A Hungarian Jewish man’s fight for freedom [PODCAST]

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“Despite the terror of the Soviets, it was clear that not even their mighty tanks could eradicate the social tides that now, like a tsunami, could not be turned back. The power of the movement forced Ernő Gerő, just a few months into his rule, to step down the next day and communist officials appointed Imre Nagy as Prime Minister. Despite this acquiescence, the violence only escalated. The Soviets were intent on crushing the movement with as much brute force as possible, killing and arresting protestors en masse, sending more and more dying and critically injured young people to the hospital where Ervin and his team worked in a constant state of shock.”

Robert J. Wolf is a neuroradiologist.

He shares his story and discusses his book, Not A Real Enemy: The True Story of a Hungarian Jewish Man’s Fight for Freedom.

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Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show, where we share the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from. My name is Kevin Pho, founder and editor of KevinMD. Rate and review the show at KevinMD.com/rate. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/podcast. Today on the show we have Robert Wolf. He’s a neuroradiologist, and he’s the author of the book Not a Real Enemy: The True Story of a Hungarian Jewish Man’s Fight for Freedom. Robert, welcome to the show.

Robert J. Wolf: Thank you very much for having me.

Kevin Pho: And we’ll get into your book in a little bit, but first off, just briefly share your story and journey to where you are today.

Robert J. Wolf: I was born in Detroit, Michigan, and I was raised K-12 in suburban Michigan, where my dad was an OB/GYN. After that I went to Tufts University, then University of Michigan Medical School. I did my internship at Framingham Union Hospital, home of the famous Framingham heart studies, and now called MetroWest. I believe they did change their name a while ago. I did my radiology residency at Brown, Rhode Island Hospital, and I trained as a neuroradiology fellow at Yale New Haven Hospital.

Kevin Pho: All right, so we don’t have very many neuroradiologists on the show. So take us through a typical day. Tell us some of the typical cases that you would see.

Robert J. Wolf: That’s a great question. It’s been a while. I’ve been practicing part-time and mostly from home the last few years, but back when I was full-time, night calling, weekends, the busiest was probably in Flint, Michigan, especially weekends. I would come into the hospital on a weekend day and read the ICU board, the emergency room board, the CT scans, the ultrasounds, and I was taking angio and interventional call too, for pretty much, I guess, 11 years, and I would do all those cases too. And then I’d have to go over to the MRI center and spend the afternoon doing the emergency MRI cases and reading as many as I could to make Monday’s caseload a lot easier.

So that was about as busy as it got, except, flash forward to when I was at Kent County Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, I read up to 200 cases a day. I didn’t have to do interventional at the time, but it was very assembly line. By that time I was working part-time. I was working about 60 percent of full-time, but it seemed like full-time. It was a good practice. At that point it was a little much for me, and I moved on to another job, and then things happened, and my mom passed away, and we’ll get on to that in a minute too, when we talk about the book.

But now I’m working part-time. I work two days a week, like I think you said, two from home, Wednesday and Thursday. I’m just mostly reading X-ray and ultrasound from a place called Michigan Healthcare Professionals, MHP, in Michigan. But the book’s been my passion the last four years.

Kevin Pho: All right, and you mentioned that over the last few years your passion is the book that you wrote, and it’s titled Not a Real Enemy: The True Story of a Hungarian Jewish Man’s Fight for Freedom. Now, before talking about the book, tell me about the events leading up to you writing this book.

Robert J. Wolf: My mom and dad did an autobiography. They worked on it together, pretty much pencil and paper, then pen and paper, then typewritten, then put on a computer, then put on a disk. And my dad passed in 1997. About that time, I think I read the story once. I was pretty young then. Maybe I’m still young, but I was a very young man. I read through it, and it didn’t really strike me that much at the time, and of course I was busy with my practice, family, friends, social life, just living life in general.

Flash forward to 2016. I had just finished my last real radiology job. A month later my mom passed away. When I cleaned out her house and we worked on her estate and her affairs, a friend of the family, a friend of mine, handed me the disc of my parents’, my dad’s story, and she said, “You really have to look at this.” And I took it to heart, but I was busy with my mom’s affairs for a year, and then I decided to retire. And then a friend of mine in Michigan, one of my good friends from the Flint practice, was running this radiology practice, and he needed help because he was short-staffed. So I said, “OK, I’ll help you.” It was just X-ray and ultrasound, easy enough, a couple of days a week.

And that brought me to the disc. Between cases, I loaded the disc into my computer and I started reading my dad’s story again. This time I read it cover to cover, and this time I read the story very carefully and realized, “Oh my God, why didn’t I do something with this a long time ago? Why didn’t I rewrite this? Why wasn’t I more impressed with what my dad had been through and how he was after all that?”

So they wrote the story as though it had happened the day before. In the 70s, they wrote the story as though they remembered it from the previous day, from the 30s, 40s, 50s, all the way to 1956, when they left after the Hungarian Revolution. So I decided to turn it into a biography, and I had it copyedited and polished and copyedited again, and then I had some beta reads and sent it out to some professional people.

