Upcoming Anthology Explores Complex Role of Jewish Medical Workers During Holocaust.

The daunting, soul-numbing task of providing care and comfort during the Holocaust is one of the harrowing facets of an upcoming anthology of first-person accounts of Jewish medical workers.

The current issue of Bostonia magazine highlights the work of a team led by Michael Grodin, professor of health law, bioethics and human rights at BUSPH, the founding director of the Project on Medicine and the Holocaust. The team has compiled about 40 first-person accounts of the horrors endured by medical workers during the Holocaust, first in the ghettos under Nazi persecution, then during the horrors of the concentration camps.

In some cases, doctors and nurses found their core tenet of  “First Do No Harm” severely challenged by the daily rigors of sustaining life during the war. Some medical workers were forced into life-or-death decisions weighing the life of a mother against the life of an infant. Others chose death rather than participating in the grisly selections of unfit prisoners destined for death chambers.