Doctors With Borders Ebook Tooltip Ebooks kunnen worden gelezen op uw computer en op daarvoor geschikte e-readers. A Collection of Short Stories About Physicians Behind the Iron Curtain

At the end of World War II, the Anglo-American alliance gifted Joseph Stalin, the Butcher from the Kremlin, eight European countries as part of the Yalta Treaty. With that shameful pact, more than one-hundred-twenty million people entered a period of slavery and communist tyranny. Among the enslaved intelligentsia, were doctors who also found themselves on the wrong side of the impenetrable Iron Curtain. They were all locked up in a massive labor camp. They faced a dismal professional future and lacked basic opportunities, which was part of the Cold War’s consequences. They were unable to travel freely to the Free World, or legally cross the frontier of their country of birth. During big national disasters or massive epidemics, they could not travel outside the Soviet Bloc to volunteer their skills to other nations in need. Hence, their new nickname was Doctors with Borders. Being poorly reimbursed by the communist regimes, they lived below the poverty line of any Western society. Socialist equality, as promoted by the Marxist propaganda, came with the brutal reality that everyone was equally poor and miserable. The loss of human rights and many oppressive measures prohibited them to seek a better life anywhere in the Free World. Unlike the famous French physicians, Médicins sans Frontières—Doctors without Borders—who travelled freely all over the world to help people in distress, their colleagues, locked up behind the Iron Curtain, were doomed to a life of isolation. Any protest would have resulted in a prompt confiscation of their medical diplomas or incarceration. Despite such repressive measures, a few brave souls risked everything for a chance to live in freedom. However, unlike the rest of the Soviet Bloc countries, Poland offered its citizens and especially its doctors a sweeter form of communism. There was a serious reason behind the Polish rulers’ decision to make exceptions. Throughout the recent geopolitical turmoil and refugee crises, ten-million Polish nationals had resettled in the free world. Those expatriates living happily in Western Europe and America were all fiercely opposed to communism. Their numbers were equal to nearly one third of postwar Poland’s population. With one million Polish nationals living in Chicago alone, nearly as many as in Warsaw, it became an impossible task for the tyrannical regime to isolate its residents from their expatriated brethren. In a span of two generations, a small number of Doctors with Borders became free people. This collection of short stories, as part two of the trilogy “Medical Brotherhood” depicts a few such escapes or relocation by some lucky Hippocratic followers.