By Sandor Slomovits
Some years ago, I read about a study which concluded that one of the main factors in instances of heroic action is a feeling of competence. In other words, the man or woman who runs into rough surf to rescue a struggling swimmer or jumps into an icy lake to pull out a child who has fallen through the ice acts partly out of a sense of confidence about their ability to swim. There are, of course, additional factors. There is the essential one, even if merely accidental or coincidental, of being in the right place at the right time. But, even more important, is having a strong capacity for compassion, and for courage, the ability to set aside fear and act, despite danger and risk.
Heroism comes in all shades of valor, and every type exemplifies these factors and likely others. Examples abound: the soldier who braves enemy fire to rescue a wounded friend, the whistleblower who risks her career to expose unsafe working conditions, the fireman who enters a burning building, the policewoman who engages an active shooter, the teenaged girl who speaks up when she sees her friend’s bruises, the fourth grader who intervenes to stop a class bully….
Two recent obituaries in the news especially caught my eye because they centered on their subjects’ compassion, competence, and courage, but also because I felt a particularly personal connection to their stories.
Peter Buxtun died in May at the age of 86. His moment of glory came over fifty years ago when, as an epidemiologist working for the U.S. Public Health Service, he leaked documents exposing the Tuskegee Syphilis Study to Jean Heller, a journalist at The Washington Post. (The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male was conducted, from 1932 to 1972, by the U.S. Public Health Service and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The study monitored the progression of syphilis in hundreds of Black men who were left untreated even after the advent of penicillin.) Shortly after Buxtun began working for the PHS, he tried several times to shut down the blatantly immoral study by reporting it to his superiors, but they repeatedly disregarded his concerns. After trying to work through appropriate internal channels at the Public Health Service, Buxtun finally risked his career and reputation and went to the media to end the study and secure justice for the participants.
Buxtun’s persistence was likely spurred by all the factors leading to heroic actions that I listed above, and perhaps a unique additional one. There was something in his past that impelled him to act.
Born in 1937 to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother in the Czech Republic, Buxtun’s family emigrated to the US before WWII due to rising Nazi antisemitism. Growing up, Buxtun frequently heard tales about the Holocaust from family members. So, when he came across the details of the profoundly unethical and depraved Tuskegee study, Buxtun was immediately reminded of the barbaric medical experiments Nazi doctors performed on Jews and other people in concentration camps. "I didn't want to believe it. This was the U.S. Public Health Service. We didn't do things like that."
I understand Buxtun’s reaction. Although I have never been tested like Buxtun, like him, I too view the world through lens focused and tinted by the Holocaust experiences of my parents and other family members. His story reminded me of one my mother told me.
On December 4, 1944, her 26th birthday, my mother, Blanka, along with her older sister, Anci, and hundreds of other Jews were marched at gunpoint from the Budapest ghetto in which they had been forced to live for the previous few months. The long line of people snaked along Budapest streets toward the railroad station. My mother, noticing that they were being relatively lightly guarded, mostly by Nyilas thugs (Hungarian fascists assisting the Nazis), began suggesting to her sister that they sneak out of the line, duck into a doorway, and then make their way to her mother-in-law to be, who was herself hiding in a nearby house. Anci balked, “No, they’ll see us and shoot us.” My mother could not abandon her sister, which is how they, along with hundreds of other Jewish women, came to be shoved into cattle cars and shipped to Germany.
After a horrendous six-day trip, they arrived in the Ravensbrück concentration camp on December 10. The winter of 1944-45 was an especially harsh one in Europe. (In Budapest, the Danube froze over for the first time in decades.) The inmates of Ravensbrück, all women, many of them housed only in large tents, suffered terribly. Perhaps chief among their many miseries were the daily appells, the roll calls: the women were forced to stand outside on the appellplatz in flimsy clothes in bitter December weather while the Nazis counted them. The guards strutted in their tall black leather boots, the women stood in the huge wooden shoes they’d been issued. Their feet were always blistered and bleeding. If, after one count the numbers were not right, the guards would count again—and again.
There were also the daily selections. After the appells, lines of women were sent to various kinds of labor. At times—they never knew when—some lines would disappear. My mother and her sister tried to always stay together, but one day in mid-January, they were sorted into different lines. My mother hissed to her sister, Anci, “Come here! With me!” Anci stood frozen, “No. They’ll shoot me.” It was—as they well knew from their month in Ravensbrück—not an unfounded fear. Despite that, my mother was no longer willing to ignore her instincts the way she had in Budapest. She grabbed Anci’s arm and yanked her into her own line. That group, 700 women in total, were shipped, again in cattle cars, to Penig, to labor in an airplane parts factory for the remainder of the war.
