From Concentration Camp to an Institute – Life's Journey of the Oncologist Majda Mačkovšek Peršič

In June 1967, a Slovenian oncologist and Director of the Institute of Oncology Ljubljana, Dr. Božena Ravnihar, wrote a letter on behalf of the institute's clinical committee to the Republic Secretariat for Health Care and Social Security in Ljubljana. In it she proposed that her colleague, Dr. Majda Mačkovšek Peršič, be promoted to the position of chief physician. The commission of the Federal Council for Health Care and Social Policy in Belgrade approved her nomination.

Majda Mačkovšek was born on February 17, 1919, into a liberal family of Janko and Meta Mačkovšek. She graduated from the Faculty of Medicine in Zagreb in 1942, and then did internship and volunteered at the surgical department of the General Hospital in Ljubljana. She was arrested and imprisoned for her involvement with the Liberation Front, once even being left without any food for three days straight. In September 1944, she was arrested again for treating a partisan woman. On October 14, she was taken directly from her on-call duty at the hospital by the German authorities and deported to the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp, where she stayed until the liberation, when she returned home. In Ravensbrück, the imprisoned Czech female doctors introduced her to the camp’s medical work under conditions she later described as horrific, impossible and unbearable - forcing her to witness so much misery, appalling hygienic conditions, and inhumanity in one place that she nearly gave up. Despite these challenges, she worked tirelessly to help the sick internees, among them also to two Austrian Jewish women, whose tattooed numbers from Auschwitz concentration camp she cut out, skin and all, so that they would not be detected by the SS. In March 1945, during the final stages of WWII, as the Soviet Army approached and the Nazi authorities tried frantically to cover up their crimes, the conditions in the camp deteriorated even further and exhausted prisoners were increasingly being killed in gas chambers. Majda herself contracted typhus and was no longer able to carry out her medical duties. Taking a risk, she handed over her patients’ diagnoses to a fellow Polish doctor, who justified her trust and work diligently to ensure the patients’ well-being. Although stricken with typhus, Majda Mačkovšek and her fellow sick prisoners lived to see the arrival of the Red Army and the end of the war. She remained with them until their transport back to Yugoslavia in May 1945.  

The Second World War did not spare either Majda Mačkovšek or her family. Her brother Aljoša was killed as a partisan fighter in 1943. Her father, Janko Mačkovšek, despite being the founder of the illegal anti-communist movement Slovenska zaveza as well as a critic of the Liberation Front, was nevertheless regarded by the Germans as dangerous because of his ties with the Western Allies. He was sent to Dachau concentration camp in 1944, where he died in early 1945. Majda, who joined the Liberation Front in 1941 and supported the movement throughout the war, was politically inactive afterward and never joined the Communist Party. Post-war reports made by the State Security Service note, among other things, her apolitical stance and her disappointment at the immoral conduct of Russian soldiers toward female prisoners during the liberation of the concentration camp.

After returning to Yugoslavia, she resumed her work at the surgical department of the General Hospital in Ljubljana. However, her time in the concentration camp left her physically weakened and unable to manage the difficult work of surgery, so she requested a transfer to the internal medicine clinic. She eventually decided to leave this post after receiving an invitation from Dr. Josip Hebein, the head of the Institute of Oncology Ljubljana, who at the time was struggling with the shortage of physicians. In 1946, Majda Mačkovšek began working there as an assistant. After six years at the institute, she followed her husband, a doctor surgeon Dr. Ivan Peršič, to Vipava. Between 1952 and 1958, she worked as a general practitioner in several health centres across Primorska region, carrying out the kind of work she had found most interesting when, as a child, she first decided to become a doctor. As head of the oncology station for the Primorska region and of the oncology clinic for the district of Nova Gorica, she also continued to care for cancer patients. These were patients who had been treated at the Ljubljana Institute of Oncology and once discharged, were sent for regular check-ups to their local health centres. She was also involved in organizing preventive and early cancer detection activities and provided medical staff with training to acquire specialized knowledge related to cancer treatment.

After her husband was transferred to the hospital in Šempeter pri Novi Gorici, the Mačkovšek Peršič family moved there from Vipava, but did not stay for long. Both Majda and her husband were offered positions at the Institute of Oncology Ljubljana, a move that defined the course of her professional career.  At the institute, she worked as a resident in radiology and radiotherapy, completing her specialization in 1961. She went on to become one of the leading radiotherapists and independently headed the department of telecobalt therapy. The main drawback of telecobalt radiotherapy was that the equipment used in the procedure was less precise when targeting deep-seated tumors. This led Majda Mačkovšek to focus her scientific research on finding ways to improve tumor localization. In addition to her significant contributions to the development of radiotherapy, she was also well known for her dedication to her patients – a quality she had already demonstrated during her work in Primorska region and continued to demonstrate at the institute. She insisted on carrying out comprehensive clinical examination for all her patients, regardless of their presenting symptoms, which enabled her to diagnose many cases of early-stage cancer. She also played a key role in establishing several new services at the institute, including the medical-social service, occupational therapy, and physical therapy. She remained active in her role as an educator as well. On the one hand she passed on her expertise to colleagues, medical students, and other staff at the institute; on the other, she also held lectures on broader topics such as early detection and treatment of cancer, patient care and therapy, diet and rehabilitation. In all her lectures she placed strong emphasis on being professional and, above all, on safeguarding the well-being of cancer patients.  Toward the end of her career, she served as an assistant to the director of the Institute of Oncology, Dr. Božena Ravnihar, though by her own admission she did not much enjoy this role of being stuck between a rock and a hard place. She retired in 1975 but continued to work contractually as a physician. She continued to work even when the legislation changed, and contractual retired physicians no longer received payments for their services. Thus, she ended her medical professional path the way she started it – as a volunteer without any payment.   

Majda Mačkovšek Peršič died on March 13, 2014, aged 96. For her humanitarian work among the female internees at the concentration camp and for her work in the field of oncology, she was awarded the Order of the Freedom of the Republic of Slovenia in 2000, and the Yugoslav Order of Merit, Class III in 1951.

Anja Paulič