Leon Berkowicz’s tale of his life during World War II is harrowing. There is a relentless alternation of human warmth and darkness, superbly told, making it a powerful and very moving narrative. At times it is almost too exhausting to read, never mind to have actually experienced. As he says, though, the survival instinct is strong in animals. 

Survival, however the movies like to portray it, is not always a great thing. Berk introduces his memoir with an acknowledgement of his survivor guilt, and especially remembers the many people who died from light wounds that became infected with tetanus. 

His tale begins as he leaves his Polish home for fascist Italy in 1936 to study medicine. In Milan he is forced to join the Fascist Confederation of Foreign Students, which for him begins the inexorable slide into the blitzkrieg of Poland in 1939. By the time Hitler invades, Leon is in the southern city of Lvov completing his studies. Hitler and Stalin agree to divide Poland, so that he finds his home town is on the Russian side. Observing that ‘No-one foresaw the Holocaust’, he completes his studies on the eve of the Nazis taking Lvov (having breached their treaty with Stalin). He finishes his exams, and on 5/7/1941 the Nazis summarily execute all the Polish Christian academics and their families. It is only a few days before the Nazis have stirred up long-standing hatred of ethnic Ukrainians against the Jewish population to create a pogrom lasting 3 days and in which 6,000 people died. Somehow Leon survives a crowd being driven against a prison wall and crushing itself to death as officers take photographs. Next he must avoid a fellow student (now, like him, a graduated doctor) who passes by wielding a stick and wearing an armband.

Consider:  What is the best way to prevent doctors becoming agents for a destructive enemy? Should they or should they not have a political education? 

Stunned by the sights he has seen, in hiding, and scared to ask for food, Berkowicz decides with a friend to walk 500km home to Baranovichi in north-east Poland. It is clear the Nazis have found a fast route to spread hatred of the Jews among rural peasants, in retrospect assisted by the beliefs of the Catholic population: 

“What! Get on your way now! I don’t help Jews who killed our Lord and started this dreadful war.” 

In more recent times Pope John Paul II was called to account for this by the secular left in Europe, as well as by some Jewish people. Berk, however, shows us the picture was more complex, especially when he relates an episode as a young boy when he joined in his peer-group trying to stone a local Jewish girl in love with a Christian boy. The argument over Romans versus Jews as the killers of Christ is recalled, to everyone’s detriment. Later on, a Jewish merchant is shot by the Russians for selling methylated spirits to soldiers who tragically find it rapidly lethal.

In Baranovichi he gets assigned to the hospital surgical department. Colleagues unde the Russian partition were friendly, but under the German’s hostile, and he soon found himself wearing his yellow star front and back. The sudden shunning of Jewish colleagues by other doctors proved a good survival technique for the latter, as the collaborators, helpers, and friends of all Jews and the military enemy were later executed (this was done on both sides).  

‘To my great joy I found that Shurka had escaped the killing squads.

…

We talked all the time and escape was our only topic. Then we learned that it was Dr Prawko who had given the order for the Jewish doctors at the hospital to be sent to the ghetto.

‘The man must have known he was condemning us to death, how could he do it?’ I asked Shurka.

It was a question I kept repeating. Though I had never had a high opinion of him it was almost beyond comprehension to find he was capable of this.

“So he has no time for Jews as such but, damn it, we are all members of the same profession and we all took the same oath which binds us to respect the sanctity of life. We should be if not brothers, then at least allies in a noble profession”.

“It’s wartime, Leon,” said Shurka gently. “People do strange things in wartime.”’ 

Prawko’s rather flexible interpretation of the Hippocratic oath under the stress of occupation is soon forgotten by Leon himself when he has the opportunity to handle some stolen weapons. He cannot wait to use them on some Germans, whose murderousness was becoming both methodical and continuous. The Rabbi who tells him off for creeping out of the ghetto and joining the underground, such as it was, is one of thousands executed and dumped in the trenches they had previously been forced to dig on the outskirts of town. Leon lies in hiding in a peasant’s pig sty and listens impotently for three days as the job, which includes almost all his family, is completed. He notes laconically that ‘The good are easy to deceive.’ How much pain is behind that simple sentence! 

In 1942, after three months hiding from the Nazis in a pig sty and making black market vodka for Pashka the peasant who sheltered him, he finally makes contact with the Russian controlled partisans in the forests. After describing his first amputation he observes that: 

“I don’t know who invented the dum-dum bullet but I hope retribution awaits him somewhere.” 

Consider: What sort of justifications do we hear for the manufacture of weapons such as those topical today: the anti-personnel landmines? What kind of person goes to work each day to make them? 

Berk describes the medical system outside the cities: 

A feldsher was a regional phenomenon deeply rooted in Russian tradition. At the time of the Tsars there were very few trained doctors so members of the community were chosen and taught how to recognise basic illnesses and how to give injections; with time they gained a status between doctor and nurse. Fyedik had been one of them. Now his knowledge was being put to use. But as he confessed, he would have preferred to be a fighting man rather than a feldsher. He certainly looked nothing like a doctor. He was wearing side-bulging pants tucked into high boots and the typical Russian rubashka – a long shirt which reached the knees and had four very large pockets.…

‘Now,’ said Fyedik, ‘before we start seeing the sick, there are a few things to remember. First, if you don’t agree with my diagnosis don’t say so in front of the patient – they’re all damn fools anyway. And, second, never – do you hear – never question my treatment. Got it?’ 

Consider: Would you take this advice? 

The narrative becomes exciting as the partisans go about killing Germans, ‘the race that taught us to hate’, ambushing and destroying rail lines; and by February 1943 the Red Army has secured Stalingrad after a stupendous battle and loss of life. But the fate of the captured enemy is grisly indeed, and the stories more and more desperate and horrific.  

‘Look what they have done to my people. Look what they have done to me’ cries one woman reduced to raging hatred and violence. A partisan’s lover has a baby in the forest – Leon ‘puts it to sleep’. The brutal necessities of war exist in personal interaction and in state-directed rules, such as the orders to kill the sick if required (from the increasingly organised command structure emanating from the government in Moscow). 

After another execution of a collaborator, a village elder who hated communists more than the Nazis, Leon records: 

‘I had to go away. By now I thought I had seen it all; slaughter had become almost commonplace. ‘You will get used to it, Leon,’ I had been told, and I was sure I never would. I was wrong. The times were tough, the enemy was vicious; it was a case of kill or be killed.’  

An historical note: George Bush Jnr. rallied people behind the USA after the September 11 attacks with the same slogan Lenin used as he forged the USSR, and Stalin as he rallied the Soviet people to defeat the Nazis: “Those who are not with us are against us!”

References and Further Reading 

Berk (owicz) L (1992) Destined to Live: Memoirs of a Doctor with the Russian Partisans            Paragon Press