Jerzy Einhorn

Jerzy Einhorn (26 July 1925 – 28 April 2000) was a Polish-born Swedish physician, a professor of radiation therapy, and a Christian Democratic member of the Riksdag. He was born in Częstochowa, Poland, the son of the tailor Pinkus Mendel Einhorn and the dentist Sarah Blibaum, lived in Danderyd Municipality, and died of leukemia at Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm at the age of 74. El País reported the illness as acute leukemia.

During the German occupation he was placed first in the Warsaw Ghetto and later in a camp outside his hometown. He and his family survived the war in Częstochowa, near the Hasag-Pelcery camp. After the war he began medical studies in Łódź, where he met Nina Rajmic, and in the summer of 1946 the two were among students sent to Copenhagen for laboratory courses. While they were in Denmark they heard of the Kielce pogrom, in which 42 Jews were killed, and were advised not to go back to Poland. They sought refuge in Sweden, were admitted as extra students at Uppsala University, and moved their studies to Karolinska Institutet after the Uppsala department would not take them.

He received the medicine kandidat degree at Uppsala in 1949, a licence to practise in 1954, and the medicine licentiate at Karolinska the same year. A doctorate in 1958, Studies on the effect of thyrotropic hormone on the thyroid function in man, was followed by a docentship in radiotherapy in 1959. He worked at Radiumhemmet from 1954, as chief physician and head of clinic from 1967 to 1991, and he was professor of radiotherapy at Karolinska Institutet from 1967 to 1992. From 1975 to 1992 he directed the Stockholm–Gotland regional cancer centre. A curriculum vitae issued for the Stockholm International Forum lists him as a member of the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute from 1967 to 1992 and as its chairman in 1984, for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Ulrik Ringborg, then director at Karolinska, told the Los Angeles Times that Einhorn had worked not only on treatments but on symptoms and on how cancer care was organised.

He married Nina Einhorn in 1949. Their daughter Lena was born in 1954 and their son Stefan Einhorn in 1955, and after nine years in Sweden the couple became Swedish citizens. Einhorn sat in the Riksdag from 29 September 1991 to 2 October 1994 and was a member of the social affairs committee throughout that term. On 30 January 1992 the government set the terms of a parliamentary inquiry on priorities in health care and appointed him chair; the inquiry issued a discussion report, Vårdens svåra val (SOU 1993:93), in November 1993 and a final report under the same title (SOU 1995:5) in March 1995. He published two books about his life. At the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust earlier in 2000 he said, “You must never forget what can happen when organized Nazism gets established,” and, “for your sake and for your children’s sake, do not forget us.”

Early life and the Holocaust

Childhood in Częstochowa

Jerzy Einhorn was born on 26 July 1925 in Częstochowa, an industrial city in southern Poland, as Chil Josef, the elder son of the tailor Pinkus Mendel Einhorn and Sara (Sura), née Blibaum. Pinkus, born in 1886 in Zawiercie, had apprenticed from adolescence; by the 1930s his men's workshop, with cloth from Bielsko and Manchester and about ten workers, was among the best known in the city, at II Aleja 29 and from late 1935 at aleja Wolności 3/5. Sara, from Zduńska Wola, was a dental technician. They married around 1924, and a second son, Roman, was born in Częstochowa in 1931. The Jewish community, founded in 1765, numbered about 28,500 at the outbreak of World War II, with religious and secular schools and a large share of local trade and industry.

Einhorn started at the school of Zofia Wigurska-Folfasińska and then attended a Jewish school until 1939. A later obituary reported that antisemitic incidents had led him to leave a Polish school, and that he learned Hebrew at the Jewish one. He was fourteen when the war began. Utvald att leva (Chosen to Live, 1996) opens on his parents' marriage and the prewar household, then on the siege of Warsaw and the return to Częstochowa—not on the Warsaw ghetto, a setting sometimes read into that chapter. He wrote that fifty years' distance were needed before he could recover the houses, streets, faces, and sentences he still carried.

The ghetto and the HASAG camp

Nazi Germany occupied Częstochowa on 3 September 1939. The next day, "Bloody Monday," German forces killed more than 300 Jews. A Judenrat under Leon Kopinski was formed on 16 September, and confiscation, beatings, and forced labor followed; in August 1940 about 1,000 young Jews were sent to camps at Ciechanów, very few of whom survived. On 9 April 1941 the city commissioner, Richard Wendler, ordered a ghetto in the old eastern quarter. Sealed on 23 August, it eventually held more than 48,000 people, including some 20,000 brought from other towns. The Einhorns were moved to I Aleja 14, the Dom Frankego, on the ghetto's edge, where Pinkus worked for the German authorities with other skilled Jewish craftsmen.

From 22 September to 8 October 1942 about 39,000 Jews were sent in freight trains to the Treblinka extermination camp. Residents of the old-age home and the orphanage were killed on the spot, and about 2,000 people escaped or hid. A fenced "small ghetto" then held some 5,000 Jews kept for their skills. Einhorn remained in the small ghetto after the deportations of September and October 1942. In April 1943 Pinkus, with the other residents of the tenement, was moved into it and worked in a shop run by Maria Mosiewicz, a Volksdeutsche. The memoir moves from the great ghetto through the days of the killing action to the liquidation of the small ghetto, and its publisher's note credits Pinkus's trade and ingenuity with helping the family survive.

In December 1942 the Jewish Fighting Organization formed a unit of about 300 in the city, in touch with Warsaw. In January 1943, led by Mendel Fiszlewicz, it resisted a German roundup. Yad Vashem records 251 Jews killed in the clash, further deportations to Treblinka, and reprisal murders of intellectuals, children, and the elderly. On 25 June 1943 another group fought as the small ghetto was liquidated. Most of those left alive were imprisoned at the munitions plant that the Leipzig firm Hugo Schneider AG (HASAG) had made, in the second half of 1942, from the former Peltzery spinning mills. Under Ernst Lüth it was renamed Apparatebau in February 1943, but prisoners knew it as Pelcery; reference lists that split the two names divide one works. From mid-1943 Einhorn was held there and put to work, and he remained until liberation.

Felicja Karay's 2006 monograph describes the permanent camp that replaced the ghetto. A selection on the night of 19 July 1943 killed nearly 400 people, leaving more than 3,000 Jewish men and women. Shifts ran twelve hours, children included in the heavy transport; each prisoner had about 40 centimetres of bunk, and hunger, vermin, floggings by the factory guard, and epidemics were constant, though some inmates thought Pelcery less lethal than other HASAG camps. Prisoners from Łódź and Skarżysko-Kamienna arrived in 1944. From December the camps were under the SS, guards from Płaszów increased the terror, and groups were sent to Buchenwald. Einhorn's narrative of the camp closes on the heading "Chosen to live."

Liberation and departure

On 16 January 1945 Soviet troops reached the suburbs. Prisoners hid in storerooms, the kitchen, and under bunks, or tried to leave the grounds, while German staff departed. The Red Army entered the city that day, and the family returned to aleja Wolności 3/5. About 5,000 Jews were still in the area; 2,167 were living in Częstochowa in June 1946. Einhorn finished at the Romuald Traugutt liceum, passed the matura in 1945, and began medicine at the University of Łódź.

That summer, with Polish laboratories short of equipment, medical students were invited to Copenhagen. Einhorn went with Nina Rajmic, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto and a fellow student he had met among Jewish students in Łódź. The course belonged to a summer school of roughly 250 students from Warsaw, Łódź, and Gdańsk, arranged with Niels Bohr and Harald Bohr. In Denmark the Łódź group heard of the murder of a Jewish student at home and, days later, of the Kielce pogrom of 4 July 1946, in which 42 people were murdered. Letters from Einhorn's parents urged him and other Jewish students not to return. Denmark was not granting asylum to refugees from Poland. At Helsingør, Harald Bohr called Sweden, visible across the sound at Helsingborg, only "a cat's leap," and Einhorn, Nina, and two other students fled. The crossing is recorded as illegal; after further difficulty they were accepted as refugees. Pinkus, Sara, and Roman emigrated to Canada in 1949, and Pinkus died in Toronto in 1959.

Medical education and life in Sweden

Training and degrees

Einhorn took the studentexamen in Poland in 1945. The curriculum vitae he later gave the Riksdag for Fakta om folkvalda lists a year at Birkagårdens folkhögskola in Stockholm in 1946, a medicine kandidat at Uppsala University in 1949, a licence to practise and a medicine licentiate at the Karolinska Institute in 1954, a medicine doktor in 1958, and appointment as docent in 1959.

He was not enrolled in the ordinary way. With three other Polish-Jewish students he applied to resume medical studies in Sweden and was refused, then accepted only as an extra student at Uppsala: the group could attend lectures and sit examinations without formal admission. When they reached clinical medicine, Professor Erik Ask-Upmark, head of the department, turned them away. In a 2020 essay for Uppsala Medicinhistoriska Förening, Lars H. Gustafsson describes a 1949 campaign by Martin Holmdahl and by Per Gedin, editor of the student paper Ergo, for four Polish-Jewish extra students who had already completed two years there. Quoting Utvald att leva, he reports Einhorn’s account that Ask-Upmark filled spare places first with German students, then other Western Europeans, then non-Jewish Eastern Europeans, and last Jewish students from Eastern Europe, men ahead of women, and said that waiting was pointless. Einhorn left Uppsala and continued at Karolinska in Stockholm.

The 1958 dissertation, Studies on the effect of thyrotropic hormone on the thyroid function in man, is catalogued by the National Library of Sweden as a Karolinska thesis: 107 pages, printed in Stockholm by Thule as Acta Radiologica Supplementum 160. The Riksdag biography gives the same title.

Nina Einhorn and the family

He met Nina Einhorn, née Rajmic, in Łódź after the war. In the Svenskt kvinnobiografiskt lexikon article by their daughter Lena Einhorn, the meeting was an introductory gathering of Jewish students who had survived, and both were reading medicine at the Łódź faculty. In the summer of 1946, laboratory teaching there being scarce, they were allowed to do that work at the University of Copenhagen. News of the Kielce pogrom, in which Polish militia and soldiers killed 42 Jews, brought advice not to return. With Helena Zymler and Toska Roller they tried to stay in Denmark. On a student outing to Helsingør, the mathematician Harald Bohr said a residence permit would be difficult and pointed across the sound to Helsingborg. The four reached Sweden and, after further difficulty, received refugee status.

In a 2001 interview Nina Einhorn placed the meeting at a student club in Łódź in the autumn of 1945, and said she had got him onto the Danish trip although he was a term behind her. Of a photograph of the two newly engaged in Uppsala, she said the year was 1948, not the 1949 he had written, and that his memory for dates was poor.

They married in 1949. A daughter, Lena Fanny Einhorn, was born on 19 May 1954, and a son, Stefan Einhorn (Stefan Artur), on 26 October 1955; the lexicon article also lists him as a professor of molecular oncology and an author. It dates Swedish citizenship to 1955, nine years after arrival, and records Nina’s medicine kandidat at Uppsala in 1947–1949 and her medicine licentiate at Karolinska in 1955. Einhorn himself wrote that citizenship came after seven years: a clerk handed him a plain sheet of paper for a small stamp fee and seemed surprised that he remained, an occasion he remembered both as security and as oddly unceremonious. Another motion, reproduced on his member page, says he arrived as a refugee in 1946 and then waited several years for permanent residence and a work permit.

The same biography names his parents as the tailor Pinkus Mendel Einhorn and the dentist Sarah Blibaum, and gives Danderyd as his residence. In 2001 Nina Einhorn described the house there, its garden looking out over the water, where she said they had lived together for thirty years, and said she did not want to leave it.

Oncology at Radiumhemmet

The clinic and the professorship

Radiumhemmet was already the non-surgical cancer clinic of Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm when Jerzy Einhorn joined it. In 1937 the departments of radiophysics and radiopathology at Karolinska Institutet moved into the Radiumhemmet building at Norrbacka, the first building of the new hospital. Einhorn was a junior physician and then deputy chief physician in the clinic’s general department from 1954 to 1967. In 1967 he was appointed professor of radiotherapy at Karolinska Institutet, a chair he held until 1992, and chief physician and head of Radiumhemmet, a post he held until 1991.

Aerial view of Karolinska Hospital and the Norrbacka Institute in Stockholm.

From 1975 to 1992 he was also director of the cancer centre for the Stockholm–Gotland region. In 1976 he was among the authors of a Läkartidningen account of an oncologic centre for that region, covering hospital organisation of cancer therapy. Writing in 1994 from Radiumhemmet, he recalled that in the 1950s the few specialised Swedish radiotherapy departments, Radiumhemmet among them, basically admitted patients who could be cured by radiotherapy, and that radiotherapy was in practice a subspecialty of diagnostic radiology from which most future radiotherapists were recruited. By the early 1990s, he wrote, Sweden had separate clinical disciplines for general and gynaecological oncology, regional oncologic centres for coordination, and departments that continued to care for patients they could not cure.

After his death, Ulrik Ringborg, described as the hospital’s director, told the Los Angeles Times that Einhorn “worked not only with concrete treatments for cancer, but also with all the symptoms and other problems by taking an interest in the organization of cancer care.” The obituary called him director of Karolinska Hospital from 1967 until retirement in 1992; the biography he supplied to the Riksdag separates the clinic headship, which ended in 1991, from the professorship and the regional cancer-centre directorship, both of which ran to 1992.

A radiotherapy department at Kenyatta National Hospital in Nairobi was ready to start in late 1968. A 1976 report co-authored by Einhorn states that it was built mainly to treat Burkitt lymphoma and nasopharyngeal carcinoma, after collaboration between Stockholm’s Institute of Tumour Biology and the hospital’s ear, nose and throat department on the association of those tumours with Epstein–Barr virus. The first four patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma were treated in December 1968, and 64 cases had been admitted by the end of 1970. The biographical account of his wife, the gynaecological oncologist Nina Einhorn, who worked at the hospital as a physician and researcher from the autumn of 1968 until the spring of 1969, describes the clinic as the first radiotherapy clinic in East Africa and attributes its start to him.

Research

The parliamentary biography places his publications in radiotherapy, endocrinology and radiation biology. His 1958 doctorate, Studies on the effect of thyrotropic hormone on the thyroid function in man, was issued as Acta Radiologica Supplementum 160, a monograph of 107 pages on the pharmacology of thyrotropin and its effects on the thyroid. With Ulla Beling, in 1961, he reported hypothyroidism and recurrence after iodine-131 treatment of hyperthyroidism in 791 patients: radioiodine tended to cause hypothyroidism both early and, especially, late, whereas recurrence of hyperthyroidism after a long remission was uncommon. In 1962, with S. Franzén, he published on thin-needle biopsy in the diagnosis of thyroid disease, a cytologic method used at Radiumhemmet. In 1967, with G. Wikholm, he reported hypothyroidism after external irradiation of the thyroid region.

Clinical trials at the clinic extended beyond the thyroid. In a randomised Stockholm study whose 1986 report lists him among the authors, 960 women with operable stage 1–3 breast cancer were treated by modified radical mastectomy alone or by the same operation preceded or followed by radiotherapy, 4,500 rad to the breast or chest wall and to the internal mammary, axillary and supraclavicular nodes. Up to ten years, the gap in recurrence-free survival widened in favour of the irradiated patients, with no difference between preoperative and postoperative radiotherapy. Among node-positive patients, postoperative radiotherapy was associated with significantly fewer distant metastases and a statistically non-significant tendency toward improved survival compared with surgery alone.90060-x) In 1975 he published an editorial, “The future of radiotherapy as a discipline,” in the International Journal of Radiation Oncology, Biology, Physics.90029-2)

International cancer organizations

The same Riksdag biography records him as chair of the boards of Svensk förening för medicinsk radiologi and Svensk onkologisk förening, and as a board member of the European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer. It also lists him as chair of Cancerfonden. In November 1991, after he had entered parliament, Dagens Nyheter reported that he would remain in that chair for the rest of the term, under the headline that it would not be good for Cancerfonden if he left then.

In the late 1970s he was one of five radiotherapists—with Klaas Breur of Amsterdam, Michael Peckham, Maurice Tubiana and Emmanuel van der Schueren—who discussed a European society for the specialty. An account published by the society’s communications staff dates the founding meeting to 18 September 1980 at the National Cancer Institute in Milan, where a meeting of the Groupe Européen de Radiothérapie was turned into the European Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology, later the European Society for Radiotherapy and Oncology. Breur was elected first president, Einhorn president-elect and van der Schueren executive secretary. The society’s list of serving presidents begins with Einhorn for 1982–1983, still based at Radiumhemmet, followed by Tubiana of the Institut Gustave Roussy (1983–1984) and Peckham of the Institute of Cancer Research and the Royal Marsden Hospital (1984–1986). Peckham chaired the first congress, in London in 1982. Van der Schueren, in Leuven, was the first editor of the society’s journal Radiotherapy & Oncology, launched in 1983.

The following year six societies, including ESTRO, legally founded the Federation of European Cancer Societies; Peckham has been described as its first chairman, and the federation was later transformed into the European Cancer Organisation. Einhorn’s parliamentary biography nonetheless records him as chairman of the European Federation of Cancer Societies from 1975, a date that precedes the 1981 legal founding.

The Organisation of European Cancer Institutes was formed on 14 May 1979 in Dubrovnik, at a meeting of institute directors chaired by Umberto Veronesi, then president of the UICC. A 2009 historical list of its presidents places Einhorn, of Sweden, over the general assemblies in Heidelberg in 1986, Bratislava in 1987 and Ankara in 1988, after which S. Eckhardt of Hungary is listed from 1989. The Riksdag biography dates his chairmanship from 1986. The Radiological Society of North America lists him as an honorary member in 1985 and as a gold medalist in 1999.

The Nobel Assembly

Membership and the chair

Alfred Nobel’s will gave the prize in physiology or medicine to Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm. From 1901 the laureates were chosen by the institute’s professors, 19 at the outset, while a small Nobel Committee did the detailed review. By 1970 that medical faculty had 61 full professors. A university reform then in preparation would have taken it above 200 members, and a new Swedish publicity statute would have opened a state institution’s files to the public. In 1977 the prize-awarding task was moved to a new body, the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute, legally and financially independent of the institute and paid for by the Nobel Foundation. The Assembly has 50 voting members, professors in medical subjects at Karolinska Institutet, who leave when they give up those appointments. Its business is in the hands of a chairman, a secretary and the Nobel Committee. Statutes approved by the government in 1994 elect the chairman for one year, bar immediate re-election, and forbid the same person to chair the committee; a historical survey by two of the Assembly’s officers describes the chair as changing each year by seniority.

The Nobel Committee for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has five members, elected for three years and limited to six consecutive years, together with the Assembly’s secretary. Ten co-opted specialists join the committee from 1 March to 31 October. The September before the award, confidential invitations go to roughly 2,500–3,000 scientists. Nominations close on 31 January, and a personal application is not considered. Those entitled to nominate include members of the Assembly, earlier laureates in physiology or medicine, professors at the medical faculties of the Nordic countries, and Swedish and foreign members of the medical class of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The committee decides which nominated work will be specially investigated, the Assembly may add to that list before the end of May, and the Assembly reaches a final decision by secret ballot and simple majority no later than October, at a meeting early in the month. There is no appeal. Proposals, investigations and opinions concerning a prize may not be divulged, and the underlying files may be shown to outsiders only after at least 50 years, so an individual member’s vote is not a public record.

