Letters written by Auschwitz doctor offer rare look at wartime family ties

Newly discovered collection highlights correspondence between Jan Nowak, a non-Jewish physician from Kraków, and his family outside the Nazi camps

A collection of letters and documents belonging to a Polish doctor imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps was recently donated to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, offering historians a rare glimpse into the personal ties that sustained prisoners during the Holocaust.

The archive, donated by Kraków numismatist Marek Trybulski, centers on Dr. Jan Nowak, a non-Jewish physician from Kraków who was deported to Auschwitz on June 26, 1941, the museum said Tuesday. It includes a letter sent by Nowak from Auschwitz, seven letters from his relatives, postcards, parcel receipts and other wartime documents.

Approximately 2 million non-Jewish Poles were killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust, alongside some 3 million Polish Jews. Before the war, Jews comprised about 3.3 million of the country’s 35 million people.

While imprisoned, Nowak worked in the camp’s prisoner hospitals, primarily in the infectious diseases ward in Block 20, where he and other inmate medical staff sought to save fellow prisoners from disease, selection and death despite severe restrictions.

On February 18, 1942, Nowak was transferred from Auschwitz to Majdanek along with three other doctors, and tasked with organizing prisoner hospitals there. After a long period there, Nowak was transferred to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp, and then to a subcamp of the Flossenbürg concentration camp in Litoměřice. It was from there that he was eventually liberated.

After the war, he testified in proceedings against former German SS doctors and against Erich Muhsfeldt, an SS officer responsible for crimes committed, among other places, in Majdanek and Auschwitz.

But Nowak’s letters don’t divulge any of the harsh details of his day-to-day existence. Correspondence between Auschwitz prisoners and the outside world was subject to strict restrictions and could only be written in German. Jews and Soviets were barred from writing any letters.

All letters were checked by censors, and the SS removed passages considered suspicious or too precise in describing the conditions in the camp. Messages had to include an assurance that the prisoner was healthy, even though this very often was not the case.

Instead, Nowak’s correspondence with his family focused on less dire matters. One letter Nowak received from his mother for Christmas had a hand-drawn Christmas tree decorated with baubles and a candle in its upper left-hand corner.

“For a man imprisoned in the camp, this small Christmas tree must have had to replace all the Christmases he had previously spent with his family,” Trybulski said. “Looking at this letter, one can try to imagine what such a drawing and a message from his mother meant to him in the reality of the camp.”

Trybulski said he acquired the collection after a woman who initially sought to sell coins unexpectedly brought him more than 90 documents linked to the doctor. He later donated them to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, insisting that he could not receive payment for them.

“This is the history of the camp and of a specific person. Documents like these should not be traded,” he said.

The Auschwitz Museum will retain documents related to Nowak’s imprisonment there, while materials from his later incarceration at the Majdanek and Gross-Rosen camps will be donated to the respective museums.

Collections of letters like this are donated extremely rarely, and offer a unique window into prisoners’ inner lives, said Wojciech Płosa, head of the Museum Archives.

“Reading these documents, we can see how important the bond was that prisoners tried to maintain with their families despite being imprisoned in a concentration camp,” he said. “It gave them hope and the strength they needed to survive.”