Victor Penzer

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Victor Penzer (18 July 1919–29 December 1999; also: Wiktor Penzer, Jósef Czarski) was a Polish-Jewish resistance fighter during World War II and an inmate of Auschwitz and other concentration camps. He later became a physician, dentist and humanitarian in the United States.

Biography

Family, youth and education

Victor was born as the second child of a bourgeois liberal Jewish merchant family in Kraków, Poland. His mother, Rosalia Feldblum, came from an old Jewish family in Kraków and his father, Józef Pencier, came from Jasło. While his brother Edward had to go to Palermo, Italy, to study medicine due to the restrictive clauses for Jewish students in Poland, Victor was admitted to the medical faculty of the Jagiellonian University of Kraków in autumn 1937 and studied medicine for two years.

Refuge and resistance during WWII

With the German occupation of Poland, the university was closed down and Penzer fled east on September 4, 1939, to the demarcation line (Curzon Line) where the Soviet Army had already arrived and arrested him. He escaped to Lwow. He could not resume his studies there and tried to return to Kraków. He fell into German hands on December 31, 1939, but again escaped. He was able to get forged documents from the family of a deceased classmate and assumed the "Aryan" identity of "Józef Czarski" . He was involved in the resistance movement and operated as an independent agent, doing his best to procure false papers, both for Polish Catholics and Polish Jews. Thus, he led a double life in the resistance and under his real name he continued working in his father's former business. When the Kraków Ghetto was set up in 1941, his mother moved to her mother-in-law to Jasło to escape the ghetto, hoping to be safe in the country. Victor went into hiding and witnessed the mass murders and Nazi atrocities. He was not believed, not even by the Jewish communities, and his reports were considered propaganda. By providing them with "Aryan" papers from Poles who were either dead or went underground he was able to send Jews as foreign workers to Germany.

In February 1943, Penzer was arrested. To avoid betraying anyone under torture he attempted suicide, was shortly able to escape but then arrested again. After a month of interrogation, and with the help of a former classmate who advised him to confess his own Jewish identity to avoid being liquidated on the spot he came to Auschwitz by truck with other prisoners on March 14, 1943. Together with a transport of around 2,000 Jewish men, children and women from the Kraków Ghetto B on March 13, 1943, he was subjected to the selection; 484 men were admitted to the camp, 1492 people were killed in the gas chambers of Crematorium II. He was tattooed with the prisoner number 108268. Initially he was assigned to a forced work squad. Emaciated and exhausted he contracted typhus which finally helped him to get an office job in the camp hospital in September 1943 where he had to work under a prisoner doctor, the Polish colonel Dr. Roman (Zenon) Zenkteller, who was known among the inmates to be particularly brutal with the Jewish, and the benevolent Dr. Naum Wortman. He owes his survival to many happy coincidences. After the evacuation of Auschwitz Penzer survived the death march and finally arrived in the Mauthausen concentration camp, prisoner no. 119164. At a point of death by starvation, Victor was liberated on May 5, 1945 by the 71st Division, 5th Regiment of the 3rd American Army.

Resumption of of his studies and marriage

First he found shelter in the women hospital of Wels. As ist seemed impossible to return to Poland then under Soviet occupation he tried to resume his medical studies. At the Ebensee Camp for Jewish displaced persons he heard that the university would open in Innsbruck. Nearby the “Wiesenhof”, Gnadenwald, a former Jewish-owned hotel, was set up as a transit camp for immigration to Israel. There he met his future wife, Stella Sławin (September 9, 1921 – August 7, 2018) who also came from Poland, and had lost her family, killed by the Nazis. . Victor decided to transfer to Ludwig Maximillian University in Munich to be closer to his brother Edek (Edward), who was a doctor in the Föhrenwald DP camp near Wolfratshausen. Edward had studied medicine in Palermo, Italy before the war. “Aryanized” with his wife as siblings through forged papers, they had survived the war in Germany near Berlin as Polish foreign workers. They were able to emigrate to the United States, where Edward already worked as a psychiatrist in New Jersey under the name Panzer. He never corrected the spelling mistake. In 1957, he became chief psychiatrist at the Middlesex County Health Clinic. Stella rejoined Victor in Munich where they married on October 31, 1946. In summer 1948 he was able to pass the state dental exam in Munich. He then did his doctorate at the hygienic institute under Karl Kisskalt.

Emigration to the US

In 1949, Victor got a position at a dental clinic in Ulm, Stella as a nurse. But they did not want to stay in post-war Europe nor go to Palestine where they foresaw unremitting conflicts. When the U.S. American restrictions on refugees were lifted, they were able to emigrate via Augsburg and Bremerhaven to the United States.

Medical career

First, they lived in New York City, Victor working at Mt. Sinai Hospital as an operating room orderly, Stella as a nurse in the maternity ward of Beth Israel Hospital. European credentials as such were not fully recognized, so Victor had to apply to get an American degree. He was admitted at Tufts University Dental School in Boston, so they moved to Boston in fall of 1950 and graduated there with the DMD title. He worked as a dentist, but continued his academic, but also his unorthodox education: pathology at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Washington, public health and immunology at Harvard University, Cambridge MA, acupuncture at the Center for Chinese Medicine, oral myology at the myofunctional Institutes, 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 in journalism and often provocative. He was the editor of Stomatologia Holistica and co-editor of Health Consciousness but also involved in continuing education, both at Tufts and at Boston University, and lectured in many countries. From 1992 to 1995, Penzer was a founding member and teacher at the California Institute for Human Science.

Already as a child Penzer came into contact with alternative healing methods. As early as 1926 he and his family stayed in the famous Priessnitz Sanatorium in Gräfenberg (today Lázně Jeseník, Czechia). In 1978, with other committed dentists, he founded an organization to provide a forum for the development and exchange of health-promoting therapies that should go beyond dental procedures, the Holistic Dental Association. In the early 80th there was an attempt to revoke Penzer's license because he had gone to the public with warnings about mercury amalgams.

In 1986 he retired but continued to work as a consultant at the Lemuel Shattuck Hospital in Boston in Ted Kaptchuks pain clinic for patients with temporal mandibular joint pain.

Political engagement

As the civil rights movement gained momentum, Penzer who himself had experienced racism, identified with Black people and sought out ways to work in solidarity. The Penzer family thus became guest parents during the school shutdown in Prince Edward County, Virginia, they took one of these students, Moses Scott, into their home. Victor Penzer became a great role model for Scott. They took part in a group trip through Eastern Europe sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee and during their stay in Poland visited Auschwitz.

Memberships and Awards

• Editor of Stomatologia Holistica
• Co-Editor of Health Consciousness
• 1992 bis 1995 Co-Founder and Teacher at the California Institute for Human Science
• Dag Hammarskjöld "Pax Mundi" Award

Works and some publications

• Penzer V. Dlaczego? Warum? Why? Jósef Czarski (Pseudonym of Victor Penzer) Primrose Press, Boston 1999.
• Penzer V.: Fixed bridges without soldering. The Journal of Prosthetic Dentistry, 3 (1953)
• Penzer V.: Sudden infant death syndrome: Myo-dynamic dysphagia hypothesis. International Journal of Oral Myology, 1(1975), 114-117
• Penzer V.: Deglutition phobia case study . International Journal of Oral Myology, 2 (1976), 20-21
• Schimmel HW, Penzer V.: Functional Medicine: The Origin and Treatment of Chronic Diseases, Haug, Heidelberg 1997

References

• Nolte S.H.: Schicksal und Wirken des jüdischen Zahnarztes Dr. Victor Penzer: Überzeugungstäter für eine bessere Welt. Zahnärztliche Mitteilungen 112 (2022) p. 54-57

External links

• USC Shoah Foundation Institute testimony of Victor Penzer
• 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.

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