Jewish Warsaw Ghetto - Death Certificate - Karta Zgonu
I spend a lot of time looking for information about my family members who were murdered during the Holocaust.
I recently came across the Poland Central Jewish Library.
And there I located the death certificate, Karta Zgonu II, for my great-aunt Chaja Lea Weiser Meinhardt.
In Polish, the death certificate was known as Karta Zgonu. I annotated the death certificate hoping it may help someone else who would be researching a Karta Zgonu. I used google translate so it may not all be correct.
Per the United States Holocaust Museum, this death certificate (Karta Zgonu) was part of a collection.
The collection contains 10,055 certificates of deaths fulfilled and signed by the Jewish doctors in the Warsaw Ghetto for the office: “Wydział Statystyczny Zarządu Miejskiego w mieście Warszawie” (Statistical Department of the Council of Warsaw) for the statistical purposes and census records of the City of Warsaw. Certificates of deaths contain following information: the last, first and second name, the year of birth, the place of birth, the father’s, and mother’s name, the address, the date of death, the number of the death certificate, the marital status, the occupation, the citizenship, the reason of death, the coexisting illnesses and the name of the home doctor. Not all sections of the death certificates were filled.
For my great-aunt, the death certificate was completed by Dr. Z. Sztajnkalk.
The Martyrdom of Jewish Physicians in Poland was published in 1963. This book contains the names of the approximate 2,500 Jewish physicians who worked to help the Jews in the Polish Ghettos. More information about this book can be found at JewishGen.
Dr. Zygmunt Sztajnkalk was murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators in 1942. The pediatrician/internist was seventy-years-old when he was murdered.
In the recent book, The Doctors Of The Warsaw Ghetto, the murder of Dr. Sztajnkalk is described:
After the Great Deportation, the plundering and beatings followed by killings continued. From the window of the Linas Hacedek Hospital on 20 Nowolipki Street, Dr. Feliks Majnamer-Mrozowski saw two Gestapo officers order Dr. Zygmunt Sztajnkalk, a pediatrician, to walk in front of them, in November 1942, and even though he obeyed, they shot him.” The event was also witnessed by Dr. Zofia Rozenblum. In her words:
The old and distinguished pediatrician, Dr. Steinkalk [sic], had been walking peacefully to visit a patient. Something about his figure was not to the liking of the two Gestapo officers. One shot him in the head, and he crashed down onto the pavement. Nobody looked back, nor did anyone rush to help him. I informed his wife and two daughters. When night fell, they removed the body. With utter indifference, adults and children alike passed by corpses covered with newspapers as if they were mere things lying in the street.