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.

The Medical Journey of Dr. Mircea, Part II

A fresh graduate in September 1961, Aurel described his six years of medical school quite succinctly – four years filled with communist propaganda, basic science classes, political classes, and the Russian language; two years focused mostly on hospital training, public health, and hygiene.  He wrote, “very little practical experience was accumulated during those final years. The final exam consisted of three medical subjects and the mandatory Marxism-Leninism oral test.”

The Marxism-Leninism test required the memorization of about 50 volumes of communist propaganda. The wise classmate Valeria managed to condense the 50 volumes into 2. It was easier to regurgitate two volumes of the worthless rhetoric that nobody will ever need, including the Useful Idiots.

To pay back the free education, graduates had to accept assignments wherever the communist party sent them. To make sure they complied, the health authorities in Bucharest withheld their medical diplomas until the rural assignment was completed or a replacement was found.

Aurel’s assignment was in two villages in Oltenia which had no electricity, no phones, no running water, no medical supplies, and no medical clinic. One room provided by the local “Feldscher” doubled as occasional examination room and bedroom for the Barefoot Doctor. A feldsher was a term derived from the German word Feldscher coined in the 15^th century, given to medieval barbers who practiced ancient medicine in the army.

Patient care was provided on foot, making house calls, rain or shine. After eight months of torture and deprivation of human rights, Aurel resigned, telling the medical commissar in Bucharest to keep his diploma and dropped out of the medical profession temporarily and became a musician.

During his last two years of medical school, students were exposed to some surgery but most of the hands-on medicine was accomplished during the 3-year long mandatory service in rural areas, practicing on desperate people who needed medical care the most.

After graduation, the privileged few, with connections to the Communist Party, remained in large cities as employees of the urban healthcare authorities or enrolled in a specialization course if they met the affirmative action criteria.

One night’s chance encounter with a Polish dentist and his wife in a dance club at the Black Sea where he was performing would eventually change Dr. Mircea’s life. The possibility of postgraduate studies in Warsaw under his sponsorship was discussed.

Poland, although a socialist country under the rule of the communist party, “preserved some degree of freedom of the press, religion and even allowed a certain degree of private enterprise including medical and dental practices. Realizing that the government is not the answer to all problems, the Polish authorities obliged its people’s demand for the preservation of private businesses and family farms.”

At the request of Comrade Ghiorghi Preda, Aurel had performed monthly concerts during medical school years. He would lie to him about the composers – Comrade Gershwinowsky (George Gershwin) and Comrade Portersky (Cole Porter), both graduates of the Moscow Conservatory of Music. Comrade Ghiorghi would nod his “brainwashed communist head in approval. As long you don’t play any imperialist tunes from America, which I hate with passion!” Boiling on the inside, Aurel never told Ghiorghi how much he hated his communist Romania which destroyed the people’s souls and spirit.

Aurel passed the indoctrination Marxist-Leninist written and oral tests with a perfect score, not because he knew the material, he despised it.  Thanks to his group of colleagues who had prepared beforehand all the correct answers to questions 1-60. What they thought the communist agitators wanted to hear as answers were lining the pockets of his jacket. With agile prestidigitation, he took out the correct and embellished answer to his question and dazzled the committee on which, surprisingly sat his medical school colleague and commissar Ghiorghi who never showed up for any exams but passed everything with a perfect score of 10.

Had Aurel and his group been caught cheating on the Marxist-Leninist test which counted 25 percent of the graduation score, they would have been expelled and sent to Siberia in a Gulag and would have never be seen or heard from again.

Aurel had picked up his temporary doctor’s diploma - the real one would be held hostage and locked up in the dean’s safe for the duration of the three years of mandatory service as a Barefoot Doctor in a rural area.

Luck intervened again. His prayers were answered when he met a colonel on campus who was looking for a doctor for one of his three non-combatant battalions staffed with young peasants drafted by force under the new conscription law which made them work from dawn to dusk for three years with an axe and a shovel, building roads, bridges, and other infrastructures.

The newly minted battalion physician reported to his job Monday through Saturday, tending to his motley crew in Buzau. The soldiers were healthy and strong, and his job involved only issues of hygiene and nutrition. The sixty-mile train and bus commute were pleasant, and he made friends with the regular riders, all pissed off at the communist regime but helpless to do anything about it.

Through the years, besides his native Romanian language, Dr. Mircea became fluent in French, Russian, Polish, English, and a bit of Afrikaans and Fanaglo, the Bantu People Esperanto of the subcontinent, a mix of Zulu and English.

The military commissar asked Comrade Doctor one day why he was studying foreign languages. Aside from the personal joy of being able to swear in Polish at the totalitarian commissar, Dr. Mircea answered the Comrade Captain with a straight face that he liked to study the history of the Soviet Union in the Russian language.