Penig, a small town near Leipzig, and the site of one of the subcamps of Buchenwald was worlds away from heaven on earth—to put it mildly—but, nevertheless, was still a few degrees less hellish than Ravensbrück. My mother’s quick, courageous action may have saved both their lives. They managed to stay together for the rest of the war and made it back to Budapest in July of 1945.
The other obituary that got my attention recently was that of Dr. J. Robin Warren, who died in July at the age of 87. Dr. Warren was an Australian pathologist who in 2005, along with his colleague, Dr. Barry Marshall, received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering that stomach ulcers were caused by the bacterium Helicobacter pylori and not—as had long been believed—stress, alcohol, or spicy foods. Drs. Warren and Marshall’s work gave the lie to centuries of accepted wisdom about the cause of ulcers. “The standard teaching in medicine was that the stomach was sterile, and nothing grew there because of corrosive gastric juices,” Dr. Warren said years later. “So, everybody believed there were no bacteria in the stomach. When I said they were there, no one believed it.”
I was particularly drawn to Dr. Warren’s story because of my own long history with stomach ulcers. I began struggling with ulcers in 1966 just before I turned eighteen. At the time, I was given the same advice and treatment as all patients. I was told to chug bottles of Gelusil, drink lots of milk (turns out, exactly the wrong thing to do), abstain from spicy foods and alcohol, and try to avoid stress. Despite all that, by the time Drs. Warren and Marshall first published their findings in 1984, I’d already been hospitalized three times with bleeding ulcers and had suffered frequent recurring bouts of painful, exhausting gastritis.Coincidence, Compassion, Competence, and Courage
Ten years passed before Drs. Warren and Marshall’s discovery became widely accepted by doctors. That’s when my own doctor first heard of it, in 1994, and asked me if I’d ever been tested for H. Pylori. Sure enough, a simple breath test confirmed that I was infected with the bacteria, and once I was treated with a brief course of antibiotics, I was, and am, free of the disease.
“He was uninfluenced by other people’s opinions,” Dr. Marshall said about Dr. Warren, remembering how doctors laughed at their attempts to prove H. Pylori caused ulcers. “As far as he was concerned, that was the fact. If you didn’t believe it, it was because you were just incompetent or something.”
As I write this now, in September of 2024, there are ongoing wars in the Middle East, Ukraine, and Sudan among other armed conflicts raging in many parts of the globe. There are humanitarian crises in South America, particularly in Venezuela, and immigration tragedies at our southern border, in Europe, Africa, and elsewhere. They all offer innumerable past examples—and future occasions—for bravery or cowardice, for selfless or selfish, for humane or inhumane, for life affirming or death dealing actions.
In the past eight years, there have been a great many events in America that called for courageous action, and countless people in our country’s political system have behaved honorably, often at considerable risk to their reputations, careers and, not infrequently, their very lives.
If history serves as any guide, no matter what happens on November 5, I am certain there will be many more such opportunities—nay, essential obligations—for similarly courageous action.
Drs. Warren and Marshall were surely not expecting to win the Nobel Prize when they tried for years to convince doctors to take their discovery seriously. And despite their enormous impact on countless lives, including mine, I had never heard of them until this year. Similarly, it’s very unlikely that Peter Buxtun was seeking fame when he spoke out. And, while by now many people have heard of the Tuskegee study, relatively few remember Peter Buxtun’s name.
After my mother told me of pulling her sister to safety, she brushed aside my praise of her bravery. “I didn’t know which was the good line or the bad. I just wanted us to stay together.”
None of them—nor any of the public servants who behaved so honorably and courageously in America in the past eight years—anticipated the enormous effects of their selfless decisions—effects that are still playing out.
The Jewish sages famously said, “If you save a life, it is as if you’ve saved the world.”To Dr. Warren, Peter Buxtun, the dauntless public servants, and above all, to my mother, I say, “You saved lives. Thank you.”
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Some years ago, I read about a study which concluded that one of the main factors in instances of heroic action is a feeling of competence. In other words, the man or woman who runs into rough surf to rescue a struggling swimmer or jumps into an icy lake to pull out a child who has fallen through the ice acts partly out of a sense of confidence about their ability to swim. There are, of course, additional factors. There is the essential one, even if merely accidental or coincidental, of being in the right place at the right time. But, even more important, is having a strong capacity for compassion, and for courage, the ability to set aside fear and act, despite danger and risk.