Despite the horrors that were happening around her, Polish midwife Stanislava Leščinska helped pregnant women in Auschwitz to make these unfortunate women give birth as normally as possible. And so in the hell of a concentration camp she managed to give birth to over 3,000 babies!
Stanislava Leščinska was born in 1896. Before the Second World War, her life did not differ in any way from the life of any other Catholic girl from Poland at that time - she finished primary and secondary school before the First World War and in 1916 married Branislav Leszczynski, a printing worker. Until 1919, she had a son and a daughter and moved with her family to Warsaw, where she began studying to be a midwife. By 1923, she gave birth to two more sons and got a job at the city hospital as a midwife, writes the portal Allday.com. The Nazis occupied Poland at the beginning of World War II and the Leszczynska family had to move because their entire area was turned into a Jewish ghetto. Stanislava and her family did not want to leave their former neighbors stranded, but they were not careful enough, so they were soon caught delivering food and false documents to the Jews. Stanislava was arrested in 1943 together with her three children, while Branislav and their eldest son managed to escape. She never saw Stanislav's husband again because he died a little later in the Warsaw Uprising.
Midwife from Auschwitz!
After being interrogated, Stanislav and her 24-year-old daughter, a medical student, ended up in Auschwitz. As both women had medical knowledge they were assigned to the maternity ward while the whole hospital functioned under the control of the infamous Dr. Mengele. Their knowledge probably saved their lives. The situation in Auschwitz was bad everywhere, but the maternity ward was like hell. The ward was not equipped with even the most basic means of medical care and Stanislava had to use all her ingenuity to help women give birth as painlessly as possible. She arranged for the beds of pregnant women in the barracks to be moved closest to the ovens and advised these women, no matter how difficult it was, to barter their portions of bread for extra blankets so that, once the babies were born, they had something to wrap them in. If mothers did not have towels or sheets, their babies used dirty pieces of paper instead of diapers.
Coming into the world in the middle of hell!
Stanislava Leščinska gave birth to every pregnant woman in Auschwitz with the same care and effort as she did in the hospital in Warsaw. Despite being surrounded by horror, every baby was born with the help of her loving hands full of love. Other detainees later testified that Stanislava spent the night awake advising pregnant women on how to go through childbirth as easily as possible, and soon the whole of Auschwitz called her - Mother. The Nazis assumed that most pregnant women, in the midst of poor conditions and illness, would sooner or later have an abortion or give birth to dead children. Thanks to Stanislava, a large number of women still managed to carry the pregnancy to the end, and she also organized a group of camp inmates who, as much as they could, took care of mothers and babies. But this was not the end of the suffering of these people! Any mother who would not be able to recover quickly enough after giving birth was immediately taken to a gas chamber. As for the baby, Mengele at one point ordered Stanislava to kill any child who managed to survive the birth. She refused and after that she helped the mothers to hide the children. In the end, Stanislava Leščinska, risking her life, helped 3,000 babies be born. Of that number, nearly 2,500 children eventually did not survive the horrors of Auschwitz. About 500 babies who had Aryan characteristics were sent by the Nazis for adoption to German families. Stanislava helped here too! She found a way to tattoo babies so that after the war, their real parents could find them.
Saint of Auschwitz!
Stanislava Leszczynska was released from Auschwitz after the war and managed to find her two surviving children again. She did not want to speak publicly about what she did during the war years because, as she once said, it was all too painful and scary. However, in 1970, at a meeting of detainees in Warsaw, she met some surviving mothers and children whom she rescued in Auschwitz. Stanislava Leščinska's incredible life story was revealed after the publication of Stanislava's short story "The Report of a Midwife from Auschwitz"
Just before her death in 1974. In 2010, the Catholic Church began the process of proclaiming Stanislava Leščinska a saint.
Imagine how brave she was.