Dr. Mircea, Barefoot Doctor Part III

Dr. Mircea in Poland

Photo: Private collection

In the spring of 1964 Dr. Mircea received the much sought-after invitation for a two-year post graduate ear nose and throat (ENT) fellowship in Warsaw, Poland. The nasty treatment at the Bucharest airport by armed guards, including confiscation of college photos as “security threat” because “the enemy of the communist regime must not know what the entrance to the university looks like,” did not dampen his spirit and elation to finally leave the oppression of communism behind.

The two-year surgical training included abdominal surgery and ENT, followed by three years of brief solo practice, government work, and part-time ENT work at the famous Alfa Clinic on the elegant Nowy Swiat Street in Warsaw. In the five years Dr. Mircea spent in the Polish healthcare system (1964-1969), he “never met a single male nurse” because of WWII’s massive casualties and male immigration to the west.

Dr. Mircea was fascinated by the basic freedoms that the Polish people enjoyed, even though they were under a communist regime. When compared to the other Iron Curtain countries in Poland:

-          Passports and travel visas were given with relative ease

-          Foreign goods could be purchased with U.S. dollars in stores

-          Owning foreign currency was not a crime

-          Private enterprise was allowed on a limited scale

-          Government’s stores had a variety of products and nobody had to wait in endless food lines

-          Disgruntled citizens expressed dissatisfaction in public without the fear of retribution

-          Religion was allowed and Catholicism practiced

-          No Marxism-Leninism indoctrinating courses were mandated in schools

-          Public transportation was better, very efficient, reliable, and cheap

-          Physicians, dentists, lawyers, and accountants could have their own practices

-          No state censorship prohibited the showing of American movies

-          Jazz clubs cherished American music and celebrated it with annual festivals

-          Private ownership of farmland and real estate was protected

The only Romanian medical practitioner in Poland, Dr. Mircea made the grand sum of $25 per month as an nose and throat specialist during 1966-1969 at a time when the average resident in the west was making $500 per month. He supplemented his income with tour guide stints and as a currency exchange trader, which was legal.

Invited to Paris for a visit by his old Romanian friend Sahak, thirty-year old Aurel embarked on an arduous 850-mile train journey in a second-class compartment, determined to find a post in the free world. He carried his passport and money in a specially made armpit wallet to guard against the famous Parisian pickpockets.

Iron Curtain between East and West Germany

Photo: Dr. Aurel E. Mircea

Of all the borders they had to cross between Poland and France, the real Iron Curtain crossing made a lasting impression on the adventurous and fearless young doctor. He described it, “The most diabolical creation of the postwar Stalinist ideology was a huge concrete wall with observation towers, every three hundred feet. The piece of land on the east side of it, the shoot-and-kill zone, about fifty feet wide was patrolled by uniformed East German guards with their Alsatian dogs on leashes. The steel fence on the western side of the Iron Curtain, twenty feet tall, was electrically charged with 5,000 volts of a deadly current. The whole border looked more menacing than the perimeter of a concentration camp. It would be impossible to penetrate it on foot, or by any other means. It was unmistakably a war zone, the real and most dreaded human barrier designed to keep the people in, and not enemies out.”

He carefully took several pictures of the Iron Curtain walls when the train stopped to change a steam engine to a modern Diesel one. The landscape and homes were drab, poor, and unkempt on the socialist side, cheery on the free western side, with large barns, prosperous-looking homes, well-fed cows, snowy farm fields, and no sign of poverty. The west, as he experienced it over and over from that point on, was “shimmering with the pulse of prosperity and capitalist opulence.”

With a suitcase full of polish sausage and cheese, to last him so that he did not have to buy street food he could not afford, Dr. Mircea arrived in the famous Parisian La Gare de Nord, greeted by his friend Sahak, who took him to a cheap hotel in the vicinity of his modest apartment on Rue de Lafayette, a few blocks from Montmartre and Moulin Rouge.

When his friend Sahak insisted that Aurel should settle in Warsaw and get married, Dr. Mircea explained to him that, although his situation under Polish communism was much better than under Romanian communism, “Socialism, communism, and the likes have severe limits on one’s freedom, from professional to financial point of view. I want to be a free man!” His medical journey is ongoing, but he is not afraid of the “tedious trail in the free world, toward capitalist prosperity.”

Explaining to Sahak that his destination is the land of the free and the home of the brave, he concluded his tirade with, “I have had it with the communist system and the limitations to freedom!”

Fate intervened again. After brief interviews with various African consulates in Paris during which he was more and less rejected immediately, he got lucky and, following an impassionate plea for freedom, he was well received at the South African Consulate. The reassuring vibes he received from the consul felt like he won the lottery.

Bad luck did not dampen his spirit when, having let his guard down in a moment of elation, his unattended hanging coat was pickpocketed on the returning train in La Gare de Nord. He lost his traveling papers, ticket, and passport on his attempted return to his Warsaw medical practice.

Walking miles and miles back and forth to reclaim his stolen identity and to borrow $100 from poor Sahak, dragging four suitcases full of merchandise destined to be sold in Warsaw, penniless, paperless, and hopeless, Dr. Mircea managed to get traveling papers from the French government, valid for a one time use without a passport. Neither the Romanian nor the Polish government were willing to help him, on the contrary, they reproached him for being too careless with pickpockets.

