Look Who it Was Random video

Marek Edelman - Resurrection ward (125/145)

2,422 views · Published 11 September 2017 · 3:14 · Indexed 21 September 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2017 · News & Politics

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To listen to more of Marek Edelman’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpEJsJK7ur8&list=PLVV0r6CmEsFy9YZLKSE0bbnuUJfcOBFxQ

Marek Edelman (1919-2009) was the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. He had remained in Poland following the Nazi defeat and was active in domestic and international politics while at the same time becoming one of Poland’s leading cardiologists. [Listeners: Anka Grupinska, Joanna Klara Agnieszka Zuchowska, Joanna Szczesna; date recorded: 2003]

TRANSCRIPT: Ah yes, Aga had problems because they brought Kołakowski there, with...?

[L] They brought him from Warsaw.

He came in from Warsaw, he had chest pains, she admitted him onto the ward and the secret police got on to her demanding to know why she was treating Kołakowski, such an anti-fascist, etc., etc. But that's not important. This was already in the time of Mr Budny.

[L] Not yet. Budny was there, the gentleman whose name we don't want to mention and who wanted to kick you and Elka out when you went to Sterling.

Well yes, in the meantime there was Rysiek who was a very good head of this department. He built the first defibrillator. There was nothing like it in Poland, he was an engineer, I don't remember his name, his wife was called Danusia.

[L] They called us the resurrection department.

Is he dead?

[L] No, I'm just saying that they called us the resurrection department because we resuscitated everything without considering the cause because we were only just learning about this, it was 1968, 1969.

Rysiek made this, we had this equipment and they brought us a patient. There's this syndrome called Printzmetal's angina, and you can die from it or you can survive and since he was going to die we decided that... there was no emergency surgery of the coronary arteries. Somewhere someone had operated an arterial stenosis but this wasn't popular at all. We decided we had to operate on him because otherwise he would die. He was a small man, a skilled worker in a textile factory, a mechanic, young, 40 years old, about to die. So we said we'd operate. I won't go into the details of what happened. It was night-time, we had a colleague who was a drunk, he was trashed and he was supposed to do a cardiac catherisation. We dragged him out of bed at three in the morning, he did the procedure and confirmed the diagnosis.

[L] It was like a spy film, wasn't it?

I can't remember. We were waiting in a taxi somewhere outside his house, he might have been married or had a mistress at the time and we had to drag him out of bed not knowing what state he'd be in... I don't remember.

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