Dr. Bronislaw Wisniewski was born in Warsaw, Poland on November 28, 1909, to Leiba (Leon) Waksman and Jenta (Antonina) Szyszko. Having graduated from the Medical School of Warsaw in 1935, Dr. Wisniewski worked as an intern at the Jewish hospital (Czyste hospital) in Warsaw and then at the Wolski hospital at Plocka Street. After the German invasion of Poland, he moved to the ghetto and worked at the Jewish Hospital on Stawki Street and participated in clandestine teaching. When the Germans started destroying the ghetto and deporting people to Treblinka, he managed to get out of the ghetto and lived in hiding on the estate of Count Zamoyski near Lublin. With the mobilization of the physicians, he was incorporated to the Polish army and worked as the chief of internal medicine in a hospital arranged at the Bobolanum. In 1944 he moved to Bydgoszcz and then went back to Warsaw. He was in charge of the medical department of the military hospital at Koszykowa Street before his discharge from the army. After the war Dr. Wisniewski worked as the chief of internal medicine in a hospital at Zoliborz and then became a professor in the postgraduate medical school of Warsaw in 1950. In 1957 he went to Israel and stayed there for 14 months, working at Tel Hashomer Hospital. In his late forties he arrived in the United States and settled in New York, where he worked in Columbia Medical School (Bellevue) as an assistant to Andre Cournand and then in New York University Medical School until his retirement in July 1988.
Dr. Karolina Borman was born on Apr. 9, 1922, in Warsaw, Poland, to Jan Borman and Rinka Dobrejcer, and has a younger sister, Irena Bakowska. Dr. Borman went to science lyceum at the age of 15 and received a matura in 1939. After the German invaded Poland, she and her family lived in their original domicile in what had become the ghetto, where she worked in her father’s dental laboratory. In 1940 she went to the underground medical school in the ghetto and finished two years of medical study. In 1942 the ghetto was burned, and her family was arrested and taken to the Umschlagplatz, where they escaped from being sent to the concentration camp and went back to the Warsaw ghetto. She lived in hiding in the ghetto until she managed to work on a German farm as a Polish worker till the end of the war. Liberated on Nov. 13, 1944, in France by American troops, she stayed in France and worked in the Red Cross. She resumed her medical education in Poland and acquired her diploma in 1950. She married to an American citizen, emigrated, and practised medicine in the United States until her death in 1987.
Dr. Tadeusz Stabholtz was born on Nov. 16, 1916, in Warsaw, Poland, to Henryk Stabholz and Sabina Stabholz. He Attended the University of Warsaw school of Medicine and completed two years of medical study before the war broke out. He was in Warsaw when the Germans started the bombardment. Then he went to Lwow, where he was sent to a small city (Zbaraz) close to the Russian border to organize the hospital. In March 1940, he went to Warsaw again, where he attended part-time the Warsaw ghetto medical school from 1940 to 1942. In the meanwhile, he did quite a bit of clinical work in the Jewish Hospital in Czyste. He survived in the mass deportation and lived in hiding near the hospital on Gesia from September 1942 to early May 1943. After the collapse of the ghetto uprising, he was transported to the extermination camp in Treblinka and selected there as fit for work. He came to Majdanek. In the summer of 1943, he was deported to Auschwitz. He was also a prisoner of the camps in Sachsenhausen, Dachau XI and Dachau IV (Kaufering). After the war, he married Ewa Weinzman and emigrated to the USA, where in 1953 he completed his medical studies. He practiced in Ohio. He died on March 22, 2009.
Dr. Janina Zaborowska was born in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1918. Her father was a commandant of the underground Polish army in the Ukraine who died in 1925. Her mother was a mathematician who became an accountant in the Polish Red Cross Central Office. Her family went to Warsaw in December 1922, where she finished high school in 1937 and got into medical school of Warsaw University the same year. In 1938, She married her husband Eugene Zaborowski, who was an officer in the Polish army. After the outbreak of the war her husband was captured and prisoned in a concentration camp in the Gulag Archipelago until 1943. In the meantime, Dr. Zaborowska was in Warsaw and involved in the Girl Guide, an underground organization. In 1939 she worked as a nurse in the field hospital and became a bath woman on the clean side in 1940. Following that she was appointed to run a scabies clinic till 1944, when the uprising started. She was also in charge of Warsaw Communication Services and became involved with the Intelligence Service as a secretary to one of the chiefs of the districts in 1943. She was also the commandant of the communications for the whole Warsaw between 1942-1944. She was in the camp at Bergen-Belsen until they were released in 1945 by Canadian and American forces. After the war, Dr. Zaborowska went to Brussels in 1945 to work with the Red Cross before she received a scholarship and entered the university of Brussels to continue her medical study. She reunited with her in Brussels. They came to Canada, living in Oakville, Ontario, and had two children there.
