The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World by Johnathan Freedland 326pg

 

This is the most important holocaust book that I have read   26/2/24

 2000 The author  realized that Rudolf Vrba's first wife  Gerta lived in London  she was aged 93. She gave him a pile of letters  from Walter Rosenberg (born 1924). His 2nd wife the widow Robin was in New York and talked to him about the post war man she was married to.

The head of the Slovakian government head was Catholic priest Father Jozef Tiso, the state religion of this infant republic was Nazism The Jewish community was 89,000  Slovakia had gained autonomy in December 1938 under the Nazis. 

The Hlinka Guard were Slovakia's state police and most willingly helped Hitler with his plans. It operated against Jews, Czechs, Hungarians,

Walter Rosenberg and his mother moved to Trnava 30 km from Bratislava  a town that smelt from the sugar beet factory. He though he could join Josip Titos partisan's in Yugoslavia.

For every Jew deported Bratislava handed Berlin 500 Reichsmarks officially to cover the costs. 

When Walter was eventually caught youth his age had been deported early so that they could not cause trouble now it was adults with children. At Zwardon the Slovakian, Polish border the Hlinka Guards handed them over to SS Nazi's who now took charge. At Lublin they were marched via backstreets  to the camp of Majdanek.

The chapter on life in Auschwitz I never read as it is too upsetting but because Walter knew languages he worked his way into a clerical position keeping records of who came in. He was one of the most informed people of what was happening.

The Escape

They hid in the outer field in a hole that their friend covered with a pile of planks. They had Soviet Cigarettes soaked in petrol that would act as a repellant against the dogs. An escaped prisoner resulted in the SS searching the outer field for 3 days. At night  only the inner watch tower were operated.

Most of the people who managed to escape Auschwitz were Poles whose conditions were not as bad but no Jew had escaped. A Russian informed him that a man can live on potatoes and salt for month. You must take matches to cook stolen food and a watch to double as a compass. Travel at night and stay hidden in the day. Find a hiding place before dawn breaks. Trust nobody and share your plans with nobody.  There was a network of informers amongst the poisoners. A German by himself is a fragile human being.

They headed for Slovakia a place where their accents would not betray them.  Silesia had once been Polish but the Polish population had been driven out and Ethnic Germans replaced them.

On the escape some people though they were Soviet POWs escaping. In Slovakia the Jewish doctors were given a reprieve and many were in rural areas.

They got to Cadena where Mrs. Beck gave them shelter she was related to Leo Baeck the eminent Rabbi. 

Walter Rosenberg and Fred Wentzler now revealed about Auschwitz. The Jewish Council had been the enabler s of the Nazi's. Of a group 2000 French Jews executed  they had seen the younger brother of Leon Blum.

Walter now took on the name Rudolf Vrba who had been a influential Catholic priest.

1944 March The German army moved in to Hungary deal with the Jews. The regent Miklos Horthy had made antisemitism a key part of his program. The Calvinist church protected 100,000 Christians of Jewish origin.  The Protestant leadership was considering and edict of denying communion to anyone who helped rounding up Jews or detain members of the resistance. Perhaps the Cardinal could issue a ruling like this in the name of Hungary's Catholics.   " The pope himself does not undertake to do anything against Hitler."

When Walter met the Cardinal Martilotti who was not moved by what was happening to Jews, he told him about Catholic priest shot and then brought to Birkenau in boxes to be disposed of . The cardinal was now shocked and almost fainted.

1944 23 June. Garrett contact Alan Dulles of the US intelligence who ran the Swiss bureau. BBC reported in Check and Slovak . In the US the head of the Office of the War information refused to authorize publication.

Oskar Krasnansky had appended a after word to the report calling on the Allies to  bomb the crematoria and the roads leading to it.  Mc Cloy instructed that they kill this bombing idea and that the best hope for the victims was the defeat of Nazism. The US does not want to see Jews killed by US bombes.

