Psychiatrist Sees Her Heroism as Just Doing ‘Right Thing’

depakid

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Sat Jan-02-10 01:52 AM
Original message

Psychiatrist Sees Her Heroism as Just Doing ‘Right Thing’

Edited on Sat Jan-02-10 01:59 AM by depakid

During the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II, the Germans threatened the Dutch with death if they helped Jews.

Nonetheless, Tina Strobos, M.D.—then a medical student in Amsterdam—along with her mother, sometimes hid Jews in their home. This way the Jews could make their way through the underground to more secure refuges.

Sometimes the Gestapo (the secret police of Nazi Germany) would bang on the door of the house in which Strobos and her mother lived. They'd then enter the house, push Strobos or her mother into a chair, and bark, “You're hiding Jews! You're going to jail.” They didn't say “concentration camp,” although a number of Strobos' friends whom the Nazis arrested were sent to concentration camps. After that, they'd search the house.

“You know, we could be killed for this,” Strobos' mother once commented after the Gestapo had left. “Of course I know,” Strobos said.

Strobos also took news and ration stamps by bike—at great risk—to Jews hidden on farms outside the city. She carried radios and hid boxes of guns for the Dutch resistance. She was seized or questioned nine times by the Gestapo and once was hurled against a wall and knocked unconscious.

Strobos not only survived these ordeals, but went on, after the war, to receive a Fulbright scholarship, which enabled her to travel to the United States and study child psychiatry. After she became a psychiatrist, she remained in the United States. Today she is 89 years old and living in Rye, N.Y. She retired from practicing psychiatry only last May.

...the question, of course, is: why did she <risk her life to help>?

“Because that is what I would have liked to happen to me,” she replied. “It was the right thing.”

However, she also talked about certain personality traits she had that may have influenced her heroic behavior.

“I'm an altruistic person. That is why I became a doctor, a psychiatrist. I also value courage a lot. It sounds kind of immodest, but I think I have more guts than many people. On the other hand, I am also very cautious. The Dutch underground dissidents I was involved with, a group of 10, all disappeared. Those boys were excessive risk takers. One, for instance, was caught using a radio to send messages to England. He was shot and killed.”

And while her altruism, fearlessness, and prudence may have been inherited to some degree, her parents and grandparents were also role models for her, she said.

Her mother's father, for example, was one of the founders of a freethinking movement. “Atheists basically,” said Strobos. “Nonbelievers. Theirs was a campaign against the clergy because the clergy had so much power, it tended to abuse it.” Furthermore, her mother's parents, as well as her mother, “moved in a bohemian, socialist circle” and had Jewish friends. In fact, her maternal grandmother as well as her mother helped hide Jews from the Germans.

Indeed, Strobos believes so strongly that altruistic behavior can be taught that she tried to impart it to her own three children while they were growing up. Today all three work in helping professions—one son is a physician, another a paramedic, and her daughter a psychoanalyst—perhaps indications that her instruction paid off. Moreover, her grandchildren do volunteer work with disadvantaged people—perhaps further indication that heroic behavior can not only be taught, but passed down through generations in a family.

In any event, whether altruistism or heroism is inherited, learned, or both, Strobos was eager to emphasize that a lot of Dutch people—not just she and her mother—put their lives on the line to help Jews.

“Fifteen thousand Jews were hidden throughout Amsterdam during the German occupation,” she declared. “That took a lot of homes to hide them.”

Much more: http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/content/45/1/4.1.full
Psychiatric News January 1, 2010
Volume 45 Number 1 Page 4
American Psychiatric Association