Eugenia Pernal was born and raised in Warsaw, Poland, to a successful businessman. She finished the fourth year of high school in 1939, when the war broke out. She went to the medical school in the ghetto for about three or four months before she went to the nursing school on Leszno. She finished her nursing courses within a year and received a diploma in nursing. In the meantime, she worked in Berson and Baumann Children’s Hospital on Sliska. During the massive deportations starting in July 1942, she managed to get out of the ghetto using fake Aryan papers and went to Germany as a Polish girl, where she worked for the French prisoners-of-war in a factory. She married Zygmunt Pernal after the war and settled down in Canada. She died on November 1, 2009 at Toronto Western Hospital.
Norman Miles Guiou was born February 26, 1893, in Ottawa to father Alonzo Herrett Guiou and mother Robenia Wallace. Guiou was raised and educated in Ottawa and attended Lisgar Collegiate where he gained an interest in biology and medicine after participating in science classes under the tutelage of his teacher, William Smeaton. In 1911 Guiou pursued his MD at McGill University, Montreal. During his fourth year at McGill at the start of the First World War, he enlisted as a private and in the spring of 1915 went to France with the McGill Hospital Unit, where he was eventually promoted to sergeant. Due to the great need of doctors during the First World War, Guiou was sent back to McGill University in the summer of 1916 to complete his medical program and interned at the Montreal General Hospital for 2 months. It was during this internship that Guiou learned about blood transfusions and cross-matching blood. After this internship and completion of his MD, Guiou enlisted once more, and went to France as a Medical Officer at McGill Hospital under John McCrae, just outside Boulogne. During the remainder of the First World War, Guiou originated the use of direct donor blood transfusion to resuscitate wounded soldiers as far forward as the Regimental Aid Post, using modified citrate bottles developed by Dr. O.H Robertson.
After the First World War, Guiou married Mary Elizabeth Brown in 1923, and had a son- William Wallace Guiou in 1925. In 1926, William Wallace died to pneumonia at 3 months old, and a week later Mary Elizabeth also passed away. In 1928 Guiou married Ella Loyale Mix. During this time, Guiou pursued post graduate training in New York, and went on to work at the Ottawa Civic Hospital, where he was Senior Surgeon, and then Chief Gynaecologist. He was also chairperson of the Blood Transfusion and Parenteral Fluid Committee, where he was instrumental in convincing the administration to allow nurses to give blood.
In around 1935 Guiou was inspired by the volunteer blood donors of Toc H (a veteran’s group) and convinced the Ottawa Red Cross branch under Jim Potter to start the blood donor initiative, resulting in the creation of a blood clinic in 1938 and subsequent blood drives. Thanks to Guiou, Toc H and Jim Potter, more whole blood clinics would be opened in Ontario by the Red Cross, just prior to the start of the Second World War. During the Second World War, Guiou was a member of the National Red Cross Committee on Blood for the Wounded.
In 1964 Guiou was successful in convincing Ottawa to add fluoride to its water supply. In 1985 Guiou authored the book “Transfusion: A Canadian Surgeons Story of War and in Peace”, documenting his role in blood transfusions during the First World War and leading up to the Second World War. Guiou passed away August 10, 1992.
Guiou was a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Canada, an Honorary Member of the Canadian Red Cross Society, a Life Member of the Ontario Medical Association, and a past president of the Academy of Medicine, Ottawa. His work has been published in various scholarly journals internationally.
Harry Medovy was born in 1904 near Kiev, Russia. Emigrating to Canada with his family before his first birthday, he spent most of his life in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Medovy attended medical school at the University of Manitoba’s Faculty of Medicine, earning a medal in pathology in his third year and graduating in 1928 with an MD and the Chown Gold Medal in Medicine. He then accepted a six-month chief residency at the Winnipeg Children’s Hospital, which inspired him to begin a career in pediatrics. Medovy chose to travel to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to complete his graduate studies. In 1930, he returned to the Children’s Hospital and took on an out-patient clinic in childhood diabetes as well as starting his own general practice as a pediatrician. In 1933, he received the Prowse Award for Medical Research for his work on diet and the diabetic child.
In 1934, Medovy married Mary Rosenblat, with whom he had two daughters. He went into academic pediatrics in 1954, becoming head of the department of pediatrics and chief pediatrician at the Children’s Hospital for the next 17 years. Additionally, Medovy held a part-time position at the City Health Department as a consultant in school health.
In 1979, Dr. Medovy’s book, A Vision Fulfilled: The Story of the Children’s Hospital of Winnipeg 1909-1973 was published. He received an honorary Doctor of Science degree from the University of Manitoba in 1975, the Canadian Paediatric Society's Alan Ross Award in 1980, and in 1990 he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.
