Exonian Profiles
|
Dr. William McDermott ’34: A Different Kind of Reunion
Dr. William McDermott ’34 entered Ebensee concentration camp with the U.S. Third Army’s medical corps, and the horrors that he found there forever claimed a part of his soul. Among the living dead of the 35,000 skeletal prisoners was Morris Hollander, a Slovakian Jew who had survived Auschwitz and a force 300-mile winter march to Ebensee in Austria, where he spent the last months of the war digging rocks. The two men crossed paths without meeting during the chaos that surrounded the liberation of the camp but discovered each other in Boston. The reunion was sparked by the publication of A Surgeon in Combat, McDermott’s memoir of his war experiences with a mobile surgical unit in Europe. McDermott’s 30th Field Hospital, staffed with a half-dozen physicians entered Ebensee on May 10, 1945, two days after the German surrendered. Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby excerpted part of the book for a column because Jacoby’s father had been among the prisoners in the camp. Hollander was another. Hollander, a 72-year-old retired electronics technician from Watertown, telephoned McDermott after reading the column. McDermott suggested they meet over lunch at the Harvard Club. Hollander was 18 in 1944 when he and his family were exported to Auschwitz in southern Poland. Within a year, the Germans murdered his father, mother, two sisters, and two brothers. “After just a few hours in the camp, you found yourself wondering on just what basis man sets himself up to be above the level of the so-called lower animals,” McDermott wrote. When he saw bodies stacked to ceilings outside crematoriums that couldn’t handle the demand, McDermott was unable to hold back his tears. He spent 10 days at Ebensee camp until more extensive supplies and staff arrived. Some 85 percent of the survivors had tuberculosis. Men died of infections while standing in a line waiting for treatment. A month later, Hollander was offered a spot in a Swiss hospital, but he chose to return to his village of Vysni Remety, where he found few survivors. Eventually, he married, immigrating to the United States in 1967. Excerpted from The Boston Globe. Reprinted with permission. |
