Corrections

I made corrections in my post below because my father said I had some of the details of his last moments in the camps wrong.

Where There Is Life There Is Hope

I'm embarrassed to say that I still can't report on a baby name.  I was hoping that on my next post I would be able to let you all know her name.  Soon I'm sure.

Since my article in The Age, I was contacted by someone from an excellent blog called mymeso.  The blog is an excellent resource on the latest mesothelioma research and on people with mesothelioma.  They did a post about me and so I checked out their blog where I read the story about Debbie Brewer who has a blog called Mesothelioma and Me.  She did a treatment called chemoembolization which is traditionally used to treat liver cancer.  Yesterday her oncologist told her that he doesn't need to see her anymore as she is in remission.  There are so many amazing things happening with technology, I think when you have a terminal illness, you have to just hope that some cure will come up before you die and that you find out about it and can afford it.

My father at age 15 was sent to concentration camps during WWII.  He first arrived in Birkenau and then spent most of his time in Auchwitz.  From Auchwitz they were sent on a death march to Buchenwald where thousands were killed on the way.  From Buchenwald in April 1945 just before it was to be liberated, five thousand inmates including my father were put on a train in an open goods wagon which for 4 weeks had no where to go as Germany was shrinking.  On the 8th of May the train pulled into Teresienstadt which had been liberated.  A head count 2 days after arrival showed that only about 250 out of the 5000 survived the trip.   Dad was taken from the train by a stretcher to the hospital and overheard a doctor telling the Red Cross nurses that my father would probably die before the next day.   He then spend the next few years in hospital in Czechoslovakia suffering from tuberculosis which he acquired while in the camps along with typhus.  Luckily with a prognosis of only months to live, relatives in the US sent him a new drug, streptomysin, that could cure tuberculosis.  He was the first person in Czechoslovakia to have tried the drug and it cured him.  He was saved twice at the last minute.  

Had he died I would not have been born just as had I died my beautiful daughter would not have been born.  While there is life there is hope.