Helena Kornella

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Helena Kornella, 1948

Helena Maria Kornella (born November 6, 1897 in Jasło , West Galicia , Austria-Hungary , † May 27, 1992 in Romford, London Borough of Havering ) was Poland's first urologist . She wrote a diary about her deportation to the Soviet Union.

family

Helena's mother was Jadwiga Sas-Hoszowska (1873–1942). Their father was the painter and sculptor Celestyn Hoszowski (1837-1911). His works have been exhibited in Vienna, Rome, Krakow, Warsaw and other European cities. Helena's father was Jadwiga's husband Michał Kornella (1862–1911). After becoming an engineer at the Imperial and Royal Polytechnic Institute in Vienna, he went to the Technical Academy in Lemberg . There he was the first doctoral candidate . He worked in the flood protection of Poland's major rivers and in the water supply of Zakopane and Szczawina .

Helena had three brothers. Ludwik (1902-1919) died at the age of 17 in the Polish-Ukrainian War in the defense of Lemberg. Marian (1889–1940) went to the Polish Legions under Józef Piłsudski . Roman (1893–1940) studied law in Graz and went to Austria during the First World War. After the demobilization of the Austrians, Marian and Roman joined the newly established army of the Second Polish Republic . Roman stayed with the Polish army and married a Hungarian in 1922. In 1929, like his father, Marian became a civil engineer at the Lemberg Technical Academy.

Life

Lviv's doctors, graduated in 1928, Helena on the left

In time to Austria-Hungary belonging Lviv Helena attended Catholic grammar school, the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth operated. In 1917 she passed the Abitur. After the early death of her father, she had to look after her mother and two younger brothers with the support of her grandmother. In Galicia during the First World War and the Polish-Soviet War , that was not easy. As one of the first women and against the determined resistance of her family, Helena began to study medicine at the Medical University of Lviv in 1922 . In 1928 she was one of the first three women to graduate successfully. The Lviv surgeon Ludwik Rydygier had wanted “Away with the women!” . Without any previous surgical training, Helena was the first Polish doctor to go into urology . The Lviv Clinic was headed by Stanisław Laskownicki (1892–1978). He was Poland's first professor for this subject. At the Conservatory of the Society for the Advancement of Music in Galicia , Helena pursued her second passion, singing . She graduated with honors in the mezzo-soprano subject . She sang songs for patients on the radio . After six years in urology, she switched to internal medicine . She stayed there until the German invasion of Poland .

Kazakhstan (1940–1942)

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Helena Kornella was one of the people who were deported in four great waves to Siberia and Central Asia during the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland . The total number of victims is disputed in research. Until 1993, Polish research estimated that 800,000 to 1,200,000 Poles had been deported. However, these figures were never checked in Soviet archives. According to the NKVD files , a total of 330,000 people were deported, mainly members of the Polish state apparatus and the intelligentsia as well as landowners. Kornella was arrested in the course of the second wave of deportations on April 13, 1940, along with her mother, sister-in-law and their three-month-old daughter. She suspected that she was deported because her two brothers were Soviet prisoners of war as Polish officers in the Starobilsk camp. In April 1940 they were taken to Kharkov by the NKVD and shot. Between 1940 and 1942, Helena kept a diary of the transport, working conditions, hunger and diseases in the Kazakh gulag , which is kept in the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London .

Sergiopol

After 17 days ride in cattle cars they reached the state farm Myn-Bulak in eastern Kazakhstan , near the border with Mongolia . She lived with two families (10 people) in a 4 × 4 m hut. From feces and straw she had to produce manure bricks (Kisjaks). Later she had to pull weeds in the fields. When her colleague from Lviv had sent her medical certificate, she and her family were sent to Sergiopol to work as a doctor. When the Wehrmacht began the Russian campaign in June 1941, they had to do field work again on the state farm; but the German-Soviet war fundamentally changed the fate of the deported Poles. Since the Soviets needed every conceivable ally, they approved the release of the Polish prisoners. Induced by Winston Churchill , General Władysław Sikorski and Iwan Michailowitsch Maiski signed the agreement on July 30, 1941, to release all arrested and deported Poles as part of an "amnesty". A little later, preparations were made to form an army from the freedmen. It was to be led by General Władysław Anders , who had just been released from the Lubyanka . In the reception camps, the freedmen tried to report to the Polish Armed Forces in the Soviet Union . They were released when Joseph Stalin was persuaded to evacuate some of these troops to Iran . Some civilians were allowed to accompany them. Released from forced labor on August 28, 1941, Helena immediately headed south. She found a job as a country doctor in the small town of Stary-Guk near Alma-Ata . At the same time she applied to the in Busuluk established Anders Army to the setting as "Voluntary Female Military Medical Aid Recruit" ( Pomocnicza Wojskowa Służba Kobiet , PWSK). The application was accepted on December 15, 1941.

