Dawid Salomon Amsterdamski

In the Warsaw telephone directory for 1939/1940, among the subscribers of the building at 7 Złota Street, there is an entry: "Amsterdamski D., dr, surgeon".

Behind that single line of small print lies the story of a distinguished Warsaw surgeon who, in September 1939, refused to flee the bombarded city, operated in the ghetto for three years — and died in hiding, on the fourth day of the January liquidation action of 1943. And also the story of his wife and sons, whom the war carried from Warsaw through Wilno all the way to Siberia, and who returned years later to search for his grave. In vain.

This account gathers what is known about him. Every fact comes from a source: from the official register of physicians and the telephone directories, from the notices of the "Gazeta Żydowska" (the Jewish Gazette), from the testimonies of surviving doctors and nurses, from a post-war registration card, from the family's memories. Where the sources fall silent, so does this account.

I. The Doctor

Dawid Salomon Amsterdamski was born on 27 March 1894 in Mariampol, Lithuania, to Mosze and Perla née Sołowiejczyk. He became a surgeon — and a highly regarded one. He worked at the Jewish Hospital in the Czyste district, a clinic opened in 1902 and admitting patients of all faiths, for years considered one of the best and most modern hospitals in Warsaw.

He married Irena née Szwarcsztajn (b. 1907), who came from a wealthy family of industrialists — the Szwarcsztajns owned most of the cellulose factories in Poland. In 1929 their son Stefan was born; a year later, Jerzy. The family lived on Kredytowa Street; the Saxon Garden was next door, and nearby stood the Ziemiańska café with the table of the Skamander poets. Stefan's few memories of early childhood were always bound up with his father's medical practice: a bicycle crash after which his father stitched up his split head at home; a tonsillectomy and his smiling father waving to little "Stefcio" just before the anaesthesia: "Sleep now. We'll see each other in a moment."

Towards the end of the 1930s the couple's paths diverged. Irena moved with the boys to a flat on Na Skarpie Avenue, while the doctor — as the official register of physicians recorded in October 1938 — moved into the five-room apartment no. 8 at 7 Złota Street, where he most likely also received patients.

II. September 1939. The Parting

In the first half of September 1939, Irena's brother, Edward "Edek" Szwarcsztajn — a chemical engineer and rally driver who had raced his Alfa Romeo in the Monte Carlo Rally — packed his father, his sister and her two sons into the car and set off eastwards, amid bombs and throngs of refugees. Edek had returned a year earlier from his studies in Austria, just after the Anschluss; he had seen what Hitler's victory smelled like, and he did not intend to wait.

Dr Amsterdamski did not go. He would not leave his hospital in a Warsaw under bombardment. He decided he would join the family later. They never saw each other again.

After many ordeals the family reached Wilno, where the Red Army had already stationed itself. The doctor stayed in Warsaw — in September 1939 the Germans took him, as a head of ward, as a hostage.

A testimony survives from nurse Sabina Gurfinkiel-Glocer about the first days of the bombing: when explosions sounded over the city, the staff still thought it was the announced exercises — until the telephone rang. Dr Amsterdamski answered it: director Sztabholc was reporting that the Germans were bombing Wola and Koło, and that all the wounded would be directed to the Czyste hospital. A fever seized the ward; doctors and nurses operated without respite — shrapnel wounds, amputations; there were so many wounded that it was hard to decide whom to operate on first. One day a shell fragment pierced the wall of the isolation ward and fell hissing right at Dr Amsterdamski's feet. The whole ward congratulated him on coming out of it unscathed. After the city capitulated, the doctor additionally worked at the TOZ surgical outpatient clinic at 34 Pańska Street.

III. Behind the Wall

In 1939 nearly 370,000 Jews lived in Warsaw — almost every third inhabitant of the city. Step by step the occupier tightened the noose: from October 1939 the freezing of bank accounts, from December the duty to wear an armband with the Star of David, then the bans on using trains, trams, restaurants, libraries and parks, and restrictions on the professional work of doctors and lawyers.

