Dr. Robert Fisch

I'm going to take the rest of the day off from holding Nick Coleman's feet in the fire. He covered some familiar, and worthwhile, ground yesterday.

His Sunday column dealt with Dr. Robert Fisch. He's been a pediatrician in the Twin Cities, it seems, since dinosaurs roamed the earth. He was the pediatrician to both of my children; he was a wonderful doctor, a kind-hearted man with boundless patience for new parents' endless nervous questions.

And, as I learned about the time my youngest was getting potty-trained, he was a Holocaust survivor. I wrote about Fisch myself, about six months ago, when Doug Grow covered Fisch's story.

Coleman:

Robert Fisch is almost 80, a retired pediatrician with a gentle face, a firm physician's hand and a younger man's thick shock of hair. These days, he is busy talking to young people about his experiences in the Nazi Holocaust.

It left him "tattooed on the inside," and he still suffers from nightly nightmares. But his purpose is not to tell coming generations about the inhumanity of World War II. He wants to be sure they know about the humanity that survived the camps.

You can learn about the Holocaust by reading a book or watching a movie, he says. But he is a physician, and he is supposed to help heal. And that requires an understanding of the price of being fully human in a world where evil sometimes holds sway

Fisch has always been an amazing storyteller:

Of all his experiences as an 18-year-old Jew caught up in the Holocaust, the one that is most inspiring to him is the story of a few Russian soldiers whose lives were saved by German civilians after they escaped from the prison where Fisch was held.

About 2,000 Russians tried to escape. Most died at the prison wall, too weak to survive an 18-foot drop to the ground or machine-gunned by guards. Those who made it to a nearby village desperately sought help from frightened Germans whose men were at war, fighting people just like the ones at the door.

Everyone knew that Germans who helped the escapees would be shot.

"There is a knock at your door, and standing in front of you is a filthy, lice-infested person who is the same kind of person you are fighting against," Fisch says, talking to a class of students at the University of St. Thomas. "This person says, 'Help me!'

"Well? What do you do? You have to burn his clothes and bathe him and feed him and hide him. And if the German soldiers find him, you will be shot, along with your whole family.

"I must tell you that I am not sure I could do this for my friend, let alone risk my child. And this is not my friend, but my enemy. But guess what? Eight Russians were saved in that way.

"To me, that is the most amazing thing I know."

Perhaps more amazing is that Dr. Fisch is able to tell his stories to a new generation that desperately needs to know them.

Posted by Mitch at April 25, 2005 12:51 PM | TrackBack