Victor Penzer

Victor Penzer (born July 18, 1919 in Kraków , † December 29, 1999 in Boston ; also: Wiktor Penzer, Jósef Czarski ) was a Polish resistance fighter , prisoner in Auschwitz and other concentration camps , later a doctor , dentist and civil rights activist in the United States of America America .

Life

Family, youth and the start of studies in Poland

Wiktor Penzer was born as the second child into a wealthy and extensive liberal Jewish merchant family. His mother, Rosalia Feldblum, came from Kraków, his father, Józef Pencier, from Jasło , a small town on the edge of the Carpathian Mountains . The original French family name "Pencier" was changed to "Penzer" in 1931. Wiktor attended the fourth state grammar school in Cracow and passed his matriculation examination on May 22, 1937. From the winter semester of 1937 he studied medicine for four semesters at the University of Cracow until the beginning of the Second World War, up to the preliminary medical examination in the summer of 1939.

Escapes, arrests and stays in camps during World War II

The events of the war ended further studies with the closure of the university. With his father and brother Edek, who had studied medicine in Palermo before the war and was already a doctor, he fled east on September 4, 1939 to the demarcation line , to which the Red Army had already advanced. On the retreat towards Warsaw, they were arrested by Russian soldiers and taken to a prisoner-of-war camp in Brest . They managed to escape with their father, who was now sick, and made their way to Lemberg . Victor tried to continue his studies in Lviv, but was turned away, probably because he was Jewish. Out of concern for his mother who was left behind in Krakow and who was exposed to Nazi reprisals, Victor tried to return to the German-occupied part of Poland. Because his brother Edek (Edward) found a job as a doctor near the demarcation line, he accompanied him to Sokal am Bug , the border river. After swimming through the border river, he fell into German hands on December 31, 1939, was able to escape and returned to Krakow.

Because of the prevailing anti-Semitism , he first took the name of a fallen classmate, Marek Winiarski, then the "Aryan" name Józef Czarski, with whom he was involved in the resistance. The father's business was initially closed and then handed over to a German trust. He led a double life: under his real name he was initially able to continue working in his father's business, under the name Josef Czarski in the resistance. In 1941, after the ghetto was established, his mother moved to live with her mother-in-law in Jasło to avoid the ghetto and in the hope of being safe in the country. Victor went into hiding and witnessed the mass murders of the National Socialists, among other things. His reports were not believed, not even by the Jewish communities, who believed them to be atrocity propaganda. With the papers from Poles, which were supposed to be sent to Germany for forced labor but had gone into hiding, Jews could be saved by being sent to Germany as foreign workers.

In February 1943, Penzer was arrested, tried to kill himself in order not to betray himself under torture, was able to escape first and was then arrested again. He would have been murdered if he had not been deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp on March 14, 1943 by a classmate who advised him to confess his Jewish identity . Together with an RSHA transport of around 2000 Jewish men, children and women from Krakow Ghetto B on March 13, 1943, he was subjected to selection ; 484 men were sent to the camp, 1492 people were killed in the gas chambers of Crematorium II . He got the prisoner no. 108268. After initially being assigned to a work detachment, starving, completely exhausted and suffering from typhus , he managed to get into the infirmary as a clerk in September 1943, where he worked under a prisoner doctor, the Polish Colonel Dr. Roman (Zenon) Zenkeneller, who was considered a “Jew eater”, and the well-disposed Dr. Naum Wortman was on duty in Block 31 and only survived by several coincidences. His work and behavior in the camp was judged to be impeccable, he saved fellow prisoners from the selection and helped wherever he could. Penzer survived the death march during the evacuation of Auschwitz and was sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp , where he received prisoner no. 119164 got. Finally he was taken to the subcamps Kommando Wien-West (Saurerwerke), Ebensee and finally Gunskirchen , where he was wounded in the skull and almost starved to death on May 5, 1945 by the 71st Division after a suicidal suicidal attack on himself , 5th Regiment of the Third American Army was liberated.

