2023-05-28 06:00:49
This French doctor born in Poland, always smiling, was one of the discoverers of the AIDS virus forty years ago. At 77, after having postponed his retirement on several occasions, he spent his last weeks in his office at the Saint-Louis hospital in Paris, where he said goodbye to patients with whom, for some, he went through hell and forged exceptional bonds.
I wouldn’t have come here if…
…if a little girl hadn’t told me, when my great-uncle died: “It’s God who wants it. » I was 7 years old and I answered him: “God is unjust, and I will fight to delay death as far as possible. This friend’s words had made me really angry. This uncle of my mother was the only person in our family who lived with us in France. His death had made me very sad and, hearing this sentence, I knew that healing and fighting against death was what I had to do. Becoming a doctor was therefore an obvious choice. I even devoted the first years of my practice to resuscitation, that is to say to the fight against death. And later, with AIDS, I also lived for years this race against time with death.
Was that your only motivation to become a doctor?
There was definitely something deeper. My mother had started medical studies and the Second World War had forced her to interrupt them. Without lying on a psychoanalyst’s couch for very long, I can deduce that it must have been obvious to me to finish the job.
Who were your parents?
My father, Polish, from a very modest background, was a soldier in the Polish army defeated by the Russians. According to family legend, the Poles were given the choice of joining the Russian army or going to the gulag. My father found himself in the gulag building a dam on the Volga in terrifying conditions, until 1943 when a Polish colonel negotiated the release of a number of his compatriots. Since he had just spent three years in Siberia, he wanted to go and rest in the hottest place in the USSR, in Georgia. That’s where he met my mother, also Jewish.
She was born in 1922 and came from a bourgeois family, university professors, teachers, doctors. They got married very quickly. It must not have been obvious, because Georgians are very nationalistic, very proud, very Mediterranean, and this marriage with a Polish soldier was probably experienced as a misalliance by his family. As soon as Poland was liberated, my father decided to go in search of his own, of whom he had no further news. My mother followed him with heartbreak.
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