Einhorn’s appointment as professor of radiotherapy at Karolinska Institutet in 1967 placed him on the faculty that still awarded the prize. A curriculum vitae issued for the Stockholm International Forum lists him as a member of the Nobel Assembly from 1967 to 1992, as its chairman in 1984, and as an auditor of the Nobel Foundation from 1986 to 1988. The note he supplied for the Riksdag handbook Fakta om folkvalda instead gives Assembly membership as 1968–1992 and the chair as 1984–1992, and adds, without years, membership of the Nobel Committee. That span for the chair is difficult to reconcile with a one-year term: the same Nobel survey records Nils Ringertz, secretary-general of the Assembly from 1979 to 1990, as chairman of the Assembly in 1988–1989.

Related Swedish scientific bodies

Government reports document several expert appointments beside the prize work. On 19 November 1974 the Ministry of Health called Einhorn as one of at most ten experts on medical care at the end of life. The group, chaired by Bror Rexed, reported in October 1979 as SOU 1979:59, I livets slutskede. On 9 November 1977 he was named to a committee of at most seven, chaired by Bengt Hjern, charged with reviewing the THX question; in February 1979 it submitted SOU 1979:2, Naturmedel för injektion. From 7 June 1979 he sat on the cancer committee chaired by Sune Bergström, set up to consider prevention. Its report was SOU 1984:67, Cancer – orsaker, förebyggande m.m.

The same Riksdag biography, consisting of information the member himself supplied, also lists the preparedness board against nuclear accidents in 1976–1978; the scientific council of the National Board of Health and Welfare from 1984 and that agency’s board in 1992–1995; the committee on the continued expansion of Karolinska University Hospital in 1967–1969; and the organizational committee for a national public-health institute in 1991–1992. In 1991 the government authorized a committee of at most twelve members to prepare Statens folkhälsoinstitut, then planned to open in 1992. The directive itself does not name the members.

Parliamentary politics

Election and the social affairs committee

In the 1991 general election the Christian Democratic Society Party (Kristdemokratiska samhällspartiet, later the Christian Democrats) entered the Riksdag as a party in its own right for the first time. Statistics Sweden’s historical series records 7.1 percent of the valid votes for the party in that parliamentary election. When credentials were examined on 30 September 1991, the opening protocol allotted the party 26 of the chamber’s 349 seats.

Einhorn was the party’s only member for the constituency of Stockholm Municipality; the same protocol named Michael Stjernström, Stefan Dozzi and Inga-Britt Backlund as substitutes. His registered place of residence was Danderyd, in Stockholm County, which formed a separate constituency. The Riksdag records him as an ordinary member from 29 September 1991 to 2 October 1994.

From 7 October 1991 to 1 October 1994 he sat on the social affairs committee (socialutskottet). The committee prepares the Riksdag’s decisions on health and medical care and on care for children, young people, older people and people with disabilities. In the biographical note he supplied for the Riksdag’s register of members, he is also recorded as chair, from 1992, of the governmental inquiry on priorities in health care, an assignment that continued after the parliamentary term.

Motions and party roles

His health motions were often joint work with Moderate members. With Elisabeth Fleetwood he called in January 1993 for a ban on tobacco advertising, describing tobacco as Sweden’s leading known health risk, citing more than 10,000 deaths a year, and arguing that advertising was especially effective in recruiting smokers in their early teens. When the government presented a tobacco bill the same pair asked the chamber to take up that proposal, and in December 1993 they urged a rapid inquiry into indirect advertising aimed at children and young people. With the Moderate My Persson he asked for a review of health care against a forecast, which the motion attributed to Statistics Sweden, that people aged 80 and over would number about 470,000 by 2000. With Chatrine Pålsson and Ingrid Näslund he argued that county administrative boards, rather than the National Board of Health and Welfare, supervised private hospitals, including some doing advanced surgery, and wanted common rules written if necessary into the Health and Medical Services Act.

A second group of motions drew on his arrival as a refugee in 1946. He asked that the Immigration Board and the Aliens Appeals Board report asylum cases open for more than six months and expedite those open for more than seven, citing preliminary figures of an average 191 days at first instance in September 1991. He twice proposed that citizenship be conferred in a ceremony rather than by collecting a document in an office, pointing to a ceremony Stockholm had held in the City Hall’s Blue Hall and noting in 1994 that the social-insurance committee had spoken favourably of the idea in 1993 without a review having followed.