After 1945: completion of studies, marriage in Innsbruck, doctorate in Munich

Seriously ill, he was admitted to the gynecological clinic in Wels , then to the camp for Jewish “ displaced persons ” in Ebensee . He tried to resume his studies as soon as possible, first in Innsbruck . In the vicinity of Innsbruck the “Wiesenhof” near Gnadenwald , a hotel formerly owned by Jews, was set up as a starting point for immigration to Israel. There he met his future wife, Stella Sławin. They married on October 31, 1946. Stella Sławin Penzer (September 9, 1921 - August 7, 2018) also came from Poland. She and her twin brother Lazar (Lolek) were born in Otwock by Ala Wajnstejn Sławin and Szaja Sławin. After training as a nurse , she was able to flee the Warsaw ghetto and survive "Aryanized" as Sabina Gąsiorowska. The parents were killed by the Nazis and buried in a mass grave on August 19, 1942, the rest of the family was murdered in the Treblinka extermination camp in August 1942 . The twin brother Lolek had been exposed as a Jew and shot by a police spy.

In 1946, Victor and Stella moved to Munich to be closer to Victor's brother Elek, who was a doctor in the Föhrenwald DP camp near Wolfratshausen . "Aryanized" with his wife as siblings through forged papers, they had survived the war in Germany near Berlin as Polish foreign workers. They emigrated to the USA, where Elek worked as a psychiatrist in New Jersey under the name Edward Panzer (strangely enough he never had the spelling corrected) . In 1957 he became chief psychiatrist at the Middlesex County Health Clinic. In the summer of 1948, Penzer was able to take the state examination in dentistry in Munich. He then did his doctorate at the Hygiene Institute under Karl Kißkalt with a thesis "Bacteriological investigations of the Isar water near Munich 1948".

First job in Ulm, emigration and living in the USA

In 1949 the Penzers came to Ulm , where Victor found his first job. Then they moved via Augsburg and Bremerhaven after the admission requirements were relaxed as refugees to the USA. Viktor initially worked as a surgical nurse at Mount Sinai Hospital, New York , because his degrees were not recognized, and Stella worked as an infant nurse at Beth Israel Hospital . After Victor was admitted to Tufts University Dental School in Boston and graduated with a DMD degree, the family settled in the Boston area. There he worked as a dentist until his retirement in 1986.

Private

Victor and Slavin Penzer had three children, the twins Martha Ala Penzer and Daniel Joseph Penzer and Rosita Eve Hopper. Victor was an avid tennis player and president, later honorary member, of the Lakewood Tennis Club. He was also a vegetarian : live and let live was his motto.

Act

Work as a dentist and doctor

Penzer worked as a dentist, but continued his education both academically and unorthodox: in pathology at Walter Reed Army Medical Center , Washington , public health and immunology at Harvard University , Cambridge (Massachusetts) , acupuncture at the Center for Chinese Medicine, oral myology at the Myofunctional Institute, Orthodontics (IGD New York), Myotronics (Myotronics Institute, Seattle), Journalism ( Michigan State University ), Law ( Boston University ) and Bioelectronics ( EAV , BFD, Vega). Since 1954 he was active as a journalist, often provocatively, in specialist journals. He has also been involved in continuing education at both Tufts and Boston University and has lectured in many countries.

Alternative healing methods

As a child, Penzer came into contact with alternative healing methods because he had been with his family in the Prießnitz sanatorium in Graefenberg . Only later did he deal with holistic treatment, which, in addition to hydrotherapy, included aspects of nutrition, exercise, art and music, relaxation and psychotherapy. In 1978 he and other committed dentists founded an organization that was supposed to provide a forum for the development and exchange of health-promoting therapies that went beyond dental interventions, the "Holistic Dental Association".

