The Clandestine Medical Faculty in Warsaw Ghetto, 1941-1942

• In Event: Jewish Strategies for Survival during the Holocaust

Abstract

Although the sanctions for leading or engaging in learning activities were life-threatening, many people organized and engaged in clandestine education in the General Government throughout the Second World War. The Warsaw Ghetto was no exception in this regard. This paper aims to reconstruct and analyze the structures of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Warsaw that went underground inside the Warsaw Ghetto, organized under the façade of a “Sanitary Course for Fighting Epidemics,” to understand the functions it assumed in the psychological and physical survival strategies of dozens of lecturers and hundreds of students, especially as the Nazi policies and brutality radicalized during the war and the living conditions worsened as the extent of hunger, epidemics, and poverty enlarged.

Author

• Tila de Almeida Mendonça, U of Regensburg (Germany)