Physician and researcher, head of the infectious diseases ward at the Berson and Bauman Children's Hospital, professor of microbiology at the Medical University of Wrocław, head of the Department of Virology at the Institute of Immunology and Experimental Therapy, author of "Memoirs from the Warsaw Ghetto October 1940 – January 1943".
Makower was born in Kalisz to a Jewish family from the Eastern Borderlands, the son of Gedala and Dora née Lampert. Eliza Orzeszkowa similarly described his grandparents' wedding in her novel "Eli Makower." In Kalisz, Henryk completed primary school and then high school in Łódź. He studied biology in Vilnius for two years, then medicine at the Jagiellonian University, obtaining his medical degree in 1929. While still a student, he worked as an assistant at the Department of Physiology and Bacteriology, and after graduating in 1931, he completed a course in bacteriology and immunology at the National Institute of Hygiene in Warsaw.
Henryk Makower | Public Domain
Until the outbreak of the war, he worked as an internist in municipal hospitals and the emergency medical service in Łódź. He then moved to Warsaw, where he was resettled in the ghetto. He took over as head of the infectious diseases ward at the Bersohn and Bauman Children's Hospital. There, he participated in combating a typhus epidemic, and thanks to his collaboration and friendship with Ludwik Hirszfeld, he was able to teach physiology classes for medics and pharmacists at the clandestine Faculty of Medicine in the Warsaw Ghetto (officially, the classes were known as the "Sanitary Course for Combating Epidemics"). He lost his entire family during the Grossaktion; around the same time, he married Noemi Wigdorowicz, with whom he escaped to the so-called Aryan side in the winter of 1943. With the help of Dr. Emil Paluch, the couple hid with friends in Miłosna, near Warsaw. In August 1944, Makower volunteered for the Polish Army in Lublin and became, with the rank of captain, head of the internal medicine and infectious diseases ward at the military hospital. Until the end of the war, he worked in hospitals in Otwock and Gdańsk-Oliwa.
In 1946, at the invitation of Ludwik Hirszfeld, he became an assistant professor at the Department of Microbiology at the University of Wrocław. As a Rockefeller Scholar, he spent several years abroad on research fellowships, including in the USA, studying virological research methods. These trips resulted in his founding a virology laboratory at the Department of Medical Microbiology at the University of Wrocław. This laboratory became the nucleus of the Department of Virology at the Institute of Immunology and Experimental Therapy of the Polish Academy of Sciences. In 1959, he was appointed by the World Health Organization as an expert on virology in Geneva. He died on March 11, 1964, in Wrocław.