And one, another author, very nice, she’s also a book coach and a great author and mentor, led me to my co-author, who was Janice Harper. I don’t know if you’d call her a ghostwriter. I call her co-author. She’s a big part of the team, but that was a big turning point for the book. She says, “The story is great if you want to share with a few hundred people, maybe a few thousand people, your dad’s life,” but she says, “We could turn this into something really special.” And that’s what she did. She made this book into something really fantastic. She mixed up the order of the events, she did parallelism, she did some converging stories and moved it along. She threw in great prose and dialogue, and even letters to and from home.

Kevin Pho: So tell us about your dad. When you saw that disc and read his story for the second time, what story in particular made you think twice and realize, “Wow, that’s an amazing story, and I can’t believe he went through that”?

Robert J. Wolf: The one thing that I remembered from the first time was his very first escape. Now, he had several. He beguiled, he was cunning, he outwitted both the Nazis and the Communists in Hungary, and all of that. It was just amazing how he did it. It wasn’t just escapes. It was false, forged papers, and arguing with armed Russian soldiers, and cloak-and-dagger stories, the hiding places, the things they had to do, the things they had to wear, the places he had to go to. There are so many harrowing moments. How did he ever survive, and how did he ever have this great demeanor that he had as a United States physician?

Burnout was not in my dad’s vocabulary. My dad would have worked till the day he died. He was jovial, he was jolly. I used to like going with him when he went on rounds. He’d walk through the ER, he’d be saying hi to everybody. He said hi to the janitors, said hi to the nurses, the secretaries, and they would all smile back at him. He was polite on the telephone. He didn’t mind getting called in the morning. He didn’t mind delivering babies at two, three, four in the morning. That’s what he loved to do, and I was just so impressed.

You would never know that this man went through what he went through, as we know so many people, unfortunately, get PTSD from, say, Vietnam or other traumatic events, even in the United States, terrorist events, hurricanes, all kinds of things. But my dad, you would never tell. He would come home from work after a 10- or 12-hour day, and he would tell dirty jokes.

My mom and dad would throw Hungarian goulash parties outdoors, with the bandana on and the Gypsy outfit and the tripod and spit, and you could smell the food for miles. He would do it for his Hungarian friends, and they had a lot of them, and then he would do it for his doctor friends and the neighbors, just as good a party. And they were fantastic people. They were educated. They believed in education. They stressed education to me. They loved to travel. They loved educating people about history, the Holocaust, Hungary, Israel. They were into the theater, the arts, museums, opera, very diversified. They were into etiquette.

My dad was a gourmet and a gourmand. He never left my plate empty if I left my plate. I’m like that now, but I realize now why he was like that, because he had so many days where they were completely underfed, especially at forced labor camps, where they were working all day. And he was the guy who was in charge of feeding the troops, whatever little scraps they got sent from home that were lucky enough to get through by bribing guards or by local peasants. He was the guy in charge of distributing it.

And he was also a gourmet. He was a gourmet chef. My mom and dad liked fine dining. Very diversified people, and very intelligent, very liked. They were liked in the medical community, they were liked in the Jewish community, and my mom was a big Holocaust educator and advocate. She did talks. She was president of the art society in Michigan as well. Very fantastic people.

Kevin Pho: So after reading all the obstacles that prevented him from coming to the United States, tell me about some of those stories of his past. How did those stories influence him as a physician?

Robert J. Wolf: Well, all my dad wanted, growing up. His dad was a doctor too, actually, his dad was a dentist. And unfortunately my dad’s parents, the grandparents I never met, perished at Auschwitz in 1944, at 50 years old. We have the stories. The details were recounted by a witness whom my dad ran into months after they were freed and got to go back to his hometown.

And then at some point he was divided between freedom from the Communists, who were their rescuers, unfortunately, and the desire to practice medicine, and they often conflicted. He wanted to be free, but for him to attempt to be out of a communist country, he was risking his life and his medical profession, and he kept doing that. He had multiple attempts, and in one of them he just flat out changed his mind. He made it to Austria but turned around for fear of reprisal and went back. He was in medical school at the time, and he was on call the next night, and nobody even knew he was gone. Finally, he’d had it, between the two wars and the Nazis and the Communists, and said, “Yeah, it’s worth taking a risk,” and of course with my mother, at that time, in 1956.

And I think that he just was so appreciative of being able to come to the United States. He redid his residency in Boston at Beth Israel. He had to learn English in high school, even elementary school, in Boston. And he was lucky enough to be at Beth Israel and end up getting his first job in Detroit, and a few years later he moved to suburbia and built their final house, or only the second house they owned. And he was just so proud to be a doctor. It’s all he knew. That’s all he loved. He wanted to be like his dad, who, like I said, was a dentist.

