Adina Blady Szwajger in the Warsaw Ghetto

Adina Blady Szwajger was a pediatrician in the Warsaw ghetto. When the great deportation action of July 1942 reached her hospital, she fed her young patients fatal doses of morphine. In her memoir, published in 1988, she revealed that:

I poured this last medicine into those tiny mouths. . . . And downstairs, there was screaming because the . . . Germans were already there, taking the sick from the wards to the cattle trucks.

Deniers may wish to reflect upon why she confessed to this act, given that she could simply have stated that the Germans killed the children. They may also wish to consider the context in which she acted in 1942. Why was she certain that these children were going to suffer horrible deaths during the deportation? The answer is in those events which she had already witnessed: a hospital containing many corpses, attesting to the fact that Jews had already been shot and starved. It is also in the certainty that her patients would be unlikely to survive a long journey in a cattle truck, and that 'resettlement' of such patients in such a context could only mean killing.