Physiopediatrician, professor of medical sciences and educator.
She was born into a Jewish family in Łódź, the daughter of merchant Karol Markson and Rebecca (née Cukierzys). She graduated from high school in St. Petersburg and studied medicine at the University of Bonn. As her daughter Alina describes, "she had only one problem: the professors didn't recognize women in their studies, and my mother, along with her friend from Paris, the only two female students, had to listen to lectures sitting on the floor behind rows of desks—hidden behind their colleagues. When the professor noticed a female student, he would interrupt the lecture and leave the room."
Anna Margolis, 1962 | Public Domain
With a pediatrician's degree, she returned to Łódź and took a job at Anna Maria Hospital (today Korczak Hospital). She married physician and social activist Aleksander Margolis and gave birth to two children: a daughter, Alina (later Marek Edelman's wife, a heroine of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising), and a son, Jan, who served as the models for Ala and Olek from Marian Falski's Primer, a friend of her parents.
After the outbreak of war and the death of her husband, executed by the Germans, Anna Margolisowa moved with her children to Warsaw, where they were relocated to the ghetto. She became head of the tuberculosis ward at the Berson and Bauman Children's Hospital. In the ghetto, she conducted clandestine teaching and student internships, and was also an activist in the "Kropla Mleka" Society for the Care of Mother and Child. She sent both children to the so-called Aryan side, joining them a week before the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. She hid with her daughter Alina in the Tomaszewicz family apartment on Twarda Street.
After the war, she returned to Łódź, where in 1946 the Łódź City Hall commissioned her to organize the Children's Tuberculosis Sanatorium in the Łagiewniki district, which she managed while also working at the Tuberculosis Institute. In 1950, she was awarded the Officer's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta. She co-authored the anti-tuberculosis law and was an honorary member of the Polish Physiopneumological Society. As a professor of medical sciences and a respected educator, she educated a large group of phthysiopediatricians. She died on June 10, 1987, in Łódź, where she was buried in the municipal cemetery in Doły.