My dad’s father gave free dental care to some of my dad’s high school classmates. This is before World War II and before the Nazis occupied Hungary, at least 10 or 20 free dental cleanings and checkups for people who couldn’t afford to see the dentist. And they were well respected in their community, in the small town of Győr, Hungary, in the northwest part of the country. It’s an industrial town. And they had to move from place to place within the town when things were getting heated up as far as the anti-Semitism, too. So their life was tumultuous.

My dad also, his dad was a disciplinarian. His dad used to beat him from time to time, especially if he was tardy, and that was sad, and I didn’t remember that about my dad’s life. They loved my dad, my dad’s parents, but he was straight. He taught him a lesson, and back then it was an acceptable form of discipline, and so that’s what it was. They still felt my dad was soft and would have been too soft to go to forced labor camp, or slave labor camp, whatever you want to call it. But my dad toughened up pretty quick.

And after that, once he got to the United States, I think everything else was gravy. Like they say in the movie Platoon, all you have to do is make it out of here, and everything else is all gravy the rest of your life. And so he was just happy to practice medicine, loved it, and like I said, would practice till the day he died if he could, and was just motivated by everything he’d been through.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Robert Wolf. He’s a neuroradiologist, and we’re talking about his book, Not a Real Enemy: The True Story of a Hungarian Jewish Man’s Fight for Freedom. Robert, for my listeners out there, just tell us a quick anecdote to get my readers to really know who your dad was.

Robert J. Wolf: OK, so there are so many, but his escape, the first escape that he had, it’s just riveting. You have to read it. It’s in the middle of the winter. The way people who knew my dad remembered his Hungarian accent, both my mom and dad had heavy accents, but they spoke excellent English. But the way he described his first escape, it’s just astounding. You can picture it, you can feel it. And everything else, the way he would describe a dinner table, you could picture it, you could feel it.

I sent you the excerpt from the Hungarian Revolution, where they were frontliners. My dad was an OB/GYN, but he was also trained in surgery, so he was suddenly a trauma surgeon. Three thousand people died in that war, so it wasn’t nothing. It was just a two-week-and-change war, but three thousand people, countless injured, countless refugees and displaced people. But they were on the front line, and in between all that, my dad still had to do his OB/GYN. So he still had to deliver babies, he still had to treat patients, and my mom ran the blood bank during the Hungarian Revolution.

And of course they escaped soon after, as the walls were closing in on them, and that story was amazing too, the way that my parents finally left the country. That’s one that keeps you riveted. That’s the one that keeps you, and that’s towards the end of the book, of course. In between, the way he ran around, the way he outwitted people, just so many great stories. There will be times you laugh, and there’ll be times you cry, and there are times you’ll have to put the book down, but in the end it’s a meaningful, heartfelt story.

Kevin Pho: Sure. And my final question: For my clinician audience who are thinking of reading your book, tell us one lesson you think that they would come away with after reading the story of your father.

Robert J. Wolf: The instances of racism in general, but anti-Semitism more specifically, are in the backdrop of the whole book. Even early on, they talk about how the Jews were actually respected in Hungary after World War I and into the 20s. The Jews were doing OK until anti-Semitism became more pervasive later in the 20s and into the Great Depression. So as physician leaders, I don’t think there’s any room for racism or anti-Semitism in our profession.

I learned in medical school, way back in the day, one person said, “You may not like a patient, but you need to acknowledge it and move on and treat them like a patient.” Patients don’t want to be there. They don’t want to be on your angio table. They don’t want to be there getting that barium enema or that upper GI. So if you don’t like a patient, move on. It’s the same with racism, anti-Semitism. I don’t think there’s any place for that in medicine.

And my dad had a partner, actually, who was pretty racist and anti-Semitic, but he liked my dad, ironically. The guy, his doctor friend, didn’t even like me, but he liked my dad. That’s how good my dad was. But I think that’s a big point for physicians, that we as leaders need to keep the voice going. With the rise of anti-Semitism, and unfortunately racism in general, as physician leaders we need to keep the voice going and tell people. Tell people about this book, tell people about Anne Frank’s diary, tell people about Schindler’s List, tell people about what really happened. Don’t deny it. Agree with it, listen to the history, listen to what people are telling us. Let’s not let history repeat itself.

The other thing for physicians, if you’re tired of medicine, as you well know, or not necessarily tired of it, but you want to pivot, in other words (it’s been overused, so I’ll say change vector), writing is a great way to do it. In my case, it was writing, rewriting my dad’s story, but some people are musicians, some people want to write a play. Follow your passion, and don’t let people discourage you, and the more they do, the more you should be motivated to do a good job and prove them wrong. Or, if you can afford it, go part-time. Don’t make medicine your entire life, is another lesson that I would give, and it’s what I tell the med students and the residents. There’s no substitute for experience.

And as a writer, boy, have I learned a lot the last four years. Every day I’m learning something, and it’s a whole different vector. It’s a completely different animal. I love it. It’s a labor of love, it’s an adventure, and hopefully we’re just getting going.

Kevin Pho: Robert, thank you so much for sharing your time and insight. Thanks again for being on the show.

Robert J. Wolf: Thanks, Kevin. Appreciate it very much. Thank you.

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