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EmailThe Return of the Auschwitz Nightmare
Jan Wong
Toronto
Reprinted from the Globe and Mail, Canada
Saturday, September 21, 2002 – Print Edition, Page A1
TORONTO -- One elderly woman is terrified of showers. Then there are those who hide crusts of bread in their rooms, even though that's against the rules.
"You know what? Let them hoard," said Cindy Gabriel, a health-care aide at one of the country's most unusual old-aged homes.
"If that is their way of dealing with it, let them."
"It" is the Holocaust. More than 300,000 Canadians have Alzheimer's disease or other age-related dementia. At Baycrest's Apotex Centre, Jewish Home for the Aged in Toronto, 50 per cent of patients with dementia are Holocaust Survivors for whom the loss of short-term memory condemns them, once again, to the death camps.
"For those that don't have a present any more, their past is their present," said Dr. Michael Gordon, a gerontologist and Baycrest vice-president for medical services. "In the past 10 years, we are more and more involved with patients for whom the Holocaust has resurged in their consciousness. The most dramatic are those who managed to compartmentalize their experience. As they develop Alzheimer's or dementia, the Holocaust absolutely dominates their lives."
So the dental clinic has no gas. No one lines up for flu shots. At night, the staff avoids using flashlights. And one administrator with a brisk, efficient walk and a penchant for block-heeled shoes stopped wearing them after one patient mistook her for a Nazi.
Baycrest has showers, but the staff is sensitive. "Some are very frightened of a shower. Then you say, 'Can we go and have a bodn?' " said Ms. Gabriel, using the Yiddish word for bath.
The Chinese cherish their elderly. They also value education. But neither Mon Sheong or Yee Hong, Toronto's two old-age homes for Chinese, has a research centre. Ditto Villa Colombo, for Italian-Canadians, and Suomi Koti Home, for Finnish-Canadians. Baycrest is the country's only geriatric facility with a teaching hospital and on-site research centre.
"Baycrest is unique in focusing on aging," said Dr. Paula Rochon, a Baycrest scientist who specializes in the impact of textbook doses of medicine on the elderly.
Is it coincidence that research and Jewish old-age homes exist side by side? Some say not, citing centuries of discrimination.
Dr. David Streiner, director of Baycrest's Kunin-Lunenfeld Applied Research Unit, pointed to the Diaspora. "It's the one transportable thing when you're kicked out of a country: brains."
At Baycrest, 140 people work in two research units: Dr. Streiner's, which specializes in applied research, and the Rotman Research Institute, which engages in pure research. Dr. Donald Stuss, the Rotman's founding director and a former neuroscientist at the University of Ottawa, is studying memory, emotion and cognitive impact, research that could benefit anyone with a traumatic past. As victims of rape, incest or violence develop age-related dementia, they, too, will be trapped in unspeakable memories.
"We're often perceived as the Jewish old-age home on Bathurst," said Mark Gryfe, president of the Baycrest foundation.
"But what's important is sharing what we know about Alzheimer's and dementia and aging with the world. The work we're doing is universal."
As a country of immigrants, Canada needs such research. Many newcomers have survived political oppression, extreme poverty, war and ethnic cleansing. Many could end up reverting to their mother tongues and reliving their traumas.
"It's not just an issue for Jewish Holocaust Survivors," said Dr. Gordon, the gerontologist, whose first wife's family died in Germany and whose second wife's family are Survivors. "Our experience can be used for others who have comparable genocidal experiences, people who have watched their brothers murdered or their sisters raped."
Researchers estimate that 40 per cent of people will develop some form of dementia by age 80. As the population ages, the numbers of Canadians with serious brain-related disorders will triple over the next 30 years. Even baby boomers with happy-go-lucky childhoods will need help.
Whenever Chaya Vilenski would spy a half-eaten bun on the sidewalk in Toronto, she always picked it up. Food, or the lack of it, indelibly marked her life.
