Charles G. Roland

I found this book engrossing and would recommend it both for Holocaust junkies like myself, and for people just interested in medicine. It's basically a medical history of the Warsaw ghetto: starvation, typhus, tuberculosis, depression... Yet it is also a testimony to man's ability to adapt and make the best of what he has.

A little-known fact is that doctors in the ghetto set up a clandestine medical school. Students who survived the war and continued their education at European universities got credit for their ghetto school attendance, and one student was quoted as saying she learned more from the ghetto school than from the traditional medical school she later attended. Another feat was the starvation study: realizing they had plenty of starvation and very little else, scientists began an in-depth study of hunger, the first of its kind, and its findings remain useful today.

The author interviewed many ghetto survivors and has an extensive bibliography of memoirs and other books. Courage Under Siege had a lot of attention-grabbing facts, such as details on how the typhus vaccine was made. (It involved the intestines of lice. I will say no more.) This is a solid addition to your Holocaust and/or medical history library.

[UPDATE: I found some excerpts of this book at http://remember.org/courage/ available for free.]… (més)