2023-06-25 12:50:08
Willy Rozenbaum, in 2008. CATHERINE GUGELMANN / AFP
The always-smiling Polish-born French doctor was among those who discovered the AIDS virus 40 years ago. At 77, following repeatedly postponing his retirement, he is spending his last weeks in his office at Saint-Louis Hospital in Paris, where he is saying goodbye to patients, including some with whom he has been through hell and back, forging exceptional bonds in the process.
I wouldn’t be here if…
… if a little girl hadn’t said to me when my great-uncle died: “It’s God’s will.” I was seven years old and replied, “God is unfair, and I’m going to fight to repel death as far as I can.” Coming from this friend of mine, these words made me really angry. My mother’s uncle was the only member of our family living with us in France. His death made me very sad, and when I heard that sentence, I knew that caring for him and fighting death was what I had to do. From then on, becoming a doctor was an obvious choice. I even devoted the first few years of my practice to resuscitation, that is to say, the fight once morest death. Later, with AIDS, I also spent years in this race once morest time with death.
Was this your only motivation for becoming a doctor?
There was certainly something deeper. My mother had started studying medicine, but World War II forced her to interrupt her studies. Even though I haven’t spent much time on a psychoanalyst’s couch, I can infer that finishing the job must have been an obvious choice for me.
Who were your parents?
My father, a Pole from a very modest background, was a soldier in the Polish army that was defeated by the Russians. According to a family legend, Poles were given a choice between joining the Russian army or going to the Gulag. My father ended up 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. Having just spent three years in Siberia, he decided to rest in the hottest part of the USSR, Georgia. It was there that he met my mother, who was also Jewish. She was born in 1922 into a bourgeois family of university professors, teachers and doctors. They got married very quickly. It can’t have been easy because Georgians are very nationalistic, very proud, very Mediterranean, and marrying a Polish soldier was probably seen as an unsuitable match by her family. As soon as Poland was liberated, my father decided to set off in search of his family, of whom he had no news. My mother followed him but was heartsick regarding leaving.
Who did he find?
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