Mariam Rozenberg was born in 1917 in Tsaritsyn (present-day Volgograd).
After completing school, Mariam began to attend the Astrakhan Medical Institute. As one of the Institute's star students, she was advised to switch to the S. M. Kirov Military Medical Academy. In 1939, Rozenberg was posted as a 3rd-class army medic to a military settlement near Leningrad.
On June 22, 1941, when the German invasion of the USSR began, Mariam Rozenberg was undergoing training near the town of Pushkin (formerly known as Tsarskoye Selo). By that time, she had become a senior army medic in a motor rifle regiment. Unable to return home, having no time to gather even the most basic necessities, she was dispatched to the front lines in the Vyborg area.
Shortly thereafter, Mariam's regiment was redeployed southward, to Luga in the Leningrad Region, where they had to hold the line. To prevent the Germans from breaking through, the Soviet high command set up the so-called Luga Defensive Sector – a system of fortifications stretching across 300 km. In early August 1941, Wehrmacht troops partially broke through this line. By the end of the month, tens of thousands of Soviet soldiers, with Mariam Rozenberg among them, were encircled by the enemy. During the defensive fighting, Mariam personally transported the wounded soldiers to the medical-sanitary battalion. Later, as the regiment was retreating toward Leningrad, she rendered first aid to the wounded in field conditions. Having miraculously survived and escaped from the encirclement, Mariam Rozenberg found herself in Leningrad, where she was assigned to work at a military evacuation hospital. Back at the Institute, Mariam had dreamed of being an ophthalmologist, but wartime conditions forced her to retrain as a surgeon. The besieged city was constantly bombed, and suffered from shortages of food and electricity, which were exacerbated by the abnormally cold winter. Apart from performing numerous surgeries, Mariam assisted the City Health Department by going through the apartments to locate survivors who needed help and report any dead residents. The bodies of these dead would be taken to the Piskaryovskoye Cemetery.
Mariam Rozenberg worked as head of the surgery ward of the evacuation hospital throughout the Siege of Leningrad, and went on to serve in this capacity until the end of the war. She was awarded the Order of the Red Star and some medals.
After the end of the war, Mariam Rozenberg continued to work as a surgeon at a hospital. Then, from 1952 on, she worked as a traumatologist in various Leningrad clinics.
Visitors to the St. Petersburg History Museum can see some letters of gratitude written by soldiers whose lives had been saved by Rozenberg. The letters are kept in the section devoted to the Siege of Leningrad, which also displays a bronze likeness of Mariam created by her first husband, the sculptor Iosif Bogomolny, who was killed during the first days of the war.
