Tag: World War Two
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Body heat: September 1944
Winona WendthLancaster, Massachusetts, United States I traveled up to Terezin against my will. My writing instructor had made the assignment. “Just write down what you see,” he said at nine in the morning while we squeezed into the aisle of a public bus headed out from Prague. The vehicle was packed with dozens of laborers…
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Mentally ill and Jewish in World War II
Mary SeemanToronto, Canada Introduction In 1928, my grandfather was admitted to the Clinic for Psychiatry and Nervous Diseases in Vienna for a recurrence of the manic-depressive illness he had suffered from since youth. The clinic director was Julius Wagner-Jauregg who one year earlier had been awarded the Nobel Prize for fever treatment of third stage…
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Fool the Axis
Kelley YuanMemphis, Tennessee, United States Before the advent of penicillin in 1928, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) had plagued armies in the field for centuries. In World War I alone, syphilis and gonorrhea resulted in the discharge of more than ten thousand American soldiers and consumed seven million person-days from the war.1 In World War II…
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Peleliu as a paradigm for PTSD: The two thousand yard stare
Gregory RuteckiCleveland, Ohio, United States “I noticed a tattered marine…staring stiffly at nothing. His mind had crumbled in battle…his eyes were like two black empty holes in his head…Last evening he came down out of the hills. Told to get some sleep, he found a shell crater and slumped into it…First light has given his…
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Justice denied: The Katyn massacre, Kosciusko squadron, and the Polish soul
Gregory RuteckiOhio, United States “The Nazi terror intensified…Poland became the home of humanity’s Holocaust, an archipelago of death-factories…executions…and exterminations which surpassed anything…in…history.”1 —Davies “Germany…killed the prey (Poland)…Russia will seize that part of the carcass…Germany cannot use. It will play the…role of hyena to the German lion.”2 “I…order to kill without mercy men, women and children…
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Medics in World War II
Selection from Citizen Soldiers by Stephen E. Ambrose “Bravest man I ever saw . . . he came running right through the machine gun fire and put a tourniquet on my arm,” recounted an infantry man hit by a bullet that ripped right through his right upper arm. The medic got hit by the concussion…
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A writer and a doctor: What a physician’s account of Auschwitz can teach us about the ethics of story-telling in medicine
Christine HennebergSan Francisco, California, United States In writing this work I am not aiming for any literary success. When I lived through these horrors, which were beyond all imagining, I was not a writer but a doctor. Today, in telling about them, I write not as a reporter but as a doctor.1 The opening “declaration”…
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Lest we forget
Bradeigh GodfreySalt Lake City, Utah, United States “I’ve always hated the Germans,” he said to the medical student standing next to me. He was approaching 80 years old, too young to have served in World War II. Besides, he had a slight accent that the student had correctly identified as Dutch. It was unusual for…
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A memorable veteran
Anthony PapagiannisThessaloniki, Greece It was nine o’clock on a Monday morning and this was my last outpatient clinic. By the end of the week I would be finishing my hospital duties and return home after several years of training in Britain. The first patient that day was a very pleasant seventy-five-year old man who walked…
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A battered soul rebels
Anonymous As a maturing poet I have recently noticed my work has themes of redemption. I surmise this stems from the fact that both my parents are mentally ill from the effects of war and I was an abused child. My mother suffers from PTSD/paranoia, my father suffers from PTSD/intermittent explosive disorder, and I was…