The US airforces bombed Monowitz. Siemen's, Krupp and I G Fabens had factories here and the concentration camp was a subcamp of Auschwitz. The US airforce photographed over Auschwiths and this proved every word of the Vrba Wetzler Report. This report got to London from a few sources and Chaim Weitzman and Moshe Shertok got it. It was now in Churchills hands.

The Americans bombed by day and the Brits by night only the Americans were capable of doing it. If Hungarian Jews knew they would stampeded away in panic and there would be ungovernable mayhem.

Reszo Kasztner and the Jewish leadership said this is the fertile imagination of 2 rash young men. The leader resolved to do nothing that would spread alarm.

In Slovakia the Jewish community negotiated directly with Eichmann and Dieter Wisliceny  they paid $45000 and Slovak deportation stopped temporary till autumn 1944 for Germany's own reasons. Kastner may have shown the document to Eichmann who said that the 2 should be captured and if it was exposed the Nazi negotiation about Kasztner train would be cut off. 1700 boarded Kastners train many from his home town Kolozavar $1,684000 were paid to the Germans.  500 postcards arrived from Jews resettled in Auschwitz but this was a trick. Kasztner did not allow the postcards to be distributed but nor did he allow the publication of the Vrba Wetzler Report.

The Nazis conducted the largest and swiftest deportation operation437,402 Jews were transported on 147 trains. Next the Nazis set their sights on Budapest's 200,000Jews.

In Bratislava  Josef Weiss worked in the Office of the Prevention of Venereal Disease  where the authorities did not investigate and they printed copies of the report there. The report got to Miklos Horty the regent of Hungary.  Roosevelt had his Secretary of State deliver a message to Horthy. The king of Sweden Gustav V also wrote to Horthy a warning and Horthy said the deportation must stop as nobody wanted to be a war criminal. There now ensued a power struggle in the Hungarian government. Hungarian police were sent into close of the Jewish area so they couldn't escape.

1944 2nd July the US 15th Air force bombed in and around Budapest their target was factories south of the city.

Hungary's ruling circles it appeared that Roosevelt was making good his threat to hold the political leadership responsible. So Horthy instructed his chief military commander to prevent the deportation of Budapest's Jews. One train was even turned around by Horthy's orders. Germany began to look like it was losing the war.

1944 August the Nazi's invade Slovakia and  trains started heading to Auschwitz.

1944 Autumn Horthy was toppled and the Arrow Cross the Nazi party took over.

 People did their best to escape and Rudi joined the partisans under Milan Uher where he won a Medal for bravery.

War over he went to the Czech Technical University in Prague to study chemical technology. Status of being an ex partisan enabled him to get a flat. He got a PhD in chemistry of the brain.

Rudi was a paranoid person, never trusting anyone perhaps this had caused his survival.

1946 Rudi visited Bratislava where he joined up with Wetzler, Moroowicz and Rosin the only 4 who had escaped from Auschwitz.

The annual commemoration of the anti Fascist Union Fighter nobody mentioned the fate of the Jews. 

 

Ruby was the first Czechoslovak biologist to have won Soviet  recognition and was rewarded with a passport travelled to Denmark ,Ukraine and Russia and came back each time. 

1958 When he applied to go to a convention in Strasbourg and Vienna he went to the airport and his passport was handed back to him from the Ministry of Science. His wife and children left at the same time and crossed the border and defected . Rudi flew to Israel and worked at Beit Dagan's Veterinary research institute.

He did not like the fact that Kasztner was a government official in Israel. Grunewald accused Kasztner of collaborating with the Nazi and Grunewald was sued for criminal libel.. Hannah Arendt said this the darkest chapter in a  dark story of the role played by  Jewish leaders in the holocaust. Kasztner crime was his failure to share knowledge, and this judgement caused the government of Israel to fall. Kasztner was assassinator in the street.

After 18 months in Israel he found out his wife Gerta and children were in England and went there in 1960. Gerta was living with Sidney Hilton as husband and wife.

