The Midwife of Auschwitz

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Stanislawa Leszczynska, born to a Polish Catholic family in 1896, spent her early years in relative peace—marrying, studying for her midwife’s certificate, and having children. But it was in war that she found her life’s mission: incarcerated at the Auschwitz concentration camp, she delivered over 3,000 babies. 

While her father served in the military, her mother worked 12-hour shifts in a factory to send Stanislawa to a private school. She finished high school in 1914, just as the First World War broke out. In 1916, she married printer Bronislaw Leszczynski.

She gave birth to a son in 1917, and two years later, to a daughter. In 1920, the family relocated to Warsaw. Stanislawa enrolled at the midwife college and completed her studies with an Alumnae Achievement Award in 1922. They moved to Lodz and she got a job as a midwife, and had her third child, a son. The next year she had a fourth child.

After Germany invaded Poland, the family was forced to relocate witnin Lodz because the Nazis had reserved their area as a Jewish ghetto. The Leszczyńskis began helping the Jews by delivering them food items and false documents. Stanislawa was caught red-handed, however, and brought to the Gestapo on February 18, 1943. Her three younger children were also arrested. Her husband and one son avoided capture and fled the city. The Nazis sent the two captured boys to work as slaves in the stone quarries of Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp. Stanislawa never saw her husband again; he died in the Warsaw Uprising in 1944.

After the Gestapo interrogated Stanislawa she and her then 24-year-old daughter Sylwia were sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp on April 17, 1943, and tattooed with camp numbers. Stanislawa found a German doctor and told him she was a midwife. He assigned her and Sylwia, who had been a medical student before the war, to work in the camp’s “maternity ward,” consisting of filthy barracks bearing no resemblance to a maternity ward. Most pregnant women at Auschwitz were simply sent to the gas chambers.

Others were sent to the barracks to endure their pregnancy in squalid conditions. “Sister Klara,” a midwife who had been sent to the camp for committing infanticide, oversaw the barracks with a woman called “Sister Pfani.” They were in charge of declaring babies born in the ward stillborn, then drowning them in buckets, often in front of the mothers who had just given birth.

Despite threats and beatings by Klara, Stanislawa began caring for mothers and delivering their babies. Although she knew that most babies she delivered would be killed within a few hours, she saved as many lives as she could. It was almost impossible work—no running water, few blankets, no diapers, little food. Stanislawa learned to have women in labor lie on the rarely lit brick stove in the center of the barracks—the only place that could accommodate them. Lice and diseases were common in the ward.

Stanislawa, assisted by her daughter and other prisoners, later said she delivered 3,000 babies during her two years at Auschwitz. She continued to refuse to kill babies despite repeated orders to do so, even standing up to Dr. Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death,” known for his brutal experiments on twins and other inmates.

Stanislawa felt helpless as she watched the babies she delivered be killed or starve to death, their mothers forbidden to breastfeed. But she kept on working, baptizing Christian babies and caring  for the women in the barracks. They nicknamed her “Mother.”

Of the 3,000 babies she delivered, half of them were drowned, another 1,000 died quickly of starvation or cold, 500 were sent to other families, and 30 survived the camp, according to medical historians.

In early 1945, the Nazis forced most inmates of Auschwitz to leave the camp on a “death march” to other camps. Stanislawa refused to leave and stayed in the camp until its liberation.

“To this day I do not know at what price [she delivered my baby],” said Maria Saloman (in the 1980s), whose daughter was delivered, “My Liz owes her life to Stanislawa Leszczyńska. I cannot think of her without tears coming to my eyes.”

At the war’s ending, Stanislawa returned to Lodz, and her children arrived there from the labor camps. She continued working as a midwife there. She retired in 1957and later described how she risked her life to save newborns in The Report of a Midwife from Auschwitz. In this record she mentions the meeting with Mengele and the newborns being taken to another room and drowned in a barrel by Klara and Pfani.

On January 27, 1970, Stanislawa attended an official celebration in Warsaw, where she met the women prisoners of Auschwitz and their grown-up children born in the camp. She died four years later. In 1983, the School of Obstetricians in Krakow was named in her honor. She is an official candidate for canonization by the Catholic Church. A few hospitals and organizations in Poland are named after Stanislawa as is the main road at the Auschwitz concentration camp museum.