Jan. 27, 2025, International Holocaust Remembrance Day [link 1]--paired with--A little-known story about a Jewish refugee and Cicely Saunders [link 2]
Jan. 27, 2025, International Holocaust Remembrance Day [click here for link 1]--paired with--A little-known story about a Jewish refugee and Cicely Saunders [click here for link 2]
Compilation by Joy Berger, editor; for 1/27/25
Do you know? Today's modern hospice movement was born out of the terminal illness of a Polish, Jewish ghetto refugee and his lasting influence on the young Cicely Saunders. Upon his death in 1948, he left money for her to create a new place for peaceful dying. She opened St. Christopher's Hospice in 1967.
- International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, January 27th, UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau
- David Tasma, Warsaw ghetto Jewish refugee, turning point patient and first financial donor for Cicely Saunders
- During the Second World War, in spite of parental disapproval, Saunders trained at the Nightingale School of Nursing at London’s St. Thomas’ Hospital, now part of King’s Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery & Palliative Care. She then became a hospital almoner – the equivalent of a social worker today – and met a Polish man who changed the course of her life. Patient David Tasma was a Jewish refugee from the Warsaw ghetto, and was dying of cancer. Towards the end of his life, he and Saunders discussed the creation of a home-like environment, offering hope and comfort to dying patients. When David passed away, he left a sum of money to Saunders, to help make their vision a reality. [Editor's note: £500; equivalent to $6,550 today.]
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Even as a novice social worker, Cicely began to understand that patients like David needed more than purely medical interventions. She would visit David regularly and they’d talk about the kind of place that might be better for someone like him to die. A place more suitable than the busy, noisy hospital ward he was on. It was in the course of those conversations that the idea of hospice came about in this modern sense ... [The photo below is from St. Christopher's Hospice, London, England.]
- Today's Encouragement, by Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel, Auschwitz survivor and Nobel Peace Prize