1960 May. Eichmann was brought to Israel. Rudi now was approached by the Daily Herald who did a 5 part series on Eichmann by Alan Bestic on Rudi's information.   Because he couldn't get into the US for being a Communist during Mc McCarthyism he was given a position in Vancouver by a Communist's group despite the fact that by now he was very anti Communist. He was appointed for 2 years as a visiting lectureship at Harvard Medical School.

1975 married 24 year old Robin Lipson, so he needed a women from a different generation and different continent. He would not talk to her about Auschwitz so she had to find his memoir in the Boston  public library. On seeing a tatoo number on a waiter arm told him that he must have been a Jew from Bedzin, Poland, who arrived at Auschwitz in the summer of 1943.

In Nazi trials he  showed that he was fluent in multiple languages and had an exceptional memory of the mass murder from beginning till end . The Nazis had taken pains so that nobody could understand the full process. He was in touch with Simon Wiesenthal especially about Nazi criminals in Canada.

1985Ernst Zundel was tried under a criminal code for false news a tract called "Did 6 million Jews Really Die" Rudi was a central witness and the truth of the holocaust was on trial.

1981 Martin Gilbert wrote a book Auschwitz and the Allies and he was a principal source. He advised on the World at War series and the Shoah by Claude Lanzmann. 

Josef   Lanik's book Co Dante Nevidel ( What Dante didn't see) he was portrayed as the leading character.  

The Zionist movement like every other, produced both saints and sinners while under the Nazi jackboot. Zionists led the armed resistant in Warsaw and Vilna Ghettoes some who saw Kasztner's case became the most anti Zionist.

Yehuda Bauer thought Rudi was a genuine hero of the holocaust but his deep hatred for Jewish leadership colored his judgement. Both Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi were writers and became famous while Rudi gave more information but did not achieve their fame.

His daughter Helena became a doctor and he was the last to know. She was a feminist and considered him a male chauvinist. She went to Papua New Guinee and committed suicide. (not unusual for Holocaust survivors  children).      1998 Haifa University awarded him an honoree doctorate. The same year Fred Wetzier who escaped with him, died in Bratislava 'Bitter, drunk and forgotten.'   As a librarian he never let on that that Jozef Lanik was his pseudonym.

Rudi's belief that once Jews understood what Auschwitz was about they would refuse to board the trains. The Nazi ambition to rid the world of Jews was no secret. 

Jan Karski a Polish Aristocrat in 1943 had informed Antony Eden  and Roosevelt of what he had seen of mass shooting in the Warsaw Ghetto. When supreme court Justice Felix Frankfurter met him for 20 minutes said I don't believe it.  Rome had been kept informed by the  apostolic nuncio Angelo Roncalli  in Istanbul, who became Pope John XXIII. (1958 to 1963) 

1942 Polish non Jews like Stanislav Jaster escaped and reported the killing of the Jews, or resistance fighter Witold Pilecki, but the Polish government in exile in London did not do much to publicize this. Whitehall want the British public to feel  they were fighting for Britain's sake and not to save the Jews.

A panicked refusal to go or a stampede would have forced the Nazi's to hunt deer rather than sheep. The young made plans to evade deportation but the middle aged had dependents careers and property and refused to believe what they were hearing. 

Allied military men said killing civilians did not make any military sense.  French Jewish philosopher Raymon Aron said "I knew but I didn't believe it. And because I didn't believe it I didn't know.'  

2006 Rudolf Vrba died aged 82. George Klein told him that 'you saved my like ' as I knew to run. You should be satisfied that you saved 200,000 Budapest Jews. Though he never escaped the holocaust shadow he  lived a full life.

Erik Weisz a Hungarian Jew and son of a Rabbi became Harry Houdini (1874 to 1926) The greatest magician and escapist.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

Abraham Vergalese books Covenant of Water 2023 and The Tennis Partner 1998

 Covenant of Water by Abraham Vergalese 2023   724pg         4/2/24

A story of India between 1900 that ends in 1977.

