Adina Blady-Szwajger (21.03.1917–19.02.1993)

Blady-Szwajger was born in Warsaw to a Russian father and a mother from a family of assimilitated Polish Jews. After passing her secondary school-leaving examination in 1934 at the Jewish junior high school ‘Jehudija’, she began medical studies at the University of Warsaw, which she was unable to complete due to the outbreak of World War II.

At the beginning of October, 1939, she set off to the East and stayed in Lviv until December, when she returned to Warsaw. In March 1940, she started working as a pediatrician at the Berson and Bauman Children’s Hospital, and in the autumn of 1941 was transferred to the hospital’s branch in Leszno.On January 5, 1943, she switched to the so-called the Aryan side. She became a liaison officer for the Jewish Combat Organization and a courier recommended by Marek Edelman. She organised, among others things, help in escapes from the ghetto, obtaining documents, searching for apartments, carrying weapons, distributing money and collecting information about labor camps for the Coordination Committee.

From April 1943, she lived in Warsaw under ‘Aryan’ papers as Irena Meremińska. In the summer of 1943 and 1944 she also lived temporarily in Międzylesie. At the turn of those years, she worked in the common room of the Central Welfare Council in the Salesian monastery in Powiśle, and during the Warsaw Uprising, successively in hospitals at Miodowa and Mokotowska Streets. On October 11, 1944, she left from Warsaw, escorting a group of the wounded to the nearby town of Milanówek. She lived to see liberation in Grodzisk Mazowiecki.

On January 25, 1945, she started working at the Central Committee of Polish Jews as a clerk for children and a pediatrician. She received her graduation diploma on April 17, 1951 at the Medical Academy in Łódź. Until retirement, she worked as a doctor in various medical centers in Łódź, Łagiewniki and Szczecin, initially as a phthisopediatrician, and after 1968 as a school doctor.

She died of cancer in Łódź, and was buried at the Jewish cemetery at Okopowa Street in Warsaw. In 1988, she wrote down her memoirs, which were published in 1994 under the title ‘I don’t remember anything more’.

translated by Adam Grossman