In October 1940 the Germans created the ghetto. For thousands of people it meant the sudden necessity of abandoning their homes — the forced migrations encompassed 138,000 Jews and 113,000 Poles. It was then that Dr Amsterdamski moved from 7 Złota Street to 61 Sienna Street.

On 16 November 1940 the gates of the ghetto were closed. Behind the three-metre wall crowned with barbed wire were some 400,000 people; by March 1941 — 460,000. The density reached 120,000 people per square kilometre; ten people lived to a room. In October 1941 the doctor moved once again, to 5 Solna Street — a notice in the "Gazeta Żydowska" informed patients that the surgeon received between 4 and 7 o'clock.

His hospital, too, ended up behind the wall. The surgical wards of the Czyste Hospital — 300 beds in all — were moved to the building at 1 Leszno Street. Dr Amsterdamski was head of the Second Surgical Ward there. Under the occupier's decree the staff could take only the barest necessities, though the new premises had no equipment at all. So the nurses smuggled the precious surgical instruments hidden in the makeshift pillows of the sick — telling the Germans the patients were "running high fevers", which as a rule effectively deterred the inspectors. Thanks to them the newly created wards had any equipment at all.

At the moment the ghetto was sealed, more than 900 physicians found themselves inside it; they were permitted to treat only Jewish patients. In the spring of 1942 the terror reached the doctor personally: between 15 and 30 March he was arrested in the street and imprisoned in Pawiak, from which he was released. He went back to work.

IV. The Great Deportation

On 22 July 1942 the so-called Great Deportation — the Grossaktion — began in the Warsaw ghetto: deportations to the extermination centre at Treblinka. In barely two months, by 21 September 1942, close to 300,000 Warsaw Jews were murdered there. People were driven to the Umschlagplatz on Stawki Street and crammed into freight cars, a hundred, a hundred and twenty to a car; the floors were strewn with quicklime. Only about 60,000 people remained in the area of the shrunken ghetto.

The terror of the Great Deportation touched the doctor personally as well: he found himself among the several dozen hostages — Judenrat councillors, lawyers, engineers, rabbis and eighteen physicians — held in Pawiak. Beaten, starved and forced into gruelling labour, they lived in constant expectation of being shot; they were released only on 24 August 1942. During the selection of patients, other ward heads had to lead the rounds — as it was recorded, "because Amsterdamski was absent, taken by the Germans as a hostage". Nurse Sabina Gurfinkiel-Glocer remembered what a joy it was to see Dr Amsterdamski back — in those tragic days of darkness, when so many were being taken from the ghetto to the death camps.

Dr Amsterdamski's hospital was liquidated for the first time between 5 and 11 September 1942. On 12 September, 950 patients and 50 staff were deported to Treblinka. Those doctors who managed to survive took up work in the residual hospital at 6 Gęsia Street, right beside the Umschlagplatz. Dr Amsterdamski was one of its ward heads. On the doors of the staff apartments in the annexe hung little cards: "Dr Wohl, Dr Penson, doctor, doctor, doctor…". As Alina Margolis-Edelman wrote — "it protected no one from anything".

V. January 1943

The first rumours of planned deportations reached the hospital on Gęsia at midnight between 17 and 18 January 1943. Policeman Bronisław Girszlak called nurse Gurfinkiel-Glocer out into the corridor — he did not want to speak in front of the patients. The news was bad: the liquidation of the rest of the ghetto was being planned; he advised warning people to hide wherever they could. Dr Amsterdamski, the administrative directors Kroszczor and Sztabholc and a few officials gathered in the office, and the messenger Gurwicz rode his bicycle to verify the news with the gendarmes at the gate. At four in the morning the nurses handed thermometers out to the patients — to distract them and give those who could walk a chance to hide. Those who could not get up had no chance.

On the morning of 18 January 1943 the Germans began the second deportation action. The staff of the Gęsia hospital and the workers' families went down into the shelters; some of the doctors first went to hide and secure the sick, and all the nurses stayed with the patients. SS-Sturmführer Konrad burst into the hospital. He hunted the sick — searching the recesses, dragging out those in hiding, shooting at the people lying in their beds.