Djambul

Helena was ordered to Jambul with two trained nurses . The freed eastern Poles gathered in the military outpost. They wanted to join the Anders army. Badly nourished and starved, lousy and lumpy, many succumbed to a typhus epidemic, including Helena's mother and sister-in-law. You, the two-year-old niece, and the two nurses survived. In August 1942, the Poles came to Iran in truck and bus convoys. Only half of the deported Poles were still alive.

Iran (1942–1945)

A total of 115,000 people were evacuated, 37,000 of them civilians and 18,000 children. That was 7% of the Poles deported in 1940. The transport took place by ship from Krasnovodsk to Pahlavi ( Bandar Anzali ). 40% of the emaciated newcomers suffered from typhus ; most died in the first two months, many of them from overeating. There were 25 nurses and 10 doctors in the Pahlavi camp, including Helena Kornella. It went overland from Ashgabat to Mashhad . As a captain , she was sent to a military hospital in Tehran a few days later and demobilized there . During the three years in Tehran, she adopted her orphaned niece Halina Maria Kornella. She found work in an ambulance of the Polish Red Cross . The city had five transit camps (four military and one civil), a Polish hospital, an old people's home, a convalescent home for sick children and an orphanage, which, like their high school in Lviv, was run by the Nazareth sisters. Many refugees left Iran as early as 1944, most of them via Ahvaz in the Persian Corridor . As Displaced Persons they ended up in Tanganyika , Mexico , India , New Zealand and Great Britain , in the area of ​​the League of Nations for Palestine and in Lebanon in other camps. In one of the last military transports Helena left Iran with the 5-year-old Halina via Isfahan .

Beirut (1945–1950)

The Poles first came to a camp on Saint Simon Beach. After a short time they were housed with Lebanese Christians in the Beirut area. Over 5,000 Polish refugees found safe refuge in Lebanon. Although their number was no higher than that of other nationalities, the Poles became a politically and socially significant figure between 1943 and 1950. According to a press release from Consul General Zygmunt Zawadowski in September 1946, 4,400 Polish refugees were in the country at the time, 2,300 women, 700 men and 1,400 children. Polish welfare benefits each received a £ 12 grant, especially for rent. Helena Kornella lived with an Arab family in Beirut. She worked in an outpatient clinic for Polish social welfare in Lebanon and was involved in Beirut's Polish Red Cross . From November 1946, the Polish refugees came into the care of the British Consulate General, which had an office for the Polish adviser. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and then the International Refugee Organization provided financial support. The fact that so many (young) Poles stayed in Lebanon longer than necessary was mainly due to the better training opportunities, namely the Université Saint-Joseph and the American University of Beirut . A total of around 400 Poles were studying in Beirut at the time. Half managed to graduate. In Beirut, Helena was able to give recitals again for the first time, most of them for a Polish audience.

