Living History
One of the perks of my profession is the occasional opportunity to hear peoples' stories. Many patients, especially elderly ones it seems, are more than happy to talk about their past experiences. I may hear the same story several times, or learn a bit more than I actually want to know. But I often receive some interesting insights or observations.
Today I saw a man possessing a last name with a very high ratio of consonants to vowels, a frequent characteristic of Eastern European surnames, so I asked him about his country of ancestry and in our ensuing conversation he told me the story of how in WWII his mother had been in a concentration camp, forced to perform some kind of factory work. She hid the fact that she was pregnant because the Nazis were known to perform experiments upon pregnant women. When Allied forces bombed the building she was in, the wall nearby collapsed outward and she and a few others rushed out. Had it fallen inward, it would have crushed her, but instead it provided an opening to freedom. She made her way along the Rhine river, hiding in the reeds as soldiers marched by on the road overhead. At some point, she was assisted by a farm family who hid her in a shed (under some sort of storage area for vegetables if I understood correctly). She managed eventually to make it safely back to Russia, but sadly her husband never made it out of the concentration camp. Six years after her child was born, she was "sponsored" by a family in Wisconsin, where she and her son moved. Shortly thereafter, she discovered that some of her fellow concentration camp survivors were living in Massachusetts, so she moved again to be near to those with whom, through shared suffering, she had formed a close bond. She taught her son to speak Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, and Czechoslovakian.
A few years ago, I talked to another much older man who had moved from Germany at about the age of 14, but for some reason most of the rest of his family stayed behind. In America, he attended school at first with far younger children due to his poor English skills, and these youngsters gave him the nickname "Dutch" (maybe from the German word for the language-- Deutsch, as in "Sprechen Sie Deutsch?"). His proficiency as a native speaker of German enabled him to serve as an interrogator in the U.S. Army during WWII, while his brothers fought for the other side in the Nazi Army. I'm fairly certain he said they were reunited after the war, but I'm a little foggy on that part.
Anyway, it's interesting to hear some of these stories. And sometimes we even get around to doing an eye exam.
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