MGordon_MD
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Dec 23, 2008, 12:58 PM
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By Dr. Michael Gordon
It was my Monday afternoon teaching geriatric clinic. The family medicine resident came into my office to present the patient she had just evaluated who had as is usually the case, multiple medical problems. The patient had seen many medical specialists and had undergone extensive testing to elucidate her problems with several trial of medications with no real resolution of her problem. As we reviewed the patient’s symptoms and the investigations it seemed that the options for further exploration were becoming fewer and fewer. I went in to see the patient with an open mind and prepared myself to hear her story from her own lips to make sure that what the medical resident told me was an accurate reflection of the patient’s history. I also always try to establish a personal connection with the patient as at the next visit I would likely have a different medical resident working with me.
I always start my interviews trying to establish some personal connection relationship with the patient – some of which are quite distant and others more immediate or personal. As we were doing our initial explorations of who she was and what was her background, I knew not only from the medical resident’s history but from her accent that she was Eastern European and Jewish. The resident was of Eastern European non-Jewish background and seemed to have a reasonable understanding of the Holocaust history. For some reason I used the word “Tsimmis” to the patient, trying to explain that we were going to try and simplify some of what we were going to do and then turned to the resident and started to explain what a “Tsimmis” was when the patient piped in, “a carrot Tsimmis – I am a Litvak. After I explained to the resident what that was all about I turned to the patient and said, “I too am a Litvak, and my grandparents were from Eishyshok”. The patient bolted from her chair and with great excitement said, “I am from Eishyshok and became a partisan before the Nazis came.” I knew from my own research that 3446 Jewish villagers were rounded up and shot by the Nazi’s and buried in mass graves on September 25th and 26th 1941.
She asked what my grandparent’s names were and I explained that they had left during the pogrom period at the turn of the 20th century and therefore it was unlikely that she or her family would have known them. The conversation ranged from the 900 year history of the village as captured in the wonderfully documented book, There Once Was a World written by Brooklyn College professor Yaffa Eliach, whose lectures my parents used to attend to the photographic exhibition of the village, gathered by professor Eliach which is a centre-piece of the Washington Holocaust Museum. The exhibit is a memorial not just to the village but to the destroyed Eastern European Jewry.
The medical resident seemed mesmerized by the conversation and every few moments the patient or I turned to her to explain part of the story, such as how Eliach, then a child, was saved from being shot by a non-Jewish neighbor who grabbed her from the line of Jews marching to the killing pit and protected her in her home.
The interview ended with some plans for medical exploration of her symptoms and final farewells in Hebrew when she revealed that she went to Israel before coming to Canada and discovered that I too lived in Israel. Ending the interview in Hebrew was a final testimony to her survival and that of the Jewish people.
This article originally appeared in the Canadian Jewish News.
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Dr. Michael Gordon is Medical Program Director, Palliative Care Baycrest Geriatric Health Care System in Toronto, Canada and Professor of Medicine, at the University of Toronto. He is co-author with Bart Mindszenthy of Parenting Your Parents.
Parenting Your Parents is available in bookstores and online at: Indigo-Chapters, Amazon and Barnes & Noble. It is available in a US edition: Parenting Your Parents: Support Strategies for Meeting the Challenge of Aging in America.
For bulk orders email info@dundurn.com. Call: 416-214-5544 or Fax: 416-214-5556
Dr. Gordon is the author of the engaging memoir Brooklyn Beginnings: A Geriatrician's Odyssey, published by I-Universe.
Brooklyn Beginnings is available in bookstores and online at: Indigo-Chapters, Amazon.ca, Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble and I-Universe
Visit Dr. Michael Gordon's website.
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