England (1950–1992)

HMHS Oxfordshire , built in 1912 by Harland & Wolff in Belfast, as a hospital ship of the Second World War

The SS Oxfordshire of the Bibby Line brought her with her adopted daughter Halina from Beirut to Kingston upon Hull in August 1950 . After a few months in the transit camp there, she was given a fixed-term contract at the Polish Military Hospital in Penley, Wrexham County Borough , North Wales . Her Polish license was recognized by the General Medical Council (GMC). But for one thing, there were no urological prospects in either the new National Health Service or the Royal Army Medical Corps ; on the other hand, their limited knowledge of English prevented them from being used more widely. She could speak and write German and French. Halina placed them in Pitsford, a Polish boarding school near Northampton . In order to stay close, she took the first job in a tuberculosis sanatorium. When it closed, she went to the geriatric ward at Birmingham General Hospital . There she retired in 1968 at the age of 71. To be around Halina, she moved to London. By looking after the children, she enabled her daughter to continue the medical practice. In 1990, she suffered a fractured femoral neck from which she did not fully recover in her old age. She died in her sleep at 94 and was cremated . The urn went to the columbarium of the Polish Church in Ealing . Helena Kornella had received most of her numerous orders and decorations from the Polish government in exile .

Halina

Helena remained unmarried and childless. In Tehran she adopted Halina Maria, the little daughter of her younger brother Marian Kornella. She was born on January 1, 1940 in Lviv. Unlike the mother and grandmother, she survived the deportation to Kazakhstan. She came to England with Helena via Tehran and Lebanon. In 1958 she graduated from high school in Pitsford. She studied medicine at the University of Birmingham Medical School and graduated with an MB ChB in 1963. After her compulsory year as a house officer, she worked in a GP practice in Warwick . She married the electrical engineer A. Twardzicki in Warwick and had three daughters. In 1968 the family moved to London. Halina also worked there in a doctor's office, which she soon took over. She later specialized in developmental and social pediatrics.

Works

  • with Stefan Ignacy Malczyński: O nieswoistych zapaleniach pęcherza moczowego z uwzlednieniem ich leczenia [About the unspecific inflammation of the urinary bladder and its treatment]. Physicians Practice, Lwów 1935.

Honors

Incomplete list

  • Medal Wojska za Wojne 1939–45
  • Defense Medal (United Kingdom)

literature

Web links

Commons : Helena Kornella  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Notes and Notes

  1. ↑ Stanislaw Laskownicki (Pol.)
  2. ↑ Female pioneers of urology were Dora Brücke-Teleky , Mary E. Childs MacGregor (1896–1955) and Elisabeth Pauline Pickett (* 1918).
  3. ↑ CO Cech: The Kisjak, a South Russian fuel. In: Polytechnisches Journal . 228, 1878, pp. 468-470.
  4. ↑ The USJ's Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry trained 36 students in special classes from 1942 to 1947, 30 of them from Poland.
  5. ^ The AUB only accepted students for the full program of at least three years. 80% of the 100 Polish refugees were women.
  6. ^ Penley (Polish resettlement camps in the UK)
  7. ^ Roman Catholic Church of St Andrew Bobola
  8. ↑ Army Medal for War 1939-45 (English WP)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Thaddäus Zajaczkowski: Doctor Helena Maria Kornella (1897–1992) , 2018
  2. ^ Philipp Ther : German and Polish expellees. Society and policy of expellees in the Soviet Zone / GDR and in Poland 1945–1956 . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1998, pp. 36, 71.
  3. ^ Thaddäus Zajaczkowski: Doctor Helena Maria Kornella (1897-1992) - the first female urologist in Poland . In: Pomeranian Journal of Life Sciences 64 (2018), p. 103.
  4. ^ Thaddäus Zajaczkowski: Doctor Helena Maria Kornella (1897-1992) - the first female urologist in Poland . In: Pomeranian Journal of Life Sciences 64 (2018), p. 102 f.
  5. ↑ Ryszard Antolak: Iran and the Polish exodus from Russia in 1942 (Pars Times)
  6. ↑ Iran in Poland in search of allies (Telepolis 2012)
  7. ^ The Second World War and the Poland question
  8. ^ Tadeusz Piotrowski: The Polish Deportees of World War II: Recollections of Removal to the Soviet Union and Dispersal Throughout the World (2004)
  9. ^ A b SS Oxfordshire passenger list
personal data
SURNAME Kornella, Helena
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kornella, Helena Maria (full name); Kornellanka, Helena
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish doctor (urology, internal medicine) and singer; Deported and emigrant
DATE OF BIRTH November 6, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Jasło , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH May 27, 1992
Place of death Romford, London Borough of Havering