Dr Amsterdamski hid. According to the post-war testimony of Dr Stanisław Waller, one of the physicians of the Czyste Hospital, "during the final liquidation of the hospital in January 1943 two doctors hiding in the attic died: Dr Amsterdamski, surgeon…".

The hospital memoirs confirm it: "during the last night of the deportation Dr Amsterdamski, chief of surgery of Czyste, died unexpectedly" — noted Henryk Kroszczor, the hospital's administrative director; Dr Waller's account of the hiding place in the attic is preserved in the Yad Vashem archive (ref. O.3/2358).

Within the family a slightly different picture of those days survived, heard after the war from friends who lived: the doctor was said to have hidden with a colleague in a chimney and to have sat in it, in complete silence, for two days; when they came out, they walked through dead streets, without a living soul, and when he reached his quarters — "his heart broke". Both versions say, in essence, the same thing: Dr Amsterdamski did not let himself be taken to Treblinka. He died within the walls of his own hospital.

VI. The Survivors: Wilno, Siberia, Return

Irena and the boys spent not quite two years in Wilno. In June 1941 the Soviets decided to deport them east — in cattle cars, to Siberia. It was a sentence that turned out to be a rescue: a few days later the Germans marched into Wilno, and the Jews of Wilno shared the fate of those of Warsaw.

The journey lasted many weeks in dreadful conditions. Twelve-year-old Stefan stole food and coal to heat the car; during one foraging expedition the train suddenly moved off and the boy caught up with it with the last of his strength. The family ended up in Slavgorod in Siberia, in a wretched clay-caulked farmstead. Paradoxically, it was precisely there that the future scholar was formed: Slavgorod had a superbly stocked library with a great collection of the Russian classics — Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Pushkin. The library was the only warm place in the little town, and to sit in it, one had to read. So thirteen-year-old Stefan read all day long.

In 1945 they returned to Poland. There was nothing to return to in Warsaw — they found a great sea of ruins; they settled in Łódź, where most of the Szwarcsztajns had lived before the war and where their factories stood. Of the entire family that had remained in the country not even a trace was left — all had perished in the Holocaust, and the factories were taken over by the state. Edward Szwarcsztajn, the former owner, took a job as an engineer under the direction of his own former workers.

Irena, a nurse by profession, registered on 27 April 1946 with the Central Committee of Jews in Poland.

VII. The Family's Later Years

Irena Amsterdamska died in 1989. The younger son, Jerzy, died prematurely in 1963.

Stefan Amsterdamski (1929–2005) became one of Poland's most eminent philosophers and methodologists of science. He came back from Siberia — as he himself admitted years later — an ardent communist; "later I was ashamed of it". In March 1968, as a dean at the University of Łódź, he took the side of the protesting students, for which he was expelled from the party and from the university. He refused to emigrate despite the antisemitic campaign. He signed the Letter of 59, joined the Workers' Defence Committee (KOR), co-founded the Society for Academic Courses, was active in "Solidarity", took part in the Round Table talks and served in the government of Tadeusz Mazowiecki. He was a professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the founder and first director of the Academy's School of Social Sciences; he translated, among others, Thomas S. Kuhn and Werner Heisenberg into Polish. Asked shortly before his death about existential fears, he answered like a sceptic: "I can say nothing sensible about it. I prefer to keep silent."

The doctor's grandson, Jacek Amsterdamski, is a media executive. It was he who, on behalf of the family, gave consent for his grandfather to be commemorated in front of the building.

Timeline

A Note on Sources

Compiled on the basis of, among others: the residence register of 7 Złota Street and the Warsaw telephone directories of 1937–1940; the Warsaw Voivodeship Gazette (25 November 1938); the card files of the getto.pl portal and the collections of the Jewish Historical Institute (including the testimony of Dr Stanisław Waller, ref. 301-6805); the 1946 registration card of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland; the Encyclopaedia of Solidarity; and the family's account — that of Jacek Amsterdamski, whom we warmly thank for his help and for consenting to this commemoration.

Opracowanie w ramach projektu upamiętnienia mieszkańców kamienicy — prepared as part of the project commemorating the residents of the building at 7 and 9 Złota Street in Warsaw · www.zlota7-9.com