In the Lodz ghetto in Poland, home to as many as 204,000 Jews during World War II, there were 170 doctors, as well as a few nurses and midwives, according to diaries and memoirs. Like all the others, the Jewish healers lived with the daily terror of being shipped off to a death camp.
Still, they tended to their fellow inmates. There was almost no food, no medication, and certainly no X-ray machines, laboratories, or any of the other accoutrements that we think of as essential to medicine today.
And yet, when there was nothing to give the sick, the Lodz doctors did find something.
“These doctors gave people hope,’’ said Dr. Harold Bursztajn, a Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center psychiatrist whose parents lived in the ghetto and who spoke about the Lodz experience at a recent meeting for colleagues.
The lesson for today’s doctors, who are often demoralized and squeezed ever more tightly by time and budget constraints, is that even “under the most extreme circumstances, in the face of isolation, helplessness, and hopelessness . . . even when there are no medicines, you can use yourself,’’ he said. “The doctor becomes the medicine.’’
Ghetto doctors armed with little more than kindness and hope twice saved the life of Bursztajn’s father, Abraham. The first time, said Bursztajn, was when his father fainted after being tortured. A ghetto doctor revived him.
“I will die here,’’ his despairing father said to the doctor, an older man. “One of us will, but it will be me,’’ the physician answered. “I do not have any way to treat you, but you are young. If you don’t give up hope, you will survive.’’
Thanks to that doctor, his father did maintain hope, Bursztajn said, and that hope fueled his courage to resist. One night, Abraham sneaked out of the ghetto to steal cement with which to build bunkers for hiding. The plan was to put the bunkers under the ghetto’s stinking septic system to throw off the bloodhounds the Germans used to hunt Jews. While sneaking back carrying a 100-pound bag of cement, he was shot in the leg by a German patrol. Leaving a bloody trail, he somehow got back. But his father knew the Nazis would see the blood and look for him if he failed to show up at the next morning’s roll call.
Another ghetto doctor came to him. He had no instruments, but sterilized a coat hanger as best he could and dug out the bullet from Abraham’s leg. With his leg bandaged tightly to stop the bleeding, Bursztajn said, Abraham made it to roll call and helped build the bunker, which eventually hid - and saved - 15 Jews.