A Doctor’s War Testimony: The Four Incarnations of “Dr. Twardy”

Abstract

This chapter critically compares the various embodiments of four versions of wartime diaries of Dr. Julian Aleksandrowicz, famous Polish-Jewish hematologist, humanist, and ecologist, throughout the four decades of them being written and republished. It analyzes them from the perspective of the shifting Polish-Jewish identities through which the author worked in order to achieve a consensus of his own final identity. Various aspects of Dr. Aleksandrowicz’s war activities are emphasized in different ways in the consecutive editions of his memoirs, and his choices of emphases signal a dynamic work of subjective memory in his creation of an identity for himself. By referring this development of identity to contemporary stages of the socio-political and historical reality of postwar Poland, this chapter traces the complex path that followed in the wake of the process of assimilation and acculturation that might have typified a medical section of Polish-Jewish intelligentsia remaining in Poland after the war.