Harry Medovy died in 1995 at the age of 91.
Louis Backer Jaques was born in Toronto on July 10th, 1911, to Robert Jaques and Ann Bella Shepherd. The middle of three children in a happy warm family, he received his education at Ryerson Public School and then Harbord Collegiate. He attended the University of Toronto and earned a BA in physiology and biochemistry (1932) and a MA in Physiology (1935). After graduation, he went on working in the laboratory of the Department of Physiology, pursuing his Ph.D. under the supervision of Dr. Charles H. Best and completed his doctor’s degree in 1941. in 1937 he received an appointment from Dr. Best as a demonstrator (later instructor) for the mammalian physiology labs for medical students, a teaching position he held till 1946. He was also assigned the lecture program for the dental students in 1940. In 1946, Dr. Jaques moved to the University of Saskatchewan with an appointment as professor and head of the Department of Physiology, a post he held until 1971. Following that he accepted a position as (the first) W.S. Lindsay Professor in the College of Medicine. Upon his retirement in 1979 he was named Professor Emeritus; and in 1981 he was named a lay canon by the Anglican diocese of Saskatoon
A scientist of international reputation, Jaques studied various aspects of blood coagulation and heparin as an anticoagulant. He was among the first to demonstrate the usefulness of heparin and dicumarol in treating thrombosis; to investigate the relation of stress to hemorrhage; and to originate the application of silicone in handling blood coagulation. In 1952 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and in 1977 he was awarded the Heart Foundation of Canada Outstanding Service Award as well as a Certificate of Appreciation by the Canadian Hemophilia Society. He died in Toronto on May 16, 1997.
Walter Dent was born in Parry Sound, Ontario on April 12th, 1917, to Walter Dent Senior, and Susan Bradley. His father died before he was born and he was raised by his mother, along with his 9 siblings. Dent attended school until grade 10, at which time he left to pursue work.
Dent participated in the “On-to-Ottawa trek” in 1935 and joined the Young Communist League in 1936. In February of 1937 at the age of 20, Dent arrived in Albacete, Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War. The Canadian Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion had not yet been formed, and he served instead in the American Lincoln Battalion. Due to the urgent need for men, Dent and his cohort were rushed to the battlefront without training, but he found that he was a natural with a gun. A head injury sent him to a hospital in Murcia and then to the village of Benicassim to convalesce. He attributed the healing of his head wound to daily swims in the Mediterranean Sea. Once recovered, Dent had a month’s training before returning to the front and fighting in the Battle of Brunete (July 6-25th, 1937). In September of 1937, Dent travelled by ship to New York, before returning to Spain the following month.
In October of 1937, religious leader and politician Reverend A. E. Smith came to Spain looking for soldiers to join him on a tour of Canada; Dent and fellow soldier Jack Steele volunteered and returned to Canada. The trio spent two months touring the country raising awareness and money for the fight in Spain and for wounded homecoming soldiers. Once home in Toronto, Dent discovered that an abscess had formed on the back of his head – a result of the injury he had sustained in Spain – and had it removed by Dr. Willinsky at Mount Sinai Hospital.
Dent was awarded an International Brigades' medal in January of 1939 for his service in the Spanish Civil War. Dent then served in the Second World War with the British Army. Dent later joined the Mackenzie Papineau Veterans Association in Toronto.
He was married to his partner Nancy and as a civilian worked as a carpenter. He died on May 9th, 1993.
Victor Himmelfarb was born on November 7th, 1909, to Jacob Himmelfarb and Annie Himmelfarb, who were both from Poland. Born and raised in Toronto, Himmelfarb received education at Ogden Public School and Jarvis Collegiate. After apprenticing as a pharmacist for two years, he went to the Ontario College of Pharmacy in 1931 and graduated two years later. After graduation, Himmelfarb found a job as a pharmacist on Queen Street near Spadina while at the same time paying close attention to world politics and conflicts. Aiming to get into the war and cracking against Hitler and fascism, Himmelfarb went by himself from Toronto to Spain in 1937. He travelled by way of France, from where he marched over the Pyrenees Mountains into a town of Figueras, and went through Valencia and Barcelona up to Albacete, where the headquarters of the International Brigades was located. He joined the International Brigades as a pharmacist, serving in several hospitals in different localities and finally wound up as a lieutenant.
Himmelfarb left Spain in January of 1939, travelling back to Canada with the Canadian representative and was interviewed by Gregory Clark on the way from Halifax to Toronto. During the Second World War, he worked for the Department of Veterans Affairs for over five years. Himmelfarb later joined the Mackenzie Papineau Veterans Association in Toronto.
He passed away in 1985.