Dr. Anna Wildikann

 

I met Anna Wildikann during the middle years of World War II, when I was in my late teens. My mother was undergoing minor surgery at the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, and I had come up from Tel Aviv, where we lived, to visit her. The other bed in my mother’s room was occupied by a lady doctor who had come to be treated here in Palestine from French Equatorial Africa, Hadassah being one of the few medical facilities left accessible due to the war in Europe, and incongruously the nearest to her remote mission station in the Gabon region up the Ogowe River.

That lady in the next bed was, of course, Anna Wildikann, and it quickly transpired that she and my mother had quite astonishing common links. Both were originally from Riga, and both had left Europe in the early 30’s. Incredibly, my kindergarten teacher in Riga, before my parents immigrated to Palestine, had been a certain Fraulein Wildikann - none other than Anna’s sister Naama, who perished in the Holocaust, and whom even I vaguely remembered.  

Anna’s story was highly unconventional, almost bizarre. The daughter of a medical family, Anna studied medicine in Jena and in Heidelberg (two of the last few universities still open to foreigners and Jews), and upon graduation attended a lecture by the great organist-theologian-musicologist-philosopher-physician Albert Schweitzer, who came to Europe periodically to raise funds for his unique mission hospital in Lambarene. Intuitively aware, perhaps, of the gathering storm in Europe, or filled with her newly acquired obligation to cure human suffering wherever needed, or perhaps fascinated by the extraordinary personality of the lecturer, Anna decided to join Dr. Schweitzer’s small medical team at his African outpost. There she remained for well over a decade, dedicating her best years to his mission, until ill health required her to seek medical attention nearer civilization. 

Anna had a quiet, patient air about her, not only while hospitalized, but later too. She spoke in a soft, relaxed voice, at once modest yet self-assured. True perhaps to her profession, she was both impartial observer and incisive diagnostician. Upon recovery from her operation, she decided to abandon Africa and remain in Palestine, but the British authorities refused to extend her stay and, left without options, she went back to Lambarene.

Luckily for me, during the few weeks before her departure, Anna came to stay at my mother’s apartment, and thus a small aperture to the world of Albert Schweitzer, and to that of Anna herself, opened up for me - and made an indelible impact. The idea of going out on a quest to uncharted lands and extending a helping hand to those of a different civilization fascinated me. Anna was also a dedicated photographer, a growing passion of mine at the time, and one day she invited me to take pictures together in the old city of Jerusalem. Her camera was rather antiquated, but she taught me the very essence of photography: how and what to look for. The studies I made that day of the Tower of David and the close-ups of Bedouin women and Arab vendors, black and white in those days before color photography came into use, were among the best shots I ever caught.

A few years later Anna returned to Palestine, this time on a legitimate ‘capitalist’ immigrant certificate. Obtaining such a document from the British involved depositing a considerable sum of money into the Mandate coffers, and Anna must have spent a goodly portion of her resources to acquire it. Upon arrival, Anna quickly found her way to the British internment camp of Atlit, near Haifa, where Holocaust survivors, caught by the Royal Navy as they tried to reach the shores of Palestine, were incarcerated in harsh and overcrowded conditions. There, as a volunteer medical officer, she tended the sick, doing what she was best qualified to do – working with grossly insufficient supplies and inadequate facilities. Were it someone else, this might have evoked sensations of sweet revenge toward those who had deported her, but to Anna such sentiments were foreign. Ironically, it was but a few months after her arrival that the British withdrew and the State of Israel was declared, implementing the fundamental Law of Return, by which every Jew had the right to come and settle in Israel.  

When under the new Israeli government the Atlit camp was cleared, Anna took up a position at the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, where she had once been a patient. She settled in a small apartment in Rehavia, a comfortable residential quarter, and became an active member of Jerusalem’s cultural circuit. Her apartment, however, more than being a home, was a veritable museum and library in miniature, dedicated to Albert Schweitzer and to Anna’s days in Lambarene. There were rare and just published volumes by and about Schweitzer, native sculptures in wood and ivory, some made by ex-patients of hers, many photographs of the hospital and of Schweitzer, manuscripts and letters. Anna wrote much about Lambