‘They Had to Make Choiceless Choices’.

Michael Grodin Professor of Health Law, Policy & Management

Age: 65

Hometown: “I tell everybody I’m from Brooklyn, which my family originally was, but I was actually born in California, Santa Monica. My grandfather was a rabbi there.”

Breakfast: Protein bar, wheat flakes, and coffee

What led you to study the Holocaust?

I come from four generations of rabbis. My background and upbringing was very Eastern European and Hasidic, my grandparents primarily spoke Yiddish. Part of my family was killed during the Holocaust, and I don’t know what happened to a lot of the family, but my grandfather was able to come to the US and bring most of his congregation. When I was a child I spent a lot of time with survivors, I have memories of seeing tattooed numbers on the arms of the survivors.

When I went to college I was still interested in the Holocaust, but I needed a little time away from it, because I was immersed in it. Ultimately I went to Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University. My father would say if I had studied properly at Yeshiva University I wouldn’t have had to go into medicine and could have become a rabbi. It’s funny, a famous rabbi spoke after me at a conference where I said that, and he said that his father said if he studied properly he could have been a doctor.

Anyway, I went to Yeshiva University, and I lived in the [Bronx Jewish] community, and I used to spend Sunday afternoons sitting on park benches with all the Yiddish speakers, listening to their stories.

How did you begin studying the Holocaust?

My formal work began almost 30 years ago when I began work here in Boston caring for Holocaust survivors [as a therapist], and I was very interested in resiliency, how it was and why it was some people did better than others. I continued to care for Holocaust survivors, and children of survivors, and grandchildren of survivors, and moved into refugees from other areas as well—Rwanda, former Yugoslavia, the Middle East, Tibetan monks….

I was chairman of the Institutional Review Board for Boston City Hospital [now Boston Medical Center], and I was invited to go to Geneva to speak on research ethics code and the Nuremberg Code, which comes out of the Nuremberg Trials. I went to find the textbook on it and it turned out there was nothing written on it. So I went looking, and I actually was able to find the transcripts from the Nuremberg doctors’ trial in 1947.

The transcripts were in the Harvard International Law Library, and nobody had ever touched them. I actually found them in the basement on top of file cabinets because there had been a flood and people had taken them out and put them up there. That became my first book, The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code: Human Rights in Human Experimentation.

Then I became very involved with Elie [Wiesel], and Elie suggested that I should explore more. First of all, he asked, ‘How is it possible that physicians became involved in the eugenics program? Physicians, of all people, who pledge to heal and care for people, how did they become murderers?’

How were doctors involved?

The Nazis needed the doctors to carry out their racial hygiene policies and the physicians needed the Nazis to carry out their eugenics programs. It turns out that 50 percent of physicians became members of the Nazi Party at the height of the Nazi period, and seven percent were members of the SS. They were involved in all aspects of the sterilization program, the euthanasia program, and then they disassembled the gas chambers from the mental hospitals and took them east to Poland to the concentration camps. Doctors selected at the unloading ramps at Auschwitz.

Ironically the Nazis had very advanced public health policies for Aryans. They had a holistic health movement. They were very involved in cancer prevention and anti-smoking campaigns. You’d call it progressive—for the Aryans. If you were not Aryan, of course you would need to be isolated, sterilized, and ultimately eliminated.

What was the answer to Wiesel’s question? How could physicians become involved?

It’s interesting, because I would have asked how is it that anybody could have been involved.

I spent a lot of time working on perpetrators, and wrote a paper called ‘Mad, Bad, or Evil,’ on how healers become killers and what is it that makes doctors become torturers. Doctors are more susceptible, perhaps because they’re good at disassociating. That’s the one thing that’s common to all these situations: you have to be able to dehumanize and see the others as different than yourself.

I also did some writing on how you create a torturer and how people become dehumanized and are able to move down this slippery slope, these slow steps involving separating, isolating, and dehumanizing. The Nazi doctors developed a whole new language. There are some parallels to the American use of torture in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, as well as parallels in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda….

What about your most recently published book, Jewish Medical Resistance in the Holocaust?

Maybe 10 years ago I thought, ‘I’ve written on the Nazi doctors, so why don’t I deal with the Jewish doctors?’ Nobody had written on the Jewish doctors, which was surprising.

This book was years and years of work. These are original memoirs of people, archival material. It’s a story of Jewish medical resistance, and it’s a remarkable story, particularly the public health aspect of trying to maintain health where there’s no medicines and no sanitation, no food, and they did what they could.

There was an underground medical school in the Warsaw Ghetto that nobody knows about, and a nursing school teaching how to care for people where there is no means to care for people. They also set up a sanitation police, they set up mechanisms to have quarantine—there were typhus epidemics and tuberculosis. They took bones from horses to grind them up to make vitamins for their kids. They went to a brewery and were able to extract calcium from the factory. They were really creative in trying to save lives. They had to make choiceless choices: there were no choices so they did what they could.

I’ve spoken on this topic in Europe and around the US and most people are unaware of the story at all. And so it’s been rather rewarding, and yet also distressing that people have no idea. It’s an incredible story, it’s something that needs to be documented and recorded, and hopefully I contributed some to the documentation. I dedicate the books to the memory of the heroes who were never known.

What do you see as the importance of stories—the stories used to dehumanize a group of people, and the stories you are now telling?

We humanize people when we talk to them and hear their stories. It’s the abstract, the propaganda, the stigmatization that causes fear. The whole refugee issue now is distressing, the whole issue of discrimination and stigmatization, isolating people.

I’m still basically a clinician at heart. I’m caring for patients and seeing patients and hearing stories and telling stories. Public health is population-based, but when I’m in the office seeing a survivor of genocide and hearing their story, helping them come back and be reunited with their family, and see people that actually move on, I think that really is what I feel best about.

—Michelle Samuels

Michael Grodin will discuss his book, Jewish Medical Resistance in the Holocaust, at an event on March 1.

Learn more about Grodin’s next book, Spiritual Resistance and Rabbinic Responsa During the Holocaust.