Objects

Photograph of Józef Finkel with staff and patients

It is part of the collection:

Group photograph showing Dr Józef Finkiel with patients and medical staff of the hospital where he worked. The photograph was taken in a hospital room. Three hospital beds can be seen in the frame. Some people (including two doctors in overalls) are sitting on the beds. The others are standing. The man sitting on the right is Józef Finkiel. The name of the other doctor is unknown. The other people in the photograph are patients or nurses of the hospital. The patients are wearing dressing gowns, the nurses are wearing aprons. Some of the women are standing. The other women are sitting on beds. Some of the women are wearing headscarves. In these you can see the panelled wall and two tall leafy flowers (yucca?). | From the Donor's account we know that Dr Finkiel, after handing over the most important documents and some of the furniture from his flat to his family, left for Warsaw. Thanks to a preserved document "List of non-Aryan doctors" (after Maria Ciesielska, "Lekarze getta warszawskiego", Warsaw 2017, p. 18), we know that around 1940 Józef Finkiel stayed in the Warsaw Ghetto. Thanks to surviving lists of names, we know that between November 1940 and April 1943, nearly a thousand doctors worked in the ghetto with the permission of the occupation authorities. According to the testimony of the doctor's relative submitted to Yad Vashem, Józef Finkiel died during the Holocaust. However, no documents have remained to confirm the circumstances of his death. We can only wonder whether he lived to see the start of the Grossaktion Warsaw (22 July 1942). Did he witness the ghetto uprising? Was he deported to a concentration camp? Perhaps he died of exhaustion, starvation or typhus, which plagued the population in the overcrowded ghetto?

Marta Frączkiewicz 

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Information about the object
Author/creator
unknown
Object type
photography
Time of creation / dating
20th century
Created place
Łódź (Łódzkie Province)
Technique
photographic
manual script
Material
photographic print paper
Keywords
Copyright status
the object is not protected by copyright law
Owner
POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews
Identification number
MPOLIN-A54.1.1