Before Penzer retired, there was an attempt to revoke his license to practice medicine because he had campaigned against amalgam fillings : the Massachusetts Dental Association, which has brought charges against Penzer, feared it and the American Dental Association of class actions would be overdone if amalgam fillings were proven to cause dementia and other neurodegenerative diseases. The doctor and dentist Esther (Tinka) Kerner (1906-2004), a fellow student of Victor at the Tufts Dental School, was able to convince Penzer to forestall the withdrawal of his license to practice medicine by voluntarily giving up his license and withdrawing from dentistry. He only continues to work as a consultant, including at Ted Kaptchuk's pain clinic at the Lemuel Shattuck Hospital in Boston. Ted Kaptchuk reports about him: Victor Penzer was a remarkable man and an important mentor for me. He often spoke to me about Auschwitz. My favorite story he told me was that the Auschwitz guards sometimes gave him an aspirin pill. He dissolved them in a bucket of water and gave it to the patients, teaspoons at a time. He taught us to be a healer, that one can always help a sick person. When he retired, he volunteered at the pain clinic I run and examined patients for pain in the temporomandibular joint. He never really treated her because we didn't have the right equipment. I was the director of the clinic. The patients kept asking me whether the old doctor could treat them again because he had helped them so well. They thought Victor's exam was treatment. Sometimes I would just ask Victor to speak to them again. It was a healing experience to be with Victor.

Political commitment

The Penzers had learned from their fates, to fight for equality , civil rights , the disarmament of nuclear weapons , minority protection , environmental protection , peace and reconciliation and became active pacifists and civil rights activists . When public schools were simply closed and white students were enrolled in private schools because of the desegregation in US schools in parts of Virginia , an educational miserable erupted that caused the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) to move children to school elsewhere to send. The Penzers also make themselves available as host parents. They took student Moses Scott into their home and it is said that they moved from their bedroom to the basement to give him the best room in the house. Within a year a lifelong association of these victims of very diverse forms of racial prejudice developed. Victor Penzer became a great role model for Scott. They took part in a group tour through Eastern Europe sponsored by the AFSC and during their stay in Poland also visited Auschwitz as the most extreme memorial to the consequences of racist prejudice. Moses Scott later achieved success, graduating from Howard University and completing his MBA from Harvard Business School . After a 30-year career at IBM and AT&T , introducing voicemail in the 1980s , he turned to senior citizens and opened a home care facility "Right at Home" in Essex County . He had four children and one grandchild and stayed in contact with the Penzer family until he died on March 8, 2017 at the age of 74.

Voluntary work and memberships

• Editor of "Stomatologia Holistica",
• Co-editor of "Health Consciousness"
• From 1992 to 1995 Penzer was a founding member and teacher at the California Institute for Human Science
• Dag Hammarskjöld “Pax Mundi” Award

Works

• Bacteriological investigations of the Isar water near Munich , dissertation at the University of Munich, Munich 1948.
• Dlaczego? Why? Why? Józef Czarski (pseudonym of Victor Penzer) Primrose Press, Boston 1999.
• Functional Medicine: The Origin and Treatment of Chronic Diseases Schimmel HW, Penzer V. Haug Verlag, Heidelberg 1997
• Medicine USA, in the 1990s Penzer V: in: Pixley, Charles (Ed.) Do no harm. 714x-defying a hopeless prognosis.

Literature and web links

• USC Shoah Foundation Institute testimony of Victor Penzer. [1] [2]

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Herman Richard Casdorph: Toxic Metal Syndrome: how metal poisoning can affect your brain. Morton Walker. Avery 1994.
2. ↑ Ted Kaptschuk, personal communication from July 17, 2019
3. ↑ Jill Ogline Titus: Brown's Battleground: Students, segregation fans who don & the Struggle for Justice in Prince Edward County, Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
4. ^ The interview with Viktor Penzer was conducted on July 31, 1991, by One Generation After, a Boston-based group of children of Holocaust survivors, for the One Generation After oral history project, Boston 1991