Antoni Kępiński

Who was Antoni Kępiński?

Antoni Kępiński was a Polish psychiatrist.

He attended the Bartłomiej Nowodworski High School. In 1936 he entered the Medical Faculty of the Jagiellonian University. In 1939, he interrupted his studies before graduation and volunteered for the Polish Army to defend his country from the German invasion. After the successful invasion of Poland by Germany, Kępiński was captured and imprisoned in Hungary, to where he had fled. In 1940, he managed to escape imprisonment and headed to France, then Spain, where he was imprisoned in Miranda del Ebro.

Later he was freed and came to Britain, spending a short time with the Polish aircraft division. In 1944-5, he continued his medical studies in Edinburgh graduating in 1946. Soon he returned to Poland and took up psychiatry at the Psychiatric Clinic of Collegium Medicum in Kraków.

As a concentration camp inmate himself he took part in a rehabilitation programme for survivors from the Auschwitz concentration camp.