In January 1994 he was the first signatory of a cross-party motion, also signed by Social Democrats, the Liberal Håkan Holmberg and the Moderate Mikael Odenberg, stating that nearly 400 Jewish asylum seekers were in Sweden. The motion said that Jews returned to Russia risked persecution even though the Russian government’s stated policy was not antisemitic, referred to an election result in which it said an extremely antisemitic party had received 24 percent, and asked Sweden to grant asylum and to raise antisemitism in international forums. The same month, with the Liberal Hadar Cars, the Social Democrat Bo Holmberg and the Centre Party’s Karin Israelsson, he sought durable state support for the Jewish Museum in Stockholm, opened in 1987 and from 1992 housed on Hälsingegatan. The motion described exhibitions on Jewish life in Sweden and on the Holocaust in the Nordic countries, about 10,000 expected visitors in 1993, and deficits that one-off state and city grants had not closed.

On food required for religious practice he wrote that Sweden, Norway and Switzerland alone still prohibited slaughter by Jewish and Muslim methods, asked that experts from those communities be added to a Board of Agriculture inquiry, and proposed dropping import duties on kosher foods and matzah, as with communion wafers. He co-signed Holmberg’s motions on Radio Islam, a Stockholm community-radio station whose responsible editor, Ahmed Rami, had been convicted of incitement against an ethnic group. The 1992 text asked for a longer suspension than the one-year maximum after which the station had returned to the air; the 1993 text described the broadcasts as extreme antisemitic propaganda, including denial of the Holocaust, and sought wider countermeasures.

In 1993 and 1994 he also moved for an inquiry into a smaller Riksdag, suggesting 251 members if sparsely populated regions could still be represented. He put the existing ratio at about one member per 23,000 inhabitants, and in 1994, after an elections-act revision that had not touched the size of the chamber, at about one member per 18,000 eligible voters.

The same biographical note lists him as chair of the Christian Democratic social committee and as a member of the party board from 1997 to 2000. The Christian Democratic Senior Association (Kristdemokratiska Seniorförbundet) states that it was formed after a decision of the party’s 1993 national conference, that Einhorn took the initiative, and that he was its first chair from 1993 to 2000.

Priorities in health care

The 1992 inquiry and Vårdens svåra val

On 30 January 1992 the Swedish government authorised the minister for health to appoint a committee on health care's role in the welfare state and on ethical principles for priorities. Prioriteringsutredningen was chaired by Jerzy Einhorn of the Christian Democrats, a Riksdag member in 1991–1994 who continued as chair afterwards. The other members came from the Social Democrats, the Moderate Party, the Liberals and the Centre Party; the experts included clinicians and researchers in ethics and health economics.

In late 1993 it published a discussion report, Vårdens svåra val (SOU 1993:93), for comment; the final report dates it to November 1993, and five regional meetings followed in 1994. The unanimous final report, under the same title (SOU 1995:5), was delivered in March 1995.

It distinguished clinical choice from rationing under scarcity, and rejected helping many mild cases ahead of a few severe ones, allocation by lottery, and demand as the governing rule. The grounds, it held, had to be stated openly. Three principles were ranked. Human dignity meant equal worth regardless of personal characteristics or social function; need and solidarity directed resources to the greatest needs, including people least able to assert them; cost-effectiveness required a reasonable relation of cost to health and quality of life, and only when methods for the same condition were compared. Dignity outranked need and solidarity, which outranked cost-effectiveness, so severe illness came before milder illness even at much higher cost, and cost-effectiveness could not justify cutting care of the dying, the chronically ill, older people, or people with dementia or disabilities because it would not "pay".

The priority groups were guidelines, in separate tables for political and clinical decisions, not a diagnosis list. Clinically, group IA covered life-threatening acute disease and disease that untreated causes lasting disability or premature death; group IB covered severe chronic disease, palliative care and end-of-life care, and care of people with reduced autonomy. Lower groups covered individual prevention and rehabilitation, less severe disease, and borderline cases. The committee concluded that group IB was under-resourced relative to groups II and III. Chronological age limits were not to decide access; reduced physiological reserve could enter an individual assessment, and care of premature, low-birth-weight infants was not to rest on fixed cut-offs.

He also served on HSU 2000, the inquiry into health-care financing and organisation, in 1992–1997, and from 1999 on SENIOR 2005, on policy for older people. The priority bill left part of the patient's legal position to HSU 2000.

The ethical platform in law

Proposition 1996/97:60, signed on 12 December 1996 by Prime Minister Göran Persson and Margot Wallström, kept the three principles in that order, with cost-effectiveness only after need. Most of about 70 consultees agreed; some, however, said dignity and need gave little guidance and that cost-effectiveness would weigh more in practice. General disadvantage by age, birth weight, lifestyle, or economic and social position was called discrimination. Chronological age was not itself a priority ground, nor was self-inflicted injury a reason for negative special treatment, but biological age and other limits on benefit could be weighed case by case.