A 12 year old girl marries a 40 year old widower who is illiterate She has an education and her father a Christian priest wanted her to keep studying but died and by marrying her off, she no longer has to be supported by her mothers family. there is a curse, a “Condition” that runs in the family – a drowning in every generation.

The land is shaped by water and its people united by a common language: Malayalam. Fable of Family and Medicine. Focuses almost entirely on good people (to whom many terrible things happen) Populated with archetypes rather than people as Charles Dickens style.

“Medicine is his true priesthood ,a ministry of healing the body and the soul of his flock.” A breech birth demonstrates how the wisdom of folk medicine can coexist happily with the knowledge of modern treatments. Two troubled love affairs—Big Ammachi’s son’s with a headstrong artist and Mariamma’s with a revolutionary communist.

In parallel, there is another story, of Digby Kilgour, a young Scottish doctor who travels from Glasgow to Madras to join the Indian medical service during colonial times. The two stories dovetail only towards the end, “like a river linking people upstream with those below”. Threaded through the novel are historic events – Indian soldiers fight for the British in the world wars; India gains independence; the newspaper then the radio then a post office arrives; the state of Kerala is formed; the communists win elections; the Naxalite revolution runs rampant.

The primary allegiance of the novel is to the land and the lives it sustains.  Novel’s 10 sections, each calamity tragic, Christianity provides the moral backbone, and Malayali pride shines through at key moments. Chronicles so many tragedies in a tone that never deviates from hope. The covenant of Water is that is washes away the sins of the  world.

Historically, this community was organized as the of the Church of the East in India by Patriach Timothy (780–823 AD) These Saint Thomas Christians on the Malabar Coast Portuguese Christian arrived in the 16C Travancore is at the southern tip of India between the Arabian Sea and the Western Gnats. Cochin has churches , basilicas and synagogues and cobblestone Dutch colonial streets .Paradesi were Iberian Sephardic Jews. Black Jews came to Cochin from the time of Solomon. The geography of the Spice Coast and the common Malayalan language unite the faiths.

Cocoanut and Palmyra palms are abundant and land includes water wide lagoons and canals. Travancore , Cochin and Malabar today is the State of Kerala.. The spice trade swept Europe peppercorns, fennel seed, cardamom, cloves and cinnamon as well as mustard seed  with garlic and onion to  make masala the foundation of curry. From 1400 The Portuguese followed by the Dutch and French and then the English came.

There is a genetic  Condition in this family with a death by drowning in every generation.

1903The Wright brother first heavier than air flight

1919 The story of Digby in Glasgow. Received a Carnegie Scholarship to study medicine. His mother hung herself with his school tie.

1927 Lindbergh flight across the Atlantic. He takes the ship via Suez past Bab el Mandeb ( the gate of tears). He joined the Indian Medical service as a surgeon. being a Catholic could not advance at home. With the caste system in India the British just came and moved everyone down a rung. His boss ran the British and  Anglo Indian wards that were empty while he did surgery of the native wards. Anglo Indians regards themselves as British but are excluded. With his limited knowledge the peoples choice was him or nothing. Celest's parents had been missionaries in Calcutta and died of cholera.

Cancers of the tongue and larynx are related to chewing poan 16 annas make a rupee.

WW1 a million Indian soldiers fought and 100,000 died, in the British army. War was the only proper school for surgeons.

Fort St George Madras or Chennai is the British East India Companies first settlement.

Beauty resides in the knowledge that it doesn't last. 

The doctor cut into this growth but it was an aneurism on the jugular and Jeb exsanguinated. Celeste wanted her sons back and though if her husband can't pay the boarding school fees they would return to India. Praemonitus Praemunitus  = Forewarned is Forearmed.

Leprosy -the only pain people feel is exile, leprosy is rarely contagious. The hospice was name Sister Brigitta the patron saint of Sweden. Hansen's Disease or leprosy, in which there is no feeling and without the gift of pain we have no protection.

