Doctor Stefania Perzanowska, founder of the women prisoners’ hospital at Majdanek concentration camp Marta Grudzińska
K
onzentrationslager Lublin, generally known as Majdanek, was in operation from the autumn of 1941 to July 1944, confining about 150 thousand prisoners, citizens of many countries and members of various professions and
ethnic and social groups. About 80 thousand persons died in Majdanek, including
nearly 60 thousand Jewish inmates, for whom Majdanek was a death camp. Majdanek’s atrocious sanitary and existential conditions earned it the reputation of one of the worst concentration camps from the prisoners’ point of view. It was also characterised by its high mortality rate due to the punishments and oppressive measures used against inmates, but also on account of the diseases, especially epidemics of typhus fever.
About the author: Marta Grudzińska is a historian and a curator, employed at the Research Department of the State Museum at Majdanek. The author of articles and books on the history of Majdanek concentration camp, the Lipowa slave labour camp in Lublin, and individual and collective memory in the accounts of witnesses. Co-author of museum exhibitions, including Prisoners of Majdanek, Doctors in striped uniforms. The medical service in Majdanek concentration camp. Her work at the museum is concerned with the camp’s oral history preserved in the statements made by survivors and their families.