Children in Medem Sanatorium

Quote from opening Yiddish credits of film: "This is a documentary film depicting the life of the children in the Medem Sanatorium in Miedzeszyn, near Warsaw. The Sanatorium was founded and directed by the Central Organization of the Yiddish-Secular Schools and the General Jewish Labor Bund in Poland. It bore the name of the Bundist leader Vladimir Medem. The Sanatorium was in existence from 1926 until the summer of 1942. The film was made in 1938. The Medem Sanatorium was an institution for therapy and education. It was renowned throughout Europe for its modern pedagogic methods and served as a model for other similar institutions. Under the leadership of Shlama F. Gilinsky and the supervision of a staff of physicians and teachers, children who came there from poverty-stricken Jewish workers' homes received a new lease on life, got courage, and hope. Even during the Second World War under the German -Nazi occupation, the Medem Sanatorium remained a shelter and home for needy children. On August 22, 1942, detachments of German SS guards drove the children into death wagons which led to the gas chambers of Treblinka. Their teachers, doctors, nurses and the other staff members accompanied them on their last journey to a common death. Some of the children shown in the film a few years later became active in the underground resistance of the Bund against the Nazis and fought heroically in the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt of April-May 1943. Many of them shared the fate of millions of other Jews and died a martyr's death in the gas chambers. In memory of the children, of their teachers, doctors, nurses and other helpers; in memory of Shlama F. Gilinsky a founder and director of the Medem Sanatorium (died in New York, September 4, 1961), a new print of this film was made in New York in 1965, by his family and the General Jewish Labor Bund." Many shots of children at play, at school, eating, etc.