In 1942, a grup of starving Jewish scientists plus doctors in the Warsaw Ghetto were collecting information on their starving patients. They hoped their research would benefit future generations through better ways to treat malnutrition, plus they wanted the global to know of Nazi atrocities to prevent something similar from ever happening again. They recorded the grim effects of an almost complete lack of food on the human body in a rare book titled “Maladie de Famine” (in English, “The Disease of Starvation: Clinical Research on Starvation in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942”) that we rediscovered in the Tufts University library.
As scientists who study starvation, its biological effects plus its use as a weapon of mass destruction, we believe the story of how plus why Jewish scientists conducted this research in such extreme conditions is as important plus compelling as its results.
The clandestine project’s lead doctor, Israel Milejkowski, wrote the books’s foreword. In it, he explains:“The work was originated plus pursued under unbelievable conditions. I hold my pen in my hand plus death stares into my room. It looks through the black windows of sad empty houses on deserted streets littered with vandalized plus burglarized possessions. … In this prevailing silence lies the power plus the depth of our pain plus the moans that one day will shake the world’s conscience.”
Reading these words, we were both transfixed, transported by his voice to a time plus place where starvation was being used as a weapon of oppression plus annihilation as the Nazis were systematically exterminating all Jews in their occupied territories. As scholars of starvation, we were also well aware that this book catalogs many of the justifications for the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which made starvation of civilians a war crime.
A defiant medical record
Within months of their 1939 invasion of Poland, Nazi forces created the infamous Warsaw Ghetto. At its peak, more than 450,000 Jews were required to live in this small, walled-off tempat of about 1.5 square miles (3.9 square kilometers) within the city, unable to leave even to look for food.
Although Germans in Warsaw were allotted a daily ration of about 2,600 calories, physicians in the ghetto estimated that Jews were able to consume only about 800 calories a day on average through a combination of rations plus smuggling. That’s about half the calories volunteers consumed in a study on starvation conducted near the end of World War II by researchers at the University of Minnesota, plus less than a third of the average energy needs of an adult male.