VOLUME 20 NO.6 JUNE 2020 JOURNAL The Association of Jewish Refugees ONGOING A History of SUPPORT The AJR continues to do everything possible to support our members during this pandemic. You’ll find news of some Disease of our recent activities in this journal. After these past months we are understandably preoccupied We are delighted that so many members are now engaging with our with illness, plagues and epidemics. Millions worldwide have digital outreach programme. Our been infected with Coronavirus from China to New York, tens weekly e-newsletter of lockdown ideas already reaches over 1200 of thousands have died in Europe alone. people. Several ideas are included on the back page. Please feel free to share them and our e-newsletter details with your friends and family, and we would love to hear your own stories about how you are filling your time during this period. Paying tribute in Berlin ................................. 3 Reflections on a better world after ............... 4 AJR reaches a virtual audience ..................... 5 Letters to the Editor ...................................6-7 Art Notes...................................................... 8 High life, low life .......................................... 9 Shedding extra light on a moment of history.................................10-11 The Gunzberg family saga .......................... 12 Letter from Israel ........................................ 13 A quartet like no other ..........................14-15 Obituaries .............................................16-17 Reviews ...................................................... 18 Looking for................................................. 19 Why Don’t You? ........................................ 20 Please note that the views expressed throughout this publication are not necessarily the views of the AJR. © NIAIS-RML AJR Team Chief Executive Michael Newman Sars-Cov-2 is the virus that causes Covid-19. This image shows the virus emerging Finance Director David Kaye from the surface of cells cultured in a lab. Heads of Department Community & Volunteer Services Carol Hart HR & Administration Karen Markham Not surprisingly, people have looked to past Camus’s The Plague, set in his native Algeria Educational Grants & Projects Alex Maws plagues for comparison: from the death to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. Social Work Nicole Valens of Pericles and both his legitimate sons in AJR Journal Athens in 429 BC, killed by the plague, Back in January, Holocaust historian Nikolaus Editor Jo Briggs probably typhus or typhoid fever, to Daniel Wachsmann wrote a brilliant essay for the Editorial Assistant Lilian Levy Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, from Continued on page 2 Contributing Editor David Herman 1 AJR Journal | June 2020 A History of Disease next door. If we’d shared the soup among so many victims of the Holocaust. They the others, we’d all have perished: as it was, also highlight the terrible ethical dilemmas (cont.) we succeeded in saving a few lives in the that faced doctors and show how little TLS, called “Being in Auschwitz”, about dysentery ward.” equipment doctors had. Dr. Perl describes “the historical reality of living and dying in how when she arrived at Auschwitz a Auschwitz.” Wachsmann wrote a prize- In the past, Holocaust historians have Nazi officer told her, “Don’t worry about winning book, KL: A History of the Nazi written about German racist ideology, the instruments… you won’t have any. Your Concentration Camps in 2015. bureaucrats who moved so many across medical kit belongs to me now.” “I never Europe to the Polish camps, the Shoah saw him again,” she writes. First, he writes, in his essay, there was the by gas and the Shoah by bullets. But, weather. Each season brought its own increasingly, historians like Wachsmann have Reading these terrible accounts of disease terrors. “In spring and autumn,” he writes, turned their attention to other aspects of the and epidemics we can only be grateful for “heavy rains and strong winds drenched Holocaust, including disease. a very different story: the extraordinary those toiling outside. A thick sea of mud achievements of so many refugee doctors covered much of the grounds and clung to In his monumental thousand-page book, and medical scientists who came to Britain tired feet and tattered clothes, encroaching Final Solution, David Cesarani wrote about during the 1930s and ‘40s. Many rightly even on prisoners’ dreams.” Worse was the the appalling conditions in the camps: “The won acclaim and recognition: Professor summer: “The heat bore down on sunburnt poor diet … and the bad water promoted Gustav Born, who did pioneering research inmates, who suffered more than ever from dysentery.” Later, he writes, “Light injuries into blood clotting, heart attacks and bugs and mosquitoes. Worse still was the incurred in the course of labour or as a result strokes, Professor Leslie Brent, whose work maddening thirst, which left many mouths of beatings, which went untreated and were on immunological tolerance was the basis too dry to speak.” Worst of all were the