One list of four indicative groups replaced the split tables: (I) life-threatening acute disease, disease that untreated causes lasting disability or premature death, severe chronic disease, palliative and end-of-life care, and care of people with reduced autonomy; (II) prevention and habilitation or rehabilitation; (III) less severe acute and chronic disease; (IV) care for reasons other than disease or injury. The government dropped the IA/IB division, because life-threatening conditions obviously break any queue, and it did not keep a separate borderline group. The same disease could move between groups as its severity changed.

The statute was narrower. A wider revision of the Health and Medical Services Act was postponed, duties of immediate and palliative care were not enacted, and cost-effectiveness stayed out of the act. Sections 2 and 2 a were amended so that care must respect equal human value and individual dignity, the greatest need must have precedence, and anyone seeking care must, unless obviously unnecessary, promptly be assessed medically. The amendments took effect on 1 July 1997, after the Riksdag adopted the bill on 16 April 1997 (rskr. 1996/97:185). The 2017 act retains those sentences on dignity and greatest need in chapter 3, section 1.

Later debate

Follow-up work has treated the platform as standing policy that is hard to apply. In 2007 Prioriteringscentrum at Linköping University, reporting to the National Board of Health and Welfare, found open priority-setting still uncommon: historical budgets persisted, clinicians did most rationing, the principles were little known below management, and municipal care hardly used them. It proposed clearer wording, a responsibility principle, and less strictly ranked weight for need and cost-effectiveness. In Läkartidningen in 2008, Nils-Eric Sahlin argued that reordering the principles would let cost-effectiveness dominate and turn the platform into a health-economic calculation. The 1997 order was not changed.

Age has remained disputed inside that order. A 2015 survey from the same centre found the texts clear in barring chronological age as a general criterion and in allowing biological age only where it changes benefit or risk, but unclear on the line between them and on measures that value years of life left. Later Läkartidningen exchanges have set the claim that age can fairly affect intensive-care priority against the claim that chronological age conflicts with the act and the 1996/97 bill. In 2020 the Swedish Agency for Health and Care Services Analysis found that need did not govern allocation between disease groups and recommended that the government consider reviewing the platform.

Writing and Holocaust remembrance

Utvald att leva and later books

In 1996 Albert Bonniers Förlag in Stockholm published Jerzy Einhorn’s memoir Utvald att leva: minnen, an illustrated volume of 499 pages.&format=marc) His Riksdag biography, compiled from information he supplied for the parliamentary handbook, records that book as “Minnen (memoarer) 1996.” Einhorn wrote that fifty years of distance had been required before he could bring back what he would carry as long as he could think: houses, streets, stairs, rooms, faces, words and his own thoughts. The publisher described the memoir as the story of a happy family in prewar Poland, of ghettos and camps, and of becoming Swedish. A 1999 English typescript at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Chosen to Live, translated by Joan Tate and catalogued as the English form of Utvald att leva, runs from prewar family life through the siege of Warsaw and the return to Częstochowa, the great and small ghettos, the HASAG-Pelcery camp and liberation, and then postwar study and arrival in Sweden.

The National Library of Sweden notes further impressions of the 1996 edition marked as the 9th–11th thousand in 1996, impressions within the 18th–25th thousand in 1997, and the 26th–44th thousand in 1999.&format=marc) Bonnier reissued the book as a paperback in 2006 and as a print-on-demand edition in 2012. A Polish translation, Wybrany, aby żyć: wspomnienia, by Wojciech Łygaś, was published in Gdańsk by Marpress in 2002 (ISBN 83-87291-85-4; 269 pages plus plates).&format=marc) In Russian, Izbrannyj vyžitʹ, translated by Sergei Shtern, appeared in St. Petersburg from Vsemirnaja literatura in 1999 (379 pages, ISBN 5-93270-001-7).&format=marc) Libris also records a 2022 Moscow edition from RIPOL Klassik under the same Russian title, translated from Swedish by S. V. Shtern with an introductory article (478 pages, ISBN 978-5-386-14456-2).&format=marc) JewishGen Press later issued an English hardcover, The Maple Tree Behind the Barbed Wire: A Story of Survival from the Czestochowa Ghetto (336 pages).

In 1998 the same house published Det är människor det handlar om, 473 illustrated pages, classed in the national bibliography under health-care policy.&format=marc) The catalogue note records impressions through the 13th–17th thousand in 1998 and the 18th–28th thousand in 2000, with another printing in 2001.&format=marc) The publisher presented it as a report from inside Swedish health care across half a century, focused on patients, relatives and staff and on the politics of that system as Einhorn had seen them after turning from research to parliament.

The Stockholm forum and public testimony

The National Library catalogs a 1998 article in the journal Vår lösen under the title Att inte förneka – det enda bräckliga försvaret: tal i Sveriges riksdag 27 januari 1998, and describes it as concerned with Einhorn’s own experiences of the Holocaust.%20Einhorn&format=marc) The same parliamentary biography lists him as a member of the Scandinavian executive committee of the World Jewish Congress.

The Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust, subtitled a conference on education, remembrance and research, was held in Stockholm from 26 to 28 January 2000. Its programme, issued with a contact address at the Swedish government offices (Information Rosenbad), places Einhorn in the closing plenary on 28 January, chaired by Prime Minister Göran Persson, immediately after Deputy Prime Minister Lena Hjelm-Wallén presented the Stockholm Declaration. In the archived English text, Einhorn said that remembering the Holocaust was not an end in itself but a means of recalling “what can happen when Nazi organisations establish themselves in our countries,” and he stated that organized Nazi groups then existed in most of the participating states, in some as parties with seats in federal or regional parliaments. He argued that democracies were ill prepared to respond, because a broad defense of civil liberties was difficult to weigh against action toward a movement he said undermined democracy and injured people. He set against that the postwar principle of equal human dignity, which he located in the United Nations Charter and in democratic constitutions, while saying that teaching the principle to children would not by itself be enough.

He described Nazism’s appeal as a promise of superiority offered to people who felt inferior, likened that promise to Adolf Hitler’s message to Germans, and said that racism already caused widespread suffering without another genocide. The speech urged a rapid change of attitude, effective methods and, if necessary, new legislation, and called the conference a success only if it became a first step toward an international network “with wide authority to fight against international Nazism.” Remembrance, he said, was “a fragile defence but still the best one,” a warning never to accept Nazism as a necessary evil inside a democracy. Speaking of survivors then “between 70 and 80 years old,” who might not be alive to testify at a later meeting, he closed: “Do not forget us. You must never forget what can happen when organised Nazism gets established in our countries.” An obituary in the Los Angeles Times quoted that appeal.

Death and legacy

Final illness and burial

In August 1999, on a trip to Warsaw with a society of older physicians, Nina Einhorn found a breast lump. She was told the next day that she had breast cancer; the day after that, Jerzy Einhorn, then 74, was diagnosed with acute leukemia. In a 2001 Läkartidningen interview she said they had taken the leukemia to be radiation-induced and slow, so he was not treated at once, while spread to her lymph nodes put her on chemotherapy immediately.

Chemotherapy begun in November 1999 helped only partly. His doctor said the chance of clearing the disease was nonexistent and started maintenance treatment. He felt well for most of the winter and kept working. At the Swedish government’s Holocaust conference in late January 2000 he was an inpatient at Karolinska University Hospital, left under police escort to give the closing address, and returned to the ward. On Easter Eve he worsened and was admitted again; he died six days later, on 28 April. Nina said the last period was very hard. The Riksdag records that date of death. The Los Angeles Times reported that he died that Friday of leukemia at Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm, aged 74.

The Jewish Community of Stockholm’s grave register lists his burial on 2 May 2000 at Norra judiska begravningsplatsen in Solna, within Norra begravningsplatsen, quarter ML, place 4697 (grave N ML 04 4697–4698). Nina died in Stockholm on 10 May 2002 and was buried in the same grave on 13 May.

Family and reception

Their children were Lena Einhorn, born in 1954, a physician, writer and filmmaker, and Stefan Einhorn, born in 1955. Nina said Jerzy told the children how little time he had, but would not discuss death with her. Lena’s 2005 book Ninas resa, from interviews with her mother about the Warsaw Ghetto, won the August Prize for Swedish nonfiction. At the Guldbagge Awards on 31 January 2006 the film she wrote and directed won best film and best screenplay. In 2016 Stockholm named a street in Hagastaden Nina Einhorns gata. Stefan, professor of molecular oncology at the Karolinska Institute since 1999 and head of Oncology-Pathology from 1999 to 2002, received the institute’s Grand Silver Medal in 2022. The citation noted his teaching, a part in founding the Center for Social Sustainability, the Einhorn Family Foundation’s support for research on child mortality, and fifteen books on cancer, pain, ethics and relationships.

Obituaries divided the emphasis. Dagens Nyheter on 29 April 2000, by Anders Hellberg, headlined a cancer death “marked by care” and his engagement for better care of the elderly, and identified him as a professor, cancer physician and former member of parliament who had died at 74. The Los Angeles Times quoted Ulrik Ringborg, then the hospital’s director, on Einhorn’s attention to symptoms and the organization of care as well as to treatment, and reprinted his appeal at the Stockholm forum not to forget what organized Nazism can do. El País wrote that an acute leukemia had ended his life quickly and that, as a Christian Democrat in parliament, he had defended the least protected.

The priority platform the Riksdag adopted in 1997, after the inquiry he chaired, is still set out by the Swedish Society of Medicine as three ranked principles—human dignity, need and solidarity, then cost-effectiveness—with no general discounting of need for age. That account does not name him. In Svenska Dagbladet on 19 December 2025, Christian Democrats Stefan Svensson and Per Landgren called the platform the soul of health care, gave Einhorn decisive weight in the 1997 decision, and invoked him against age discrimination when resources are short.