A Gift From a Patient

Abstract

When I first met Mr. Rozenkier, nothing about him struck me as being in any way distinctive. He was a Jewish man in his late 70s, a veteran of the Korean War. His wife was always with him at each clinic visit. They appeared to be very close, very devoted to each other, amidst some occasional bickering between them. They reminded me of other older couples from Brooklyn I had met in my years living and working in that populous and ethnically rich and diverse borough. Despite his age, Mr. Rozenkier possessed an animated and spirited manner. He spoke with what seemed to be a sense of urgency, wanting to tell his story, even if it was merely to relate how he had been feeling recently and what symptoms he had been experiencing. He sometimes would focus persistently on some fact, such as about one of his medications or what one of his other physicians had told him or on one of his symptoms. I would try to explain to him and to answer his questions as best I could, hoping that would satisfy him, but he often kept returning to the same point. I would do my best to hide my frustration and my awareness that I had limited time and that other patients were waiting for me as I would repeat and then repeat again what I had just told him. He was always polite and appreciative of whatever small amount of advice I managed to impart, and there was a pleasantness to him that was easy to see. He was a small man, short in stature, and probably did not weigh much more than he had as a young man. He did not betray in his energetic persona and affable manner that there was a special weight he carried with him. I became Mr. Rozenkier's physician after I had replaced a colleague who had moved away. The first time I met him, he had come to see me at the veterans hospital to get a medicine for his prostate cancer. At that time, he was being cared for by several physicians in various specialties in private practice. I saw in one of my colleague's earlier notes that, along with his other medical conditions, he had been sterilized in a concentration camp. This, of course, caught my attention. It is not the sort of medical history a physician encounters commonly in most practices. I am certain I said nothing to him about it in our first meeting, being shocked by my contact with someone who had survived one of the most horrific periods and series of events in human history. I felt it would be a violation of his most painfully intimate feelings and memories for me to inquire, but of course I was curious. I did little more than make a referral to the oncologists so that he could get his medication and told him to return when he needed to. I felt I had nothing else to offer him because he already had several physicians attending to his various illnesses. Mr. Rozenkier came to me again a few months later. He usually saw me to get the medications prescribed to him by his private physicians. Sometimes, he would get confused or forget exactly what the other physicians had done, so it would entail another visit to get things cleared up. In the course of these visits it came out somehow, and I do not recall now how or when it first happened, about his experience with the Nazis. Mr. Rozenkier talked freely of his past, despite the horrors he had seen. He wanted to share the experiences; he wanted other people to know. Once the subject was broached the first time, on subsequent visits invariably I would hear more, even without my alluding to it. He was born in Wroclawek, Poland in 1926. When the Nazis invaded Poland in September 1939, Mr. Rozenkier was 13 years old. German soldiers came to his home to arrest his father. When Mr. Rozenkier's sister dared to protest, she was shot and killed. Both of his parents, four sisters, and a brother died at the hands of the Nazis. Mr. Rozenkier was sent, along with the town's other Jews, to a ghetto outside the town. He managed to escape and spent several months sleeping in a cemetery. Eventually he was arrested and sent to a camp. …