It is well known that there is a disproportiionate number of Jewish doctors and that the profession of physician has been an important aspect of Jewish life. This fascinating study is a history of the Jewish doctor from ancient times to the present.
The remarkable story of Mohammed Helmy, the Egyptian doctor who risked his life to save Jewish Berliners from the Nazis. One of the people he saved was a Jewish girl called Anna. This book tells their story. The Israeli holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem has to date honoured more than 25,000 of the courageous non-Jewish men and women who saved Jewish people during the Second World War. But it is a striking fact that under the 'Righteous Among the Nations' listed at Yad Vashem there is only one Arab person: Mohammed Helmy. Helmy was an Egyptian doctor living in Berlin. He spent the entire war there, all the time walking the fine line between accommodation to the Nazi regime and subversion of it. He was also a master of deception, outfoxing the Nazis and risking his own life to save his Jewish colleagues and other Jewish Berliners from Nazi persecution. One of the people he saved was a Jewish girl called Anna. This book tells their story. Also revealed here is a wider understanding of the Arab community in Berlin at the time, many of whom had warm relations with the Jewish community, and some of whom - like Mohammed Helmy - risked their lives to help their Jewish friends when the Nazis rose to power. Mohammed Helmy was the most remarkable individual amongst this brave group, but he was by no means the only one.
An orphan leaves Dark Ages London to study medicine in Persia in this “rich” and “vivid” historical novel from a New York Times–bestselling author (The New York Times). A child holds the hand of his dying mother and is terrified, aware something is taking her. Orphaned and given to an itinerant barber-surgeon, Rob Cole becomes a fast-talking swindler, peddling a worthless medicine. But as he matures, his strange gift—an acute sensitivity to impending death—never leaves him, and he yearns to become a healer. Arab madrassas are the only authentic medical schools, and he makes his perilous way to Persia. Christians are barred from Muslim schools, but claiming he is a Jew, he studies under the world’s most renowned physician, Avicenna. How the woman who is his great love struggles against her only rival—medicine—makes a riveting modern classic. The Physician is the first book in New York Times–bestselling author Noah Gordon’s Dr. Robert Cole trilogy, which continues with Shaman and concludes with Matters of Choice.
Sima Vaisman, a young doctor, escaped the persecution of Jews in her native Moldava only to be captured by the Nazis in France and sent to Auschwitz. After her liberation, she sat down and detailed her experience. Using a physician's detached language, she described the horrors she'd seen and was the first person to report precisely how the gas chambers worked. Afterwards, she put the testimonial in a drawer and refused to talk about it. 40 years later, one of her nieces opened the drawer. Includes an afterword by Vaisman's niece, fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg.
Gisella Perl’s memoir is the extraordinarily candid account of women’s extreme efforts to survive Auschwitz. With writing as powerful as that of Charlotte Delbo and Ruth Kluger, her story individualizes and therefore humanizes a victim of mass dehumanization. Perl accomplished this by representing her life before imprisonment, in Auschwitz and other camps, and in the struggle to remake her life. It is also the first memoir by a woman Holocaust survivor and establishes the model for understanding the gendered Nazi policies and practices targeting Jewish women as racially poisonous. Perl’s memoir is also significant for its inclusion of the Nazis’ Roma victims as well as in-depth representations of Nazi women guards and other personnel. Unlike many important Holocaust memoirs, Perl’s writing is both graphic in its horrific detail and eloquent in its emotional responses. One of the memoir’s major historical contributions is Perl’s account of being forced to work alongside Dr. Josef Mengele in his infamous so-called clinic and using her position to save the lives of other women prisoners. These efforts including infanticide and abortion, topics that would remain silenced for decades and, unfortunately, continue to be marginalized from all too many Holocaust accounts. After decades out of print, this new edition will ensure the crucial place of Perl’s testimony on Holocaust memory and education.
By the end of World War I, Albert Einstein had become the face of the new science of theoretical physics and had made some powerful enemies. One of those enemies, Nobel Prize winner Philipp Lenard, spent a career trying to discredit him. Their story of conflict, pitting Germany’s most widely celebrated Jew against the Nazi scientist who was to become Hitler’s chief advisor on physics, had an impact far exceeding what the scientific community felt at the time. Indeed, their mutual antagonism affected the direction of science long after 1933, when Einstein took flight to America and changed the history of two nations. The Man Who Stalked Einstein details the tense relationship between Einstein and Lenard, their ideas and actions, during the eventful period between World War I and World War II.
Auschwitz was one of the first books to bring the full horror of the Nazi death camps to the American public; this is, as the New York Review of Books said, "the best brief account of the Auschwitz experience available."
Faced with infectious diseases, starvation, lack of medicines, lack of clean water, and safe sewage, Jewish physicians practiced medicine under severe conditions in the ghettos and concentration camps of the Holocaust. Despite the odds against them, physicians managed to supply public health education, enforce hygiene protocols, inspect buildings and latrines, enact quarantine, and perform triage. Many gave their lives to help fellow prisoners. Based on archival materials and featuring memoirs of Holocaust survivors, this volume offers a rich array of both tragic and inspiring studies of the sanctification of life as practiced by Jewish medical professionals. More than simply a medical story, these histories represent the finest exemplification of a humanist moral imperative during a dark hour of recent history.
This is the first attempt to explain how Jewish doctors survived extreme adversity in Auschwitz where death could occur at any moment. The ordinary Jewish slave labourer survived an average of fifteen weeks. Ross Halpin discovers that Jewish doctors survived an average of twenty months, many under the same horrendous conditions as ordinary prisoners. Despite their status as privileged prisoners Jewish doctors starved, froze, were beaten to death and executed. Many Holocaust survivors attest that luck, God and miracles were their saviors. The author suggests that surviving Auschwitz was far more complex. Interweaving the stories of Jewish doctors before and during the Holocaust Halpin develops a model that explains the anatomy of survival. According to his model the genesis of survival of extreme adversity is the will to live which must be accompanied by the necessities of life, specific personal traits and defence mechanisms. For survival all four must co-exist.