Prologue
“When I think about the Nazi doctors, the medical executioners, I lose hope. To find it again I think about the others, the victim-doctors.” Elie Wiesel (Night)
I
t is with great pleasure that we present the volume of proceedings of the 3rd International Conference Medical Review Auschwitz: Medicine Behind the Barbed Wire. This Conference is an integral part of the Medical Review
Auschwitz project, which we launched in 2017. Our addressee is the international medical community, first and foremost doctors and medical students, as well as bioethicists and historians of medicine. The point of departure for our discussion on medicine during the Second World War are the articles in the Polish journal Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim, which was published by the Kraków Medical Society in 1961–1991. We are having this collection of nearly a thousand unique research papers, synopses, biographical articles, witnesses’ statements, and recollections translated into English and are posting them on the Project’s website at https:// www.mp.pl/auschwitz/, where they may be accessed by new generations of researchers who have had no opportunity hitherto of reading these materials owing to the language barrier. The COVID-19 pandemic turned the third edition of the Conference into a virtual event. We had four sessions and a panel discussion in which experts from Poland and other countries took part. A video record was made of all the presentations and discussions and is accessible at https://www.mp.pl/auschwitz/conference/.
