Return to Czechoslovakia

The Andover Theological Library in Harvard is an imposing building. As I walked in through its large oak door, I imagined myself seated in a vaulted room surrounded by books or records. In fact, I had to walk through the older building to a modern wing, take a lift upstairs to a quiet corridor with ordinary offices opening on to it and finally arrive to be greeted by a helpful young woman who showed me to a small conference room with a large window. There, alone, I was given the many box files I had requested.

I was there to research my father’s work after the war, organising medical teaching missions to Europe, more specifically to Czechoslovakia and Austria. The missions had been organised by the Unitarian Service Committee, hence their being placed in the Theological Library archive. The box files were full of reports, letters, press cuttings and photographs charting every aspect of the missions: page after page of closely typed sheets detailing every decision, impression, request, problem and the many successes. I was searching to find out more about those crucial months for Erwin and Alice, between the end of the war and the end of their marriage.

In the last years of the war, Alice was working in Pittsburgh for the International Workers’ Order and alongside her paid job, working on a voluntary basis to help refugees fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe. Erwin was a medical officer with the US army, crossing the Elbe and involved in the final push with Gen.Patton to defeat the Germans. He was with the troops who liberated Buchenwald and was greeted there by schoolfriends he could no longer recognise; they had to explain to him who they were. There too, he found his uncle, so ill and so emaciated that despite Erwin helping him to Bratislava to convalesce, he only survived for a few more months. I don’t know at what point he discovered that his own parents had not survived at all; they had been killed in Auschwitz in 1942.

As the Allied troops liberated Europe, Erwin took over the administration of the hospitals and derived a grim satisfaction from his seeing his own Jewish surname emblazoned over them as the officer in charge. I can’t imagine how it felt to see what he saw and understand what had taken place in the Europe he loved.

A year later he returned to Europe at the head of the medical teaching mission and met the politicians and doctors who had survived the war, and worked with them to bring expertise and help. The very idea of this suggests a level of forgiveness and humanity that I find overwhelming. I sat and read what it involved, how he hard he had worked, often seven days a week, until the early hours of the morning, and all because he retained a hope that the world would learn from the unspeakable acts of the past. My respect for the man who was to be my father took on a whole new dimension.

Of course, if anyone was to organise a medical teaching mission to Czechoslovakia, he was the ideal choice. He was an American citizen from birth, his birthday was the 4th of July – impossible to be more patriotic than that – and he had been an officer with the US army. However, he had lived in Czechoslovakia from the age of nine, had attended secondary school there, graduated as a doctor from Charles University in Prague, and completed his studies with a year’s postgraduate medical training in Vienna. He spoke Czech, Slovak, Hungarian and German completely fluently (as well as French and English). He could be trusted both by the Americans and by the Czechs. He understood the sensitivities of both sides and was the man to overcome the reservations might have about the other.