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[ca.1950], 1984 (Creation)
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- Borman, Karolina
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1 audio cassette (1 hr. 32 min.)
1 folder of textual records
4 photographs
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Biographical history
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.
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Scope and content
File consists of an audio cassette of an oral history interview with Dr. Karolina Borman conducted by Dr. Charles Roland on March 29, 1984.
Topics discussed in the interview cover: discussion of Dr. Roland’s study on prisoner-of-war camps during the World War Two, what stimulated his interest in the Warsaw ghetto underground medical school, how he carried out the research, and students he met during the research; discussion of Bronka Wygodzka, Dr. Borman’s classmate in the medical school;
discussion of how people dealt with disaster in a way of study; discussion of the research on the hunger diseases in the Warsaw ghetto; Dr. Borman’s background and family members; discussion of Dr. W. Lewin, a pupil of her grandfather; dental practice of her father and how the patients helped her family survive during the war; discussion of her mother’s brother, Izaak Dobrejcer; comments about the young people who studied during the war; discussion of the adaptability of human beings and the importance of tradition and moral background; her first husband, William Bein and her experience working in baby clinics in Casablanca; post-war depression and apathy; discussion of how she dealt with emotional upheaval after the war; her marriage and divorce; her psychoanalytical training; her refugee patients and their attitude towards psychiatry; a typical day as a medical student in Warsaw ghetto medical school ; experiences in the ghetto.
Also contained are 4 photos of Dr. Karolina Borman examining infants at a clinic in Casablanca (ca. 1950), final interview transcript, and original draft of the transcript with edits annotated on it.