A. B. Szwajger; Pediatrician in Warsaw Ghetto

The pediatrician who only recently broke a five-decade silence to describe how she fed fatal doses of morphine to children in the Jewish ghetto of Warsaw to save them from greater terrors has died.

Adina Blady Szwajger was 75 and one of the few remaining survivors of World War II’s infamous Warsaw ghetto when she died Feb. 19 of pancreatic cancer in the Polish city of Lodz, the Associated Press reported Wednesday.

She had been under the care of Dr. Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the heroic but doomed uprising against the Nazis in April, 1943, in which nearly half a million Jews were executed or died of disease or starvation.

Mrs. Szwajger was a medical student at the start of the war. As a Jew, she was condemned to live in the walled Warsaw ghetto, where she went to work in the hopeless conditions of its hospital.

There, according to Edelman, she toiled tirelessly to comfort sick, frightened and orphaned young people.

“For those children who were in slightly better shape, who were not dying yet, she organized a kind of workshop where they painted, drew pictures and sang songs,” Edelman said. In her book, “I Remember Nothing More: The Warsaw Children’s Hospital and the Jewish Resistance,” Mrs. Szwajger described administering fatal doses of morphine--offering the children a peaceful death rather than the horror of the railroad cars that were lined up to take them to camps in Germany.

Mrs. Szwajger, who had two children, was buried Monday in Warsaw’s Jewish cemetery, a huge, largely overgrown tract where the graves of generations of Polish Jews go untended for lack of survivors.