The caste system is abominable against everything in the bible. The Maharajah is a Brahmin only the oldest son can inherit the property. Nairs are the worrier caste and overseers for the property. some become property owners. Eshava  are craftsmen and the lowest caste is landless peasants porayar or untouchables. Legend has it that St . Thomas converted only Brahmins. The English missionaries knew only one class heathen and porayars. converted willingly. The local would not accept the lowest caste but the new government school accepted all.

Moby Dick - better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian. " Fiction is the great lie that tells us the truth how the world lives."

Our hands have 34 different individual muscles. Henry Vandyke Carter was the one who illustrated Greys anatomy but was cheated by Henry Grey and later joined the Indian Medical Service. What distinguishes us from other animals is not the opposing thumb but our brains.

Badagas are an ethnic group in Tamil Nadu and are skilled welders mechanics and shop owners, they ran the estate.

Mullers Madness - Gerhard Muller was a German with a vast estate but because he never put in a road it was worthless as it could not develop.  Literacy alters patterns of life that have gone undisturbed for centuries. The Mahrajah is a young man who wants to see development in his state Travancore and enacted the Temple Entry Proclamation 1936 so that all castes could enter all temples. 

The war causes every tailor in Cochin to stitch uniforms so for  ready made clothes they go to Jew Town.

WW2 Indian soldiers were rushed to British Sudan and liberated Abyssinia from the Italians they then headed to Burma where the Japanese were invading. Later Tripoli , El Alamein With the war the price of coconuts went up but an anti hoarding act caused prices  to fall.

Success is not money but fully loving what you are doing. I have been bent and broken but I hope into a better shape.

Japanese plane bombed Madras Oct 1943. The fall of Rangoon results in the end of rice imports to India and so the British stockpiled locally grown rice for their troops, is how famine is triggered. Acetone odor is  of a body consuming itself the scent of starvation.

When electricity comes only 4 families are prepared to share the cost of the cable extension, when the other decide they want it they will have to pay plus price increase, this enables them to get a few lights bulbs and connect the radio.

1848 to 1906 Raga Ravi Varma met and painted all the famous beauties of the day. painted portraits fusing European art to purely Indian sensitivity . Elsie wanted to be an artist but had to marry as her entire fathers estate goes to her brother.

1945 Two and a half million Indian soldiers demobilized. Now for t he first time there were Indian officers. There had been none in WW1. Soldiers  who died to free  Abyssinians and the French and to free Europe from Hitler won't abide anything less than freedom for India. 200,000 British civilians in India could be slaughtered. Most troops joined for  signed-on  bonus and the salary.

1592 - 1666 Emperor Shah Jahan. The Moghul Emperor known for his architecture works and Taj Mahal near the city of Agra.

1947 Midnight August 14 India become independent with Jawaharlal Nerhu as Prime Minister.

Gwendolyn Gardens was a tea  plantation , coffee growing used less labour and the switched to robusta coffee when leaf rust  wiped out the arabica  plants. Here the tea could be plucked all year round unlike in Assam.

Balm of Gilead the cure for all ailments.

1951 Flood with hundred drowned, thousands displaced and there is rampant cholera and dysentery. Don't  count your children till the smallpox has come and gone. God gave us a beautiful girl because more foolish men you don't need.

1952 People joined the Communist party as the only group willing to undo the caste system. Malabar  Travancore-Cochin merged to become Kerala, which had the first democratically elected government in the world. Das Capital  and Stalins history of the Communist Party were the only books translated into Malayalam.

1964 The Maramon Convention was a Christian organization and even poor people contributed money to open a hospital in the area.

1897 The Red Fort  part of the  Madras Medical Collage. The Indian cotton could only be shipped back to England to English mills and then sold back to Indians. The handlooms of Indian weavers were smashed.

Mortus vivos docent  In learning anatomy by bisecting a cadaver thus the dead are teaching the living. You came into this world on an inbreath and will leave it by an outbreath.

Indo Simian Campaign - they had a problem of monkey climbing into the windows and damaging the residents to get food.

In anatomy they would have a test of having to put their hand into a  bag and feel and identify the bone. Here the male examiner wanted her to put her hand into his pocket. She squeezed his penis so hard he fell and had a heart attack.  Sometimes you have to imagine what is the to find it.