After the Germans invaded Lithuania in 1941, her one-year-old daughter, Miriam, starved to death in the Kaunas ghetto. Her husband died there, too. But Mrs. Vilenski was too healthy, so the Nazis forced her into slave labour.
"She was chosen to stay alive because she was healthy. She said they were always looking at her legs. They looked healthy," said Batia Schaffer, 52, the daughter she had after the war, after she married the widower of a cousin who was also killed in the war.
Where once Mrs. Vilenski dug runways at the Kaunas airport, now her legs are weak. A few months ago, she fell and broke her hip. On this day, she is sitting in a wheelchair at Baycrest, elegantly dressed in a blue straw hat and white sweater. Her nails are manicured. She's wearing pink lipstick.
At 88, she suffers from dementia. After all the losses she has suffered, the burning question for her is one of life and death. And so she asks, over and over again, if her brothers and sisters and cousins are alive.
With one exception, every member of her family perished in the Holocaust, not just her husband and their daughter, but her parents, all her cousins and four of her five siblings. One brother was sent to Auschwitz, but managed to escape. He died in California a few years ago. Like him, Mrs. Vilenski was sent to a Polish concentration camp from 1943 to 1945. She nearly died of starvation.
She speaks Russian, Lithuanian, Yiddish and Hebrew, but not English. Through Ms. Schaffer, a retired chemist, who translated, Mrs. Vilenski was asked what the death camp was like for her. She stared at the pastel carpet, and then described the food. "They gave us soup from grass."
Her second husband died of leukemia when Ms. Schaffer, her only living child, was a toddler. After Lithuania became a Soviet republic, Mrs. Vilenski worked in a cigarette factory. Ms. Schaffer said her mother was once caught exchanging stolen cigarettes for food. "I was very scared because they could send you to Siberia."
Mrs. Vilenski stopped stealing for a month. "And then she started again, because we couldn't survive," Ms. Schaffer said. "Food was very important in my mother's life. My mom was always shovelling food into me."
After waiting years for an exit visa, mother and daughter emigrated to Israel. In the late 1970s, they came to Canada. Even after Ms. Schaffer married and had a daughter of her own, they always lived together until Mrs. Vilenski moved into Baycrest a year ago.
At lunch time, Ms. Schaffer wheeled her mother into a dining room bright with natural light. The daughter hovered, but her mother didn't appear to need help. Although Ms. Schaffer said Mrs. Vilenski's appetite was a bit off after she broke her hip, she ate steadily, wordlessly. First she polished off a green salad, then a bowl of potato soup, then a plate of gefilte fish. She left nothing on her plate. Dessert was a dish of peaches, washed down with a container of apple juice and a cup of hot tea.
"You can ask her what she ate five minutes ago, and she can't remember," Ms. Schaffer said. "But she likes to eat."
During the Second World War, Hitler killed off the very young and very old, saving the fittest, such as Mrs. Vilenski, for slave labour. Now, 60 years after the first Jews were shipped to concentration camps, the Survivors are in their 70s, 80s and 90s. Baycrest has 13 centenarians, all female.
These Holocaust Survivors, who lost immediate and extended families, never lived with aging parents themselves. Their adult children, who grew up without grandparents, are also experiencing aging for the first time. Like Batia Schaffer, these children are often especially devoted and protective. "But their kids can't protect them from old age," said Paula David, the Holocaust Research Project co-ordinator.
The children do their best. They can't prevent their parents hearing the sirens on Bathurst Street, but when someone noticed barbed wire around a nearby construction site, he asked the company to take it down, and it did.
In the death camps, inmates were called by number. One Survivor reported sleeping on a wooden shelf with 14 others. "If one rolled over, they all had to roll over," Ms. David said. So the old-age home avoids looking institutional. Its dining rooms are intimate. Nursing stations look like condo kitchens, with coffee makers and well-stocked refrigerators. Every resident has a private room, with en suite sink and toilet.
Outside each resident's door is a display case for photos, chatchkas, even golf trophies. In Mrs. Vilenski's is her only photo -- a torn one -- of herself and her second husband. The displays remind everyone that these people once had independent lives. They also help the residents find their way back to the right room.