He wrote, “I was surrounded by soldiers who hated every minute of their forced conscription, by officers who were spying on each other and by a military commissar who tried every day to put someone in jail, including me.” You were never innocent until proven guilty, you were always guilty, it all depended on what charges the commissar would manufacture about a person they wanted imprisoned.

His stint with the battalion ended when he was forced by the new commander to swap his post so close to the capital with his son’s post far away. This son was addicted to drugs and Aurel’s post was much more enticing and closer to him and to the capital.  He used threats of many years of jail time against Aurel because he never stopped his correspondence with the Polish dentist, Dr. Kim-Ru, whom he had met at the Black Sea.  He knew, of course, all his letters were opened and read by Security Police, a huge apparatus formed to spy on citizens.

Additionally, to improve living conditions for the poor conscripts, they traded medicine they did not need, the soldiers were generally healthy, with the peasants in dire need of antibiotics and anti-inflammatories missing in commercial pharmacies, for meat and wine, improving their pathetic diet.  Bartering was a way of life if you wanted to survive under socialism, under the boot of the Communist Party because the economy was a centrally planned mess. Everybody wanted bribes and most people took things from where they worked in order to trade with others and survive. The commissars always wanted their cut until it became politically inconvenient.

Aurel’s constant dream was to have the Polish Ministry of Health give him a stipend for a postgraduate medical program in Warsaw, a suitable position in a good teaching hospital. To thwart those who constantly watched him, he wrote, “Dear Dr. Kim-Ru, I hereby express my total dedication to the cause of socialism in the Soviet bloc. I also voice my desire for Peace on Earth and my willingness to serve the great Marxist-Leninist ideology. I reaffirm that my fate is now in your hands and I’m waiting for your next move. Long live the Proletarian Paradise!” Dr. Mircea explained that, after writing such sentences exclusively for the communist censors monitoring the post office, “he puked three times in protest and hatred of dictatorship.”

Aurel’s chance encounter one night with the famous Russian composer Aram Khachaturian at the Black Sea, who was there on a therapeutic visit to the famous saprophytic muds of Eforie Nord, had lifted his spirits temporarily.

At the end of the summer, Aurel had to choose between being a Barefoot Doctor again or change countries. But fate had other plans.

The place he exchanged with the colonel’s son was in the villages of Tulburea and Aninoasa, a fifty-mile train ride from Craiova towards the Carpathian Mountains. As his mother had told him, all the riches and greatness had gone into the pockets of the communist oligarchy as part of the open-theft, centrally planned economy. The villages were poor places in the hill country, filled with “hard-working old women, sick old men, and hungry children.”

But he was glad that he was not “in some Siberian concentration camp crushing hard rocks with wooden hammers.” His modest rent bought him one room and access to a kitchen and bath. He had one bed, “one wash basin with a suspended water container and a small tea table.

For six working days and nights he slept in the same bed on which he examined the occasional visiting patients. The rest of the time, he had to trek through mud and snow to reach some of the out of the way farms with sick residents.

As a young 25-year old doctor, sent to this God-forsaken place for allegedly “stealing medications and selling local wines,” Dr. Mircea kept repeating to himself that he would not be a communist victim of the healthcare disaster he was witnessing. He wanted a professional career in freedom.

When the heavy snows came and the roads became impassable, the cooperative manager gave him a “living, hungry stallion” for which the villagers donated oats and corn. They also gave Dr. Mircea boiled eggs, bacon, and bread. The local priest gave him a sleigh which was a good thing because the horse was too old to be ridden and could not make it up the difficult hills.

When Dr. Mircea spent two nights a week in his rented one-room adobe in Craiova, condensation from running the gas heater fell from the ceiling onto his face and bed all night like a “small discreet rain.”

The Siberian Express winter storm of 1962-1963 brought weeks of misery and pain for the villagers and for Dr. Mircea. In February he found his beloved horse in the barn mauled by hungry wolves. He cried, overwhelmed by his loss and by mountains of snow.

Freezing temperatures had turned most rivers into easy to cross two-feet deep ice bridges and Bulgarian grey wolves came in packs across the Danube. Hungry and skeletal guard dogs were no match for the ravenous wolves. His beloved pet and friend, with whom he talked as if he could understand him, was dead. He was so deeply attached to him in his rural loneliness.

Dr. Mircea waited weeks until the roads and the rail became passable again and returned to Craiova where he checked himself into a local hospital ward for tests. He was afraid that his daily diet of expired sardine cans may have poisoned him. Under socialist medicine, you had to be checked into a ward in order to have any serum or x-ray tests.

While on medical leave for two months, fate intervened again and he received the opportunity of his life – an offer for a post graduate course, a two-year residency in Ear Nose and Throat surgery at a teaching hospital in Warsaw. The letter with the proposal arrived from Dr. Kim-Ru, just as he had promised. It was delivered through the production manager of a traveling Polish circus in order to escape the eyes of the communist censors. The door to freedom had finally opened for Dr. Mircea!

TO BE CONTINUED