1960s. In Colombia and Brazil the Jesuits disobeyed their church and set up liberation theology.

For Moslem women with complication in giving birth , death  was preferable to being taken to a hospital where a white male obstetrician might touch them.  

Fiat Premier Padmini , The Ambassador(Morris Oxford) The Standard Herald (Triumph) are the only 3 rebranded foreign models licensed to be build in socialist India other imported car have a 150% import tax added.

Robert Bristow a marine engineer arrived in Cochin in 1920 and had to deal with a sand bar and ridge that barred all but small boats from entering the port. Now ships can enter the port and breakwater the Willington Island is the Cochin Airport.

The family Condition of an aversion to water, in every generation drowned , or had a dizziness and many went deaf. You see a person whose skin is covered with bumps and this is called neurofibromatosis or Recklinghausen's disease. The famous Elephant Man, Joseph Merrick was believed to have suffered from this. This was a different version of this. This is what made the daughter decide to specialize in neurosurgery at the Christian Medical Collage in Vellore in Tamil Nadu.

Every family has its secrets but not all secrets are meant to deceive. Many families are defined by their secrets. However the secrets of this Condition was a killer. Secrets kill - how does one tackle a disease if you don't know how many are affected. A women build a tree house as she was terrified of floods and not heights.

Cushing s Response  = the affects of pressure in the brain. The stick a needle in to a specific part of the brain to drain the fluid. This Condition affects personality and makes them eccentric.

The very people who the Revolutionaries cause they championed were the ones who found the reward money offered by the police to hand in the Revolutionaries. A fungus called blister blight did more for the class struggle that the Naxalites as it wiped out the tea estates and the owners abandoned the land to the tribal whos land it originally was.  

In the1950s many daring young man took dhows across the sea to get jobs in Dubai or Qatar because they could not afford No Objection Certificates or of plane  or ship tickets. The build palaces in the gulf and then returned home to build their dream houses.

 

1957 When Digby and Cromwell took over Gwendolyn Gardens. They now build an access road which was just completed before the price of tea and rubber soared. Art is never finished only abandoned.

The word Confessor applies both to the one confessing as well as the priest listening. What defines a family is not blood but the secrets they share.

______________________________________________________________________________________

The Tennis partner by Abraham Verghese   1998  345pg       23/3/24

This book is about the relationship between David Smith and his professor.  Between learning to be a physician and how tennis can influence the lives of the players.

When you take drugs first you destroy your family then your partners, then your finances, then your health goes and your job performance is the last to go.  The Talbott Marsh clinic was set up for rehab of medical people in Atlanta Georgia. If he wanted to practice medicine David he must submit himself to treatment.

1598 Onate held a Mass of Thanksgiving at El Paso  and claimed this territory New Mexico in the name of Phillip II of Spain 2 decades before the Pilgrims reach Plymouth Rock

The writer is an African born to Indian parentage but a naturalized American, like the Spaniard he also come looking for an el Dorado. He was now working as a professor of internal medicine at the Texas Tech School of Medicine. His parents were brought from India  to Ethiopia by Haile Selassie to teach at one  dozens of school all over the country that the king had set up.  His parents were Syriac Christians who had set up in South India in the Church of St Thomas.

With a tennis racket and ball he would hit against the wall. He had instruction in a school tennis  court  that had been set up by originally by the British school.

10 years before the Americans had given Saddam of Iraq weapons, now they were used against America.

Abraham was now a full professor at the age of 37. Pancho Segura said never ask a better professional prayer, to play with you, he will either turn you down of sulk and hit ungraciously.

He had a large AIDS practice, rural boys had moved to big cities and then returned with HIV. His wife Rajani took the 2 sons to visit her parents at Coonoor in South India. Her father was a tea broker. He and his wife were different personalities one that his wife couldn't easily enter. He was prepared to occasionally smoke a joint , some moonshine and fascinated equally by the genius and misanthrope. He kept notes on his tennis thoughts and says that if he had paid as much attention as that to his wife he may have kept his marriage.