A few months after returning to Warsaw and after receiving a new green Romanian passport, he received an offer as a junior medical officer from the Republic of South Africa, Far East Rand Hospital in Springs, Transvaal Province, for $1,000 a month. The three-year contract paid twice as much as any western resident. No more $25 a month standard medical salary in Poland based on artificial socialist cost of living. His ship of freedom had finally arrived!  

Dr. Mircea in South Africa 

Photo: personal collection

South Africa became Dr. Mircea’s paradise of freedom he’s always dreamed about even in his most dire circumstances. He was now in the world of capitalist opportunity and prosperity. Dazed by the sunshine and the pleasant weather, he found South Africa immaculately clean. His doctor’s quarters, all paid for by the hospital, with its perfectly manicured English gardens took on palatial qualities. He was finally a free man living in Paradise!

But in the real world, nothing is perfect, the segregated Apartheid society separated blacks and whites in neighborhoods and in hospitals. The black people had their own Bantu-only hospital section and it offered Dr. Mircea the opportunity to practice varied surgical procedures. The Bantu did not trust the South African whites but, as a foreign doctor labeled as a non-discriminating person, Dr. Mircea became a medical magnet.

His fortunes improved, he bought his first car and appliances he’s never owned in Romania, opened a bank account, and eventually rented his first luxurious apartment. He met his future wife, Zona, in a music store, trying to find the name of a beloved song he had heard on radio, It Must Be Him.

In the Land of the Boers, he found the love of his life, the petite blonde Zona Visser, a famous South African recording star from the Springs. After a long courtship, they married in the South African Summer of 1973 on Zona’s birthday, February 26. Their marriage produced two daughters, Oltea and Calina.

His financial fortunes much improved, Dr. Mircea was able to sponsor and bring his mother (who defected) and one sister’s family to South Africa while the communists kept the rest of his family. His dad had to divorce his mom and marry someone else quickly in order to escape the Romanian gulag.

Among the many friends he made in South Africa, meeting Romania’s former monarch, exiled King Michael I and his wife Queen Ana, on a visit in Johannesburg to spread the Gospel of Peace, was most memorable.

The political instability in South Africa grew by 1976. During the infamous Soweto riots, Dr. Mircea’s office was closed for three days and patients trickled in with wounds and injuries from riots. Nurses were uncomfortable working for a white man.

Communist agitators abounded from the Kremlin, Cuba, and China. “All the leftist movements and communist-dominated organizations reared their ugly heads from the bush and started to rattle their sabers,” wrote Dr. Mircea. In the U.S., Jimmy Carter, the potato liberal, became president.

An unpleasant encounter one day with a black activist who posed as a patient shook Dr. Mircea to the core, opening the wounds of fear that “Marxism was alive and well, on a continuous march all over the world and that South Africa was not immune to it. The activist had said, “We like you for what you are doing for our black brothers and sisters. But we’ll soon take over this country and there will be no place for white people in South Africa.”

Dr. Mircea thought, “I’m starting to see the Dark Continent, without the benefits of the capitalist light!” After a brief visit from the SASS (South Africa Secret Service) warning him about the dangers to his life and his family’s, he decided to move everybody to America.

The agent had told him, “Carjacking, killing older family members, hurting your children and many more acts of violence could be unleashed upon you, by the local tsotsies. There is no shortage of them, with the fall of the Portuguese Empire and the infiltration of the subcontinent by millions of communists from China, Cuba, and the Soviet Union. Gaborone, two-hundred miles away, has the largest KGB contingent outside of Kremlin.”

In the eight years that he practiced in South Africa, Dr. Mircea built a good practice among the Bantu people, acquired more surgical experience, built a family, had two daughters whom he can rightfully call African American as they were born in South Africa and raised in America, and helped part of his Romanian family escape communism.

As violence escalated in Johannesburg, and after having had their family car stolen and being shot at with an AK-47 from an overpass bridge Dr. Mircea was convinced more than ever that he had to move to America. A chance brochure advertising medical practices for foreign doctors in Texas, with an ECFMG certificate which he had, and a valid Green Card, was the turning point in the future of his family.

The American consul Aurel had an audience with, told him that, because none of the Romanian immigration quotas had been used since 1950, 40,000 unused Green Cards were at his disposal. In two days’ time, Dr. Mircea delivered all the necessary documents to the Embassy: health tests to prove that his family had no communicable diseases, proof of financial support, the physical address of a jazz buddy from his Poland days, his medical certification, birth certificates, and passports.

The long medical journey for Dr. Mircea was far from over but the final destination became clear, Pasadena General Hospital in Texas. The Bantu practice he had created on McIntyre Street in Jeppestown district of Johannesburg is, to this day, a thriving practice as seen on Google Camera, fifty years later. “It has the same size and color, protective steel bars and doors as it did when I have sold it to a Rhodesian doctor in the summer of 1977. The address is immortalized on my South African Medical and Dental Council’s Certificate of Status, dating February 11, 1969,” wrote Dr. Mircea.

Dr. Mircea overcame all odds and finally landed in his beloved namesake, AMERICA, a reward for his hard work and determination to escape communism and a huge gain for Texas – they got a well-trained and seasoned international physician like no other.

His remuneration was the stratospheric salary of $72,000 a year, rent-free and fully equipped medical office for two years, paid full-time staff for one year, free fully paid relocation expenses from South Africa for the whole family, and fully paid Texas licensure for two years.

All financial rewards for Dr. Aurel E. Mircea paled in comparison with the joy both he and his wife experienced breathing the freedom air of Texas in the year 1977, when he finally reached the dreamed destination of a medical journey decades in the making.