Selected text
Of course, such attitude was not only towards me, it was also towards my colleagues-Jews, and it was not coming only from patients. I remember a terrible article about a wonderful gynecologist Kresson. I knew him very well. In the articled he was accused of murdering fetuses in the mother’s womb. It was a horrible accusation. And what really happened? In any book on obstetrics, the section covering pathological delivery reads: in case the fetus improperly develops or in case of untimely determined pathologies of the mother, hindering normal parturition and Caesarian section, mother’s life is chosen, if it were to choose between the mother’s life and the fetus’s. In this case decollation is made. Of course, it is barbaric, but at times doctors have to use the decollator to decollate the fetus and then remove the body. Such a live-saving operation was performed by doctor Kresson. He was charged with infanticide and put in jail, only after 20th [Twentieth Party Congress] 53 he was released from prison, being ill, preliminarily enfeebled and spavined. Then I remember how cardiologist, the professor, was accused of doing harm, because contacts to be attached to the patient’s body came off cardiographer machine. I, a beginning doctor, was observing all that. I also saw the way Jewish doctors were treated. A young doctor Dmitrienko worked with us. Every time another dirty article appeared in the paper she discussed it with everybody and exclaimed: ’Have a look what they are doing!’. Then in several years those doctors were exonerated after Stalin’s death. She was astounded and used to ask: ‘What am I to believe in?!’ It means that it was easy for her to believe that such outstanding experts in medicine, the writers of students’ manuals as Kogan-Yasnyi, Vovsi, Vinogradov and others were murderers. But she could not abide by the written facts that those formerly called murderers had been totally innocent. What can I say? Let bygones be bygones. I got it over. But God had not just saved my life, he also let me keep my memories. After the case with the doctors I started being very cautious with people, and not always trusted good words spoken about me. But I take pride that those people who I had grounds to consider anti-Semitists, thought me to be a good doctor, and trusted me their health.
Location
Ukraine
Interview
Hertz Rogovoy