With 1,110 beds, Baycrest is one of the largest facilities in the world. In addition to the 472-bed old-age home designated for Jews, there is a rehabilitation hospital, palliative-care unit, adult daycare and assisted-living apartments open to all ethnic and religious groups. Baycrest also has the largest kosher kitchen in Canada, a barbershop, a hair salon, a library, a museum of Jewish heritage and four on-site synagogues, including one without built-in pews because almost everyone comes in a wheelchair.
Donated art, $7-million worth, is used as markers to help residents (and visitors) get around. There are Stieglitz photographs, Frank Stella paintings and Chinese scrolls. Original Warhol silk-screens from his 1980 series, The Ten Portraits of Jews in the 20th Century, occupy a corner near a public washroom. Baycrest owns six of them: Martin Buber, Sigmund Freud, George Gershwin, Gertrude Stein and Franz Kafka.
"It's an art gallery with a couple of patients thrown in to make it look legit," Dr. Streiner joked. The old-age home has a seven-storey atrium of Jerusalem limestone, planted with olive trees. Two squawking parrots named Rhett and Scarlett exclaim, "Oy vey!" in a giant aviary. Merchants in the main hallway sell clothing, shoes and used books to patients in wheelchairs. A huge saltwater aquarium faces the elevators, which have exposed cables so residents can observe them swinging up and down.
"It's all about life, to see living things all the time, to see the hustle and bustle," said Fran Sonshine, the foundation chairwoman, whose parents and in-laws were Holocaust Survivors.
In Jewish culture, the drinking toast is L'chaim, which means "To life." So when patients deteriorate, there is zero debate on physician-assisted suicide. "It will never arise here," Dr. Streiner said. "Orthodox Judaism believes life is a gift from God. Suicide has connotations, like, we've lost another Jew in the world prematurely. There's the feeling, they tried to wipe us out."
Patients here are sometimes reluctant to report pain. "In the war, the first people to be murdered were the sick and vulnerable," Ms. David said. "In the camps, if you got sick, you died."
So staff is alert for unreported symptoms. And they are careful when taking medical histories. For someone who has lost everyone, routine questions can trigger sadness, such as: "Does breast cancer run in your family?"
On a floor of patients with dementia, Joseph Jurman, a retired accountant, sits quietly with his wife. Diana Jurman, 82, has Alzheimer's disease. Mr. Jurman, 88, visits her every morning. They met in Palestine, where her family had fled from Russia. "She was a wonderful girl. She gave me a home. We were very dedicated to each other."
Mrs. Jurman, who is slumped in a wheelchair, is impeccably dressed. Mr. Jurman always chooses her clothes, on this occasion a flowered green dress with a matching gauze jacket.
On many days, Mrs. Jurman is restless and gets lost. But if she is locked in her past, no one knows. Two years ago, she lost the ability to speak. "Now I can only read her eyes," he said.
Like Mrs. Vilenski, whose infant daughter starved to death, many here cannot adjust to abundance. One patient refused to take Ensure, the canned liquid supplement, until a rabbi fetched several cases from the kitchen to show her there was plenty.
"Hoarding is a real issue," Dr. Gordon said. "They will always take what's left over and put in the drawer. The cockroaches love it, it smells, but confrontation doesn't get you anywhere. You just say: Check Mrs. Greenberg's bedside table for bagels."
Still, Baycrest's staff has learned not to make assumptions. While some patients fear showers, others object to baths. For them, baths evoke Nazi hypothermia experiments of plunging prisoners into freezing water. Or they may bring back memories of being dipped into basins of disinfectant at the death camps.
Ms. David has prepared a staff manual with a brief history of the Holocaust and vocabulary lists in phonetic Hungarian, Russian and Yiddish. Baycrest offers free Yiddish lessons to staff whose ethnic backgrounds reflect Toronto's multicultural mix. We have staff from all over the world, some escaping their own oppression," she said. "A lot of immigrants can give extremely compassionate care. It's immigrant to immigrant."