The biography of Professor Hanna Hirszfeld, an outstanding pediatric physician, is largely overshadowed by the figure of her husband, an outstanding microbiologist, immunologist and discoverer of blood group inheritance. Meanwhile, she not only had significant scientific achievements in the field of pediatrics, but also participated with her husband in research of great importance to world science.
She was a physician, scientist, polyglot, field physician of the Serbian Army and the Army of the Orient, lecturer of medical courses in the Warsaw Ghetto, founder and organizer of pediatric clinics in postwar Lublin and Wroclaw. In her private life, a faithful companion to her husband and a loving mother. For a single woman of the turn of the 20th century, the biography seems fascinating.
Hanna Hirszfeldova studied medicine in Montpellier and Berlin. During World War I, she was a military doctor in the Serbian army; after the end of the war, she served as head of the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Warsaw. After the outbreak of World War II, the Hirszfeld family initially lived on the so-called “Aryan side,” but from February 1941 they were forced to move to the Warsaw ghetto, where Hanna Hirszfeld served as head of the infant ward of a branch of the Berson and Bauman hospital in Leszno. There, despite the harsh situation, she tried to fight tuberculosis, spotted fever and starvation sickness. In the summer of 1942, together with her husband and other family members, she made her way to the so-called Aryan side. In February 1943, their daughter Maria died. The Hirszfelds hid in Szczytniki and Kamienna in the Kielce region, Stara Miłosna near Warsaw and in the village of Lipka, among other places.
After the war ended, Hanna lived with her husband in a villa on Wittig Street in Wroclaw. She co-organized the Medical Academy, and from 1954 was head of the Diagnostic Department of the Pediatrics Department on Hoene-Wrońskiego Street. She educated and formed many doctors, among whom were later professors, deans and rectors.
She died 60 years ago, on February 20, 1964, in Wroclaw. She is buried with her husband in the St. Lawrence cemetery on Bujwida Street.
