At the outbreak of the war, Dr Aleksandra Rowińska worked as a pediatrician of the Social Insurance Office and at the Hospital of Transfiguration in Warsaw Praga where she also lived. She descended from a family of intellectuals. She was preparing to her baccalaureate in a government secondary school for girls in Łódź, attending additional courses of engineer Barszczewski.
When she was studying at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Warsaw during the Polish-Bolshevik war, she was a nurse at the sanitary station and served in front of the Section of Propaganda and Care of Soldiers. She was utterly devoted to the sick, especially the youngest and poorest.
Already in 1940, Shortly after the establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto, she took her university friend, Dr Róża Hermanowa, to her place. She let her sleep in her own bed and slept in the bathroom herself. When the presence of Dr Hermanowa became an object of unwanted attention, she moved he to a farm house in the Lublin region where Róża luckily survived the war.
Dr Rowińska was associated with the “Żegota” Council to Aid Jews. She helped those who escaped from the ghetto to access her flat which served as a kind of a intermediate point. She placed many of those people in monasteries, among other places. Each week she also passed food and money to one Jew who was hiding in Celestynów.
Rescued Dr Hermanowa recalled: “She was not an average person, she devoted herself not only to me but also to others. In my mind she remained as a unique individual, full of devotion to others, carrying aid as a doctor and a human being”.
