I Remember Nothing More [Hardcover]

Adina Blaby Szwajger (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 19, 1990

The author was a young Jewish doctor at the children's hospital in the Warsaw Ghetto from 1940 to 1942. When the hospital was forced to close the children that had survived were taken to the death-camps. Blady-Szwajger became a reluctant courier for the resistance. She left the ghetto and began to carry paper money pinned into her clothing to those in hiding. She and her flat-mate pretended to be good-time girls having fun and threw parties to disguise the coming and going of their male visitors. This heroic memoir pays tribute to all the men and women who paid with their lives for the safety of others.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In the literature of the Holocaust, this journal is among the most memorable, haunting and elegantly crafted, as, from her hospital bed in today's Warsaw, Szwajger, a pediatrician, a Polish Jew born in 1917, dredges into her memory of the events that followed the signing of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact in 1939. Her portraits of children suffering the brutality of war are particularly wrenching. Szwajger recalls a children's hospital at which she worked as a medical student with a prized "ticket" to travel between the Warsaw ghetto and the "Aryan side." We're shown the youngsters, starving, four to a bed; we feel Szwajger's anguish when the hospital is disbanded and she spares her patients their even crueler fate by administering overdoses of morphine to them. She sears us again at a monastery's children's center, describing its violent closure by the Nazis who hung the slaughtered priests on display. With false identity papers, Szwajger, a "courier girl" for the Jewish Fighting Organization, journeys throughout Poland carrying money to Jews and finding safe houses for them. Her husband is sent to a camp; she escapes a massacre at a Home Army hideout. Then, telling us about another act of euthanasia she committed, she decries: "I don't want to write any more. Not a sentence more. About anything." But it is enough, for Szwajger's testimony makes its impress as a classic. Photos.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

From School Library Journal

YA-- For 40 years, Szwajger was haunted by her experiences as a young pediatrician and a courier for the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB) during the German occupation of Poland. This fragmented account of that time is wrenched from the memory of a remarkable woman who is at last compelled to tell her story. In the children's hospital, the author's duties were to care for dying children who had no food, no medicine, and no future. Later, as a member of ZOB, she risked her life traveling back and forth from the ghetto to the "Aryan side" to secure papers and money to allow other Jews to escape through the sewers of Warsaw. Szwajger's tortured recollections are filled with the ironic horror that her very training as a doctor and compassion as a human being resulted in the most painful deed of all: mercy killing. I Remember is a unique contribution to Holocaust literature and an important primary source for students.
- Jackie Gropman, Richard Byrd Library, Springfield, VA
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: The Harvill Press; 1St Edition edition (July 19, 1990)
• ISBN-10: 0002720582
• ISBN-13: 978-0002720588
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,295,339 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Christian Themes in Jewish Suffering: Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; Blackmailers in Context; Origin of NSZ-Kill-Jews Tales, March 19, 2010

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Jan Peczkis "Scholar and Thinker" (Chicago IL, USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: I Remember Nothing More (Hardcover)

The author's work as a pediatrician gave way to that of a courier girl during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. She mentions Schremf, who was Director of the German-run Department of Health of Warsaw. He was sadistic and brutal, and hated both Poles and Jews. (p. 33).

Ironic to all those pronouncements about the Cross being absolutely foreign to Judaism, voiced during the Auschwitz Carmelite Convent controversy, Szwajger joined the ranks of Jews who appropriated Christian-suffering themes, in this case in the context of her work as a nurse: "And that this hospital was a Golgotha where the little Jesus of the ghetto was falling under the weight of his cross--the Jewish child, thrice innocent, suffering a thousand tortures." (p. 43).

In common with many Jewish authors, Szwajger is preoccupied with Milosz's "Campo dei Fiori", and the merry-go-round just outside the burning Warsaw Ghetto. What she fails to mention is the fact that Jews also tried to enjoy themselves during periods of tragedy, and that such activities did not imply callousness towards the suffering.

Szwajger puts the szmalcowniki (blackmailers of Jews) in the broader context of the overall criminality that had arisen in the Polish population (as a consequence of the brutality of the German occupation). She writes: "I told them honestly that I was afraid. Going home just before the curfew through the dark streets of Powisle wasn't safe. What I normally carried with me was too valuable to risk its being stolen. You have to remember that that on the streets there roamed, apart from the gendarmes and the extortionists, bands of young men completely corrupted by the war, preying on anybody, not just us. The words `Get out of your coat, Miss' were not uncommon, and you were rarely able to resist." (p. 123).

After the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the ZOB (Z.O.B) fighters were evacuated into the forests near Warsaw, where some of them were killed under unclear circumstances. Apropos to this, the author makes some revealing comments: "But I know that apart from the partisans from the AL there were other groups fighting the Germans in the forest, such as the NSZ, the National Armed Force which was derived from the ONR, the Radical Nationalist Camp. They were part of the extreme right wing of the National Democratic Party, who before the war had been fascinated by fascism, and had shown an instinct for anti-Semitism. So when Jewish fighters were killed in the forests in skirmishes with people other than the Germans it was easy to conclude who else had been involved." (p. 94). It is obvious that NSZ responsibility for killing the forest Jews is not a fact, but an ideologically-driven ASSUMPTION. Clearly, Szwajger is confusing, and equating, political anti-Semitism with murderous anti-Semitism. [Finally, NSZ responsibility is a physical impossibility: They were never active in that part of Poland.]