It’s titled After Auschwitz. How do people get out of hell and live a normal life?
Henry, a friend, would have told me to shut the book. He was 90. That moment when he was 21, when the cattle-car doors rattled open and he was on the platform where Dr. Mengele sorted Jews for work or gassing? Henry didn’t dwell on that.
I used to ask him about it. I told him that Dr. Mengele, the man who sent Henry’s mother to be stripped naked and gassed that day, had lived in fear and in flight for the rest of his life. Not good enough, Henry said. This was Mengele, the man who had peeled small children without anesthetic and sewn their living bodies together, to see if the graft would take.
To my shame, I actually argued with Henry about this. But he was right. Best not to dwell.
I met Henry long after the 1988 Supreme Court decision that gave abortion rights to Canadian women. Many other friends had been with him in the fight and that’s how they remembered him. But I always preferred the story of Henry, postwar, coming to Canada to practise medicine and, finding women begging for abortions, deciding to risk his life and break the law.
But Schloss was wrecked by Auschwitz. After torture, the starvation, constant terror of imminent gassing, having buckets of excrement thrown over her, she was “a cowed shell” who could scarcely approach other humans for years, so great was her self-loathing.
Henry survived by being a humanist, by being rational. At the service, filmmaker Jean Teillet told us that Henry’s legacy was less abortion rights than personal freedom.
She spoke of Auschwitz. “Henry had his personal dignity removed by the state when he was still a child. Any capacity he had to make decisions was removed. He was subjected to direct interference with his physical person by the state. He was treated as a means to an end over which he had no control. He was the passive recipient of decisions made by others. He had life, but no dignity, no freedom of choice, no liberty and no security of the person.”
“Why then are we surprised that such a man, with such a history could so empathize with women who were being subjected to the same indignities?”
I was astonished last week to read vicious columns by women, older women no less, that didn’t mention that Henry was a Jew who had survived the Holocaust. Catherine Dunphy, in this paper, deplored his three marriages, the fact that he enjoyed sex with women, imagine that. Dunphy called him a “womanizer.” He was no feminist, she said.
On j-source.ca, she mocked the dead man’s appearance. “Short, hirsute, he spoke with a Polish accent. No one would ever have called him good-looking.” I did. I found him good-looking.
I am astounded that Dunphy left out the word “Jew.” Henry was a Polish Jew. When “Polish” meant you lived and “Polish Jew” meant you died hideously, it’s a bit crucial. I have a neighbour who once sneered at “you know, that ugly Jewish face.” Shades of that here.
At the clinic, his office was “very posh,” his office chair luxurious, his desk huge, Dunphy complained. I’ve been in that office and Dunphy clearly only visited hovel-offices, for Henry’s seemed perfectly ordinary.
The columnist Margaret Wente — yes, that one — also left out Henry’s time in Auschwitz and called him a “relentless womanizer, a bad husband . . . a self-aggrandizing egotist” who “hounded the women’s movement for money” he spent on Club Med vacations to battle “stress.” But Holocaust survivors do suffer stress when they are constantly threatened with death and then sent to prison. It’s the black memories, you see.
At the funeral, Henry’s son Abraham told us he was at university when the abortion battle was at its peak. Henry was nearly penniless and Abraham found himself alone, working part-time, scrambling for scholarships.
Every reporter has baggage. Wente’s and Dunphy’s clearly involve sex and money. My baggage is this: I loved Henry. But it doesn’t drag me down. It makes me purely happy.
Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Heather Mallick
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