A collection of letters and documents belonging to a Polish doctor imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps was recently donated to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, offering historians a rare glimpse into the personal ties that sustained prisoners during the Holocaust.

The archive, donated by Kraków numismatist Marek Trybulski, centers on Dr. Jan Nowak, a non-Jewish physician from Kraków who was deported to Auschwitz on June 26, 1941, the museum said Tuesday. It includes a letter sent by Nowak from Auschwitz, seven letters from his relatives, postcards, parcel receipts and other wartime documents.

Approximately 2 million non-Jewish Poles were killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust, alongside some 3 million Polish Jews. Before the war, Jews comprised about 3.3 million of the country’s 35 million people.

While imprisoned, Nowak worked in the camp’s prisoner hospitals, primarily in the infectious diseases ward in Block 20, where he and other inmate medical staff sought to save fellow prisoners from disease, selection and death despite severe restrictions.

On February 18, 1942, Nowak was transferred from Auschwitz to Majdanek along with three other doctors, and tasked with organizing prisoner hospitals there. After a long period there, Nowak was transferred to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp, and then to a subcamp of the Flossenbürg concentration camp in Litoměřice. It was from there that he was eventually liberated.

After the war, he testified in proceedings against former German SS doctors and against Erich Muhsfeldt,........

© The Times of Israel