Reviews for Jewish martyrs of Pawiak

The average rating for Jewish martyrs of Pawiak based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-03-27 00:00:00 Matthew Laramore Adina Blady Szwajger's memoir of her life in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation reads like an interview. She was old and ill when she finally decided to tell her story and she does it without any filters or artistry often admitting to being confused about chronology and detail. There's a sense of both rawness and hurry as if she's frightened of dying before finishing her story. She was a nurse in one of the children's hospitals in the ghetto and after the deportations and the uprising worked for the Jewish underground outside the ghetto. Her young husband can't stand the strain of hiding anymore and when the Gestapo offer a limited number of Jews passage to Palestine for a large sum of money he volunteers. All these Jews were taken immediately to Auschwitz. Five stars all the way to Adina who comes across as an amazing young woman. However, I think this is a book for readers who already have some knowledge of the events in Warsaw during WW2 and not a good place to start because of its fragmented nature. She explains at the end why she didn't try to write her memoirs earlier and you realise just how heavy a burden her memories have been to her throughout her life.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-07-23 00:00:00 Sean Kenny This is one of the most haunting Holocaust memoirs I've read, and I've read a lot of them. The author was a newly minted pediatrician at the Warsaw Ghetto Children's Hospital and went on to sneak over to the Aryan side of the city and join the resistance. Curiously, she writes little about herself -- you know nothing about her life before the war and next to nothing about her family, though she does describe her husband's death and mentions that her mother was deported to Treblinka. To mention just one of the searing episodes in this story: During the liquidation of the ghetto, as the Nazis were shooting patients and throwing into trucks those that could still walk, Dr. Szwajger went to the tuberculosis ward and gave the children each an overdose of morphine, telling them it would take their pain away. She had promised to stay with the children until the end, so she waited until they all went to sleep, then she ran for her life. But decades later she was haunted by the thought that maybe one or two of them woke up later, alone. Though this book is frustratingly vague at times and it ends abruptly, I think if I could recommend only five books to someone who wanted to learn about what the Holocaust was like, I Remember Nothing More would be one of them. I applaud the author for her courage to finally tell her story. Very few people are left alive who remember it firsthand; Dr. Szwajger herself died in 1993.