easily infected by dirt or flies.” of transplantation biology, Sir Ludwig freezing Polish winters: “Thin uniforms and Guttmann, whose work at Stoke Mandeville cheap barracks afforded little protection The worst illnesses in the ghettoes were revolutionised the treatment of paraplegic against icy gusts and snow. Winter, the dysentery, typhus and TB. “Dysentery,” patients, the pharmacologist, Sir Ralph Kohn prisoners knew, was the season of frostbite writes Cesarani, “was most severe in the and the biochemist, Sir Hans Kornberg. and amputations.” summer and was aggravated because the A significant number were awarded the Germans made it difficult to remove … Nobel Prize, including Sir Ernst Chain for his Worst of all was disease. Dysentery was a waste or contain it safely.” In Words to contribution to the discovery of penicillin, Sir terrible killer, both in the ghettoes and the Outlive Us, a book of eyewitness accounts Bernard Katz, who was awarded the Nobel camps. Worse than dysentery was typhus. of the Warsaw Ghetto, Michal Grynberg Prize for his work on the biochemistry of the “The wooden shavings and rotting straw writes in his Introduction, “Famine led to nervous system, biochemist Sir Hans Krebs on the bunks crawled with fleas and chafed typhus, typhus was followed by tuberculosis, and Max Perutz OM, head of the Medical against sore skins,” writes Wachsmann. and after that came the deportations.” Research Council Unit for Molecular Biology. Conditions were overcrowded and Thousands died of disease every month. unsanitary, diet was terrible. The range of contributions is astonishing. The illness the Germans feared most was From medical inventors like George Weisz It was typhus that killed Anne Frank in typhus. “Typhus was commonly imported and Rolf Schild to veterinary medicine, Belsen. Irma Sonnenberg Menkel saw by refugees and the worst phases of the from genetics and immunology to ageing her die. “Typhus was a terrible problem, disease coincided with major inflows.” There research and psychiatric nursing. Sir especially for the children. Of 500 in my was not enough soap and certainly not Martin Roth was the first ever professor of barracks, maybe 100 got it, and most of enough private or public baths. “Typically psychiatry at Cambridge, Nelly Wolffheim, them died. Many others starved to death. typhus struck in the spring and raged until Melanie Klein and Anna Freud pioneered When Anne Frank got sick with typhus, I summer. It ravaged the most abject, the psychoanalytic work with children. remember telling her she could stay in the young and the old.” barracks – she didn’t have to go to roll call… The history of refugees and the Holocaust When she slipped into a coma, I took her Two of the most devastating accounts of is always a complex story, a mix of in my arms. She didn’t know that she was illness come from the recently published achievement and suffering. In recent years, dying.” With a Yellow Star and a Red Cross by both the history of refugees and the history Arnold Mostowicz, his memoir about his of illness during the Holocaust have started By contrast, it was illness that saved Primo time as a doctor in the Łód Ghetto, and to come into their own as major areas Levi in Auschwitz. Shortly before the camp a new edition of Gisella Perl’s I Was a of inquiry. Thanks to historians such as was liberated, he fell ill with scarlet fever Doctor in Auschwitz, published last year. Nikolaus Wachsmann and David Cesarani and was placed in Room 8 in the Infectious Both are eyewitness accounts. Like Primo our understanding is being transformed. Ward. The SS hurriedly evacuated the camp Levi’s books, they are more interesting for This is a revolution in our understanding as the Red Army approached, forcing all but anecdotal evidence than for data. of the Holocaust. The Covid pandemic has the gravely ill on a long death march that led made this new work even more relevant to the death of the vast majority. Levi’s illness They confirm that the causes of many of today and it will change the way we think spared him this fate. He wrote about this these diseases were the same whether about disease in history, perhaps above all, experience later: “there was enough soup in ghettoes or in camps. Bad nutrition, about the Holocaust. for eight people, but not for three hundred. appalling overcrowding, poor medical And so, we shut the door on those patients provision and abysmal sanitation killed David Herman 2 AJR Journal | June 2020 Paying tribute in Berlin On Tuesday 12 May an AJR commemorative plaque was unveiled at the British Embassy in Berlin in dedication and memory of consular officials whose devoted efforts in issuing visas helped many thousands of Jews escape Nazi Germany and Left to right: Deputy head of mission of the Israeli embassy in Berlin, Aaron Sagui; Ambassador Michaela Küchler, German Special Representative for Relations with Austria from 1933 to 1939. Jewish Organisations at the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs and President of IHRA; Lisa Bechner from the Kindertransporte organisation; the British Ambassador to Germany, Sir Sebastian Wood.