The Testimony    (14 page)

A solemn man, all in black, with the air of an undertaker, said, ‘Please be upstanding and raise the Bible up in your left hand.’

We all did this, and he said, ‘Repeat after me’. Slowly he announced, ‘I’ and we all said ‘I’. Then he said, ‘Pronounce your name.’ The sweet old Italian lady next to me said, ‘Pronounce your name,’ as did quite a few others, so that this became the dominant sound among the mumbled individual names. From then on it became a struggle for me to contain my giggling fit and, as a result, I have little recollection of the words of my oath of allegiance.

I collected my Certificate of Naturalisation as an Australian citizen, and my colleagues congratulated me, Halina Pronounceyourname. For months afterwards I was introduced to visitors at the lab in this way.

Back in the lab I found a bouquet of very dead thistles in a formalin jar and a large sign—‘Welcome to our new Orstralian’—next to my microscope.

After work there was a party in the office to celebrate, with drinks and nibbles. Dr Alan Jackson, who was in charge of pathology, said to me, ‘Halina, we have beer, sherry, brandy and Pimm’s. What will you have?’ Having never heard of Pimm’s, I asked for it. Live and learn, I thought. He poured a bit of a brown liquid into my tall glass and walked away. I said ‘Cheers!’ to John Birrell, who was standing beside me (training in pathology to become a memorable police surgeon), and drank it like vodka, in one gulp.

I was still gasping for air when the boss returned with a bottle of lemonade and slices of orange. He looked at my empty glass and said, ‘Now I know why your hair is so curly!’ He put some more Pimm’s in my glass, with lots of lemonade and slices of orange, and suggested I drink this lot slowly. Severely embarrassed, I hissed at John, ‘Why didn’t you tell me this drink has to be diluted?’ And he replied in his booming voice, for all to hear, ‘HALINA, YOU ARE NOW IN A FREE COUNTRY. YOU WANT PIMM’S NEAT, YOU HAVE IT NEAT!’

It took a long time to live that down. Whenever I said or did something wrong my colleagues would say, ‘Well, what can you expect from someone who drinks their Pimm’s neat?’ Bottles of Pimm’s No. 1 became a frequent birthday or Christmas gift.

This type of banter among good friends went on often in order to relieve the sadness of the tragedies we witnessed in diagnostic medicine, such as when a blood test revealed acute leukaemia—a death sentence—or acute liver or kidney failure. The diagnostic work was exciting because of its detective element—finding the invisible culprit was often vital—but we collected blood and other specimens in the wards or in casualty, and knew the patients, who were often young.

At that time the Alfred Pathology Department included the Blood Bank. Nearby was the intensive care ward. We witnessed torrential bleeds, critical injuries and dying. Such catastrophic events eclipsed the many successful treatments and recoveries that we took part in. This is the reality of acute emergency hospitals.

Here, on the edge of survival, as on battlefields and places where lives are ephemeral, strong bonds form between those involved. These span considerable differences in personality, age group, religion, culture and politics. Trivialities evaporate; life is condensed to the nitty-gritty. And these bonds last a long time. Fifty years on, a dwindling number of us still meet at annual reunions.

There was ‘our’ Johnny Jenkins, a young boy who spent much of his short life at The Alfred. He was born with a condition that prevented the normal formation of blood cells, and had to rely on direct transfusions. His and my blood was of almost identical genotype, so I became, among others, his regular blood donor for several years. Johnny, who came from a broken family, used to tell me, ‘Gee, I wish you was me mother!’ He spent much time in my section of the lab. There were two massive centrifuges made in Germany which we named Trudie and Gertie. When Johnny was about twelve he learned to operate them, and swelled with importance when asked to instruct a new pathology or Blood Bank registrar in their use. He always finished his demonstration with, ‘But remember, Doctor, you can’t do to Gertie what you do to Trudie, ’cos they ain’t the same.’

This doomed little boy had a sunny disposition, a gentleness and a generosity of spirit, and I loved him. Visits to Luna Park, followed by a huge piece of Black Forest cake in a nearby cafe, always brought a bit of colour to his pale face. It was good to see him beam with joy.

He died of the inevitable complications of his condition at the age of fourteen.

The bonds I mentioned before suffered some strain on occasions. Two senior nurses who used our tearoom were forever reminiscing about their time with the Australian troops in Palestine in 1943 and 1944. They got misty-eyed about their commanding rank and their control of underlings, but rarely about the wounded and mutilated soldiers in their care. It had been the time of their lives. When I said I never realised war could be so enjoyable, they were annoyed.

Several of my colleagues expressed surprise at my Jewish origins, saying they would never have guessed, as there was nothing Jewish about me at all. This fascinated me. I wanted to know their stereotype of a Jew. After much probing, these young people, who had met few, if any, Jews, brought up Shakespeare’s Shylock from
The Merchant of Venice
and Dickens’ Fagin from
Oliver Twist
.

Later observations also added to my view that, while the anti-Semitism I had encountered in Poland was fostered by the Catholic Church and was based on the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, the type I encountered here was based on negative characters in English literature. Fortunately, it was not vitriolic and institutionalised.

I still talked about my wartime experiences reluctantly when asked, but after several years my survival of Auschwitz and Stutthof became known. On several occasions, old and new colleagues asked the now-familiar question, ‘How come you don’t believe in God after He saved you so miraculously? You, of all people!’

I still cope very poorly and angrily with this. ‘Do you really expect me to ignore the wholesale slaughter of children, of the gifted and talented who could have enriched other people’s lives? If you expect me to stand in the midst of massive carnage and thank your God for saving me, me, me, then I reckon there is something very wrong with you.’ And I froth at the mouth. I wish I could deal with this a bit better after all this time.

A subject related to religion also strained beyond repair a good, long-standing friendship that I had. ‘The meaning of life’ became a tearoom topic, an echo of a debate on TV at the time. My friend asked me whether, as an atheist, I had a definition of this and, if so, she would like to have it, preferably in writing. She was a Catholic, and I sensed a challenge. I thought it through, wrote it down and gave her a copy of this pearl of wisdom:

I think that life, for each of us, is a lump of clay to be shaped and sculptured personally. It can be left unattended, a shapeless aggregate of particles, or be turned into a meaningful, purposeful ‘presence’ that perchance inspires and enriches other lives. It can be multifaceted in its meaning: as family to kin and kith, as a good citizen to society, an activist in the community, as friend, partner, lover, mentor, tutor, critic and giver. It can be meaningful and gratifying if
you
make it so.

This seemed to end our friendship. She became distant, and did not maintain contact after I left The Alfred.

With very few such exceptions, we all got on famously. When in the late 1960s touring Europe became affordable and fashionable, a group of my colleagues went there on their annual leave. They travelled through Greece, Yugoslavia and Italy, and I awaited their comments eagerly. They said that Europe was full of New Australians!

* * * 

In 1964 two colleagues and I attended the International Conference on Haematology in Stockholm. On the way, during a stopover in London, I visited the renowned Hammersmith Hospital for a shoptalk with pathology staff about new developments in diagnostics.

Their labs were impressive. But the tearoom talk was about a recent case they had heard about: a lady in her mid-twenties had arrived from Germany seeking the group of British surgeons who, after the war, offered their services to repair people who were maimed in action or during bombing. She had a letter of referral from her doctor describing her case, and asking if her colostomy could be reversed.

At the age of three or so, she was taken from her parents, who may have been Jewish, Polish or Gypsies. On this absolutely normal child the German surgeons performed a colostomy to find out how a rapidly growing body would deal with such a modification. (Colostomies, when necessary, are typically performed on the elderly.)

She was looked after by a family in Bavaria, who were obliged to take her periodically to a clinic for measurements. After the war she stayed with this family, was regarded as their child, worked on their farm and coped with the colostomy. But now she had met a young man. They wanted to marry and the local doctor thought that the wizards in London might be able to reverse her colostomy and give her a normal bowel passage.

‘Echoes of Nazi atrocities,’ they said, and published the case.

To me, such cases were not new. In Poland after the war, children and adults who survived medical and surgical experimentation were returning home. There were cases where muscles were transplanted from one part of the body to another for an unknown reason. These experiments were well documented by the perpetrators themselves and, later, by a shocked medical world.

The girl with the colostomy was lucky to be alive. Not so the camp inmates used in the infamous hypothermia trials and other lethal experiments. To establish the time after which hypothermia becomes irreversible, prisoners were immersed in vats of water a few degrees above zero. Using stopwatches, doctors timed their dying. The results were recorded as scientific research.

The purpose of these trials was to establish the time needed to rescue a pilot who was ejected or shot down into the waters of the northern seas. There was some criticism of these trials, not on moral grounds but on the accuracy of the results. It was pointed out that a pilot would have an insulating layer of fat under his skin that was absent in the starved and emaciated prisoners.

Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath, whose first code of medical ethics is ‘Above all, do no harm’ (
Primum
non nocere
).

Hundreds of German doctors conducted lethal experiments on inmates of concentration camps. When this was revealed after the war, it sent shockwaves throughout the medical world that lasted for a long time.

USSR, 1987

I don’t remember when I first read about the Silk Road and found its story fascinating. This ancient highway, which linked Imperial China and Imperial Rome, did more than carry silk and other valuable cargo. It revolutionised lifestyles, art, crafts, architecture, food and religious creeds, and opened up vast horizons in shared knowledge. Its surviving central city, Samarkand, held particular attraction for me.

In 1987 I joined a tour of the Soviet Union that included sections of the Silk Road in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, the capitals of Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan, as well as Moscow and Leningrad. There were eighteen of us from various parts of Australia and New Zealand, and we travelled in June, the northern summer.

Sharon and George, a middle-aged couple from Perth, were seated next to me on the long flight over. They were easygoing, friendly and sociable. George informed me proudly, ‘There are no flies on my Sharon!’ And he was right. Sharon was perceptive, sharp-witted and funny. They were good company during the tour.

Nina, who taught English at Moscow University, was our main guide and organiser. On her summer holidays she guided English-speaking tourists in order to practise the language herself and learn its various idioms. Nina was in her late thirties, and a warm, helpful and knowledgeable lady. She encouraged us to comment and ask questions about the things we observed. However, with questions about political matters she was circumspect and uncomfortable, adding that politics was not her strong subject.

Mikhail Gorbachev was a rising star at the time, and we were eager to hear local comments on his programs of reconstruction (
perestroika
) and openness (
glasnost
), which aimed to democratise the Soviets. In some places, Nina hired resident guides for their local knowledge. In a personal conversation with me, one of these said there was hope and expectation that Gorbachev would make Russia a better and more open society.

The twenty-six-day fast-paced tour had a packed itinerary and only brief stopovers. Some in our group regarded it as good value for money, but I suffered from a sensory overload and had a great need for more time in some places. Several of these, my personal highlights, linger in my memory. Like beauty, such highlights are in the eye of the beholder, and the others on this tour each had their own. I will try to describe mine.

Tashkent, the Uzbek capital, was the first place we visited. It is a modern city that was rebuilt after a major earthquake. There are a great number of tea houses where men, and only men, gather each afternoon till night for green tea, shared food and comradeship. In Tashkent we learned that elaborate ceremonies lasting two weeks accompany births, marriages and funerals. Several mosques we visited on our city tour were well attended at all hours of the day.