, no. 1, 1968.
- Pietruszka, Marek. Stefania Perzanowska. Warsaw: Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), 2023.