An epidemiologist's journey from typhus to thalidomide, and from the Soviet Union to Seveso

Abstract

Extraordinary circumstances led me to become an epidemiologist.1,2 I was a 21-year-old medical student in Warsaw in September 1939 when my father urged me and the rest of our family to ‘go east’ to escape the Nazi occupation of Poland. My mother objected, convinced that the British and French would come to our rescue. Although my father could not dissuade her, and was not prepared to leave her, he insisted that one of us ‘had to survive’, so ordered me to leave for the Soviet Union. My parents and my brother remained in Poland until they were deported to the Treblinka extermination camp, where they perished in 1942. The medical school in Warsaw had been closed by the Nazis, and I was working in a home for Jewish children with severe learning disabilities, mainly Down's syndrome. The director of the home was a communist, and he came up with a plan. The mother of one of the children came from the area of Poland which had been occupied by the Soviet Union. She obtained a permit for herself, her own child and three other children to return there. The director of the home suggested that I should travel with them to help her look after four mentally disabled children during the journey. After tutoring by my mother in how to recite for the German authorities the words written on the Russian travel document, but fictitiously adding my name, the six of us were authorized to leave German-occupied Poland and to remove our ‘Star of David’ armbands. A train conveyed us as far as the railhead at Malkinia. From there we had to walk for a few kilometres through a forest, crossing no man's land into Soviet territory at Zaremby Kościelne. It was a Friday evening, and when we spotted candles alight within a house, we asked the Jewish family there for something to drink; but we were refused. We moved on, and eventually arranged for each of the children to be returned to their parents, leaving me free to search for a medical school where I could complete my undergraduate medical training. The medical school at Lvov was already full, partly because of the influx of Polish students who had also fled from the Nazis. However, some friends of mine in that part of Soviet-occupied Poland had highly-placed contacts in Minsk, capital of Soviet Byelorussia. They arranged for me to be admitted to the medical school there, and I qualified in June 1941. It was a special committee of the Ministry of Health which then decided that I was to become an epidemiologist. I had never considered this option (I had wanted to study internal medicine), partly because Jews were ineligible for government jobs in pre-war Poland. On the day the Germans launched their offensive against the USSR on the 22 June 1941, I volunteered for the Red Army and was made a captain in the Medical Corps. After being wounded in my right leg on the Byelorussian front, I was sent to Molotov – now renamed Perm – in the Urals, where I was appointed head of an anti-epidemic unit. The unit consisted of physicians, paramedics (feldschers), nurses and disinfection personnel, and we had a small mobile laboratory for serological tests.