El Paso is at the end of the Franklin mountains which divides the east from the cities west. The el Paso tennis club had started in the 1940s.

A good Tennis player has to win, win, win or  lose his Collage scholarship. Coyote is a person who carried someone across the river or a Spanish Indian half caste. To him it meant a magnificent wild animal a carrier of rabies.

A man bitten on the hand in a bar fight had an Eikmella infection. This is from a mouth flora. People who shoot Retilin get infected with Eiknella as it burns them and the lick the place.

A fulminant pneumonia can be caused by exposure to rodents.

A tattoo Nascentes Morimur born to die mocked the doctors trying to save him. People who shoot drugs get all sorts of infection. Some use a cigarette filter on the needle to clean their drug. Where the pill is not properly crushed without a filter you get a  talc flash. If you sterilize the needle with a flame you get the soot creating a tattoo from the  vein. Swollen legs with flaky skin from injecting them. People have lost arms through gangrene by causing vein infections.

When a patient comes in with pneumonia they have to hear the history of it and start treatment immediately before they get the test results that can take several days. Eating quese de cabra , unpasteurized  goats cheese can cause brucellosis. Owning a pet bird can cause psittacosis pneumonia. Chronic alcohol ingestion can cause liver damage and less efficient metabolizing estrogens that males have. 

In India the Consul asked a medical student why he wanted to go to the US and was answered that he wanted to pass medical exams by his own merit and not by paying bribes, he was given a visa.

Phlebotomist one who takes blood at a blood bank. 

In the early days of AIDS it was not easy to get consultants from other disciplines to treat these patients. It took 4 years to understand HIV. HIV specialist learned to become jacks of all trades. On TV one could see that Arthur Ashe (who had been a top tennis player) was pail and suffering from AIDS from a blood transfusion.  He had had bypass surgery in 1979 and 1983 and died in 1993. He appealed to fund raiser for AIDS.

Old houses in El Paso came with the Moors to Spain and then with Cortez to New Spain of Mexico.

David Smith had saved a patient who had arrived with lungs unable to oxygenate his body was put on a ventilator, his kidney had failed. 2 decades previously he would have died but David had saved him and he was able to walk back into the hospital. This had not moved David understanding of his great  achievement. 

Tennis rackets sometimes are stretched to 90 pound tension these can sometime snap causing an implosion on the airplane frightening the travelers.

1885 El Paso was the  first planned city in Texas.

1911 Revolution across the Orozco River, Villa and Madera attempted to overthrow the 30 year rule of dictator  Porfrio Diaz. The battle of Jaures saw armillary , firearms and finally hand to hand combat. Wealthy Mexicans Porfiristas fled the revolution and settled in mansions of Sunset Heights, El Peso. This had architectural styles of classic, revival , Tudor, mission and Californian bungalow.

From El Peso you can see the flares of Chevron Refinery and the smoke stacks of Asarco smelting plant sticking out from the haze.

He visited Carlsbad, California and asked if the old man is still coaching tennis. He paid him $100 for an hour session and then asked him to autograph his sons photo. The name is Pancho Segura, who had won Wimbledon in 1946 and later was known to all the movie stars in Hollywood who he coached died in 1917.

Tennis is the art of hitting a ball that is never in one place, and brought out a parallel effect on the psyche.

The disease concept of taking drugs. Thousand of soldiers in Vietnam used heroin but only a few % of them continued its use when they got back.  Narcan can be used to reverse the effect of heroin reducing the person to normal, then the return to feel their suffering of this world.

Salmonella arizonae means that somebody had either eaten poorly cooked rattlesnake meat or bought rattlesnake pills as an aphrodisiac from a curandero  (a healer) in Jaures across the border.

David said as a professional tennis player he would limp after a game for a week and played the next game before  his limp had properly recovered. He had been drawn to doctoring because of subconscious  thought that if he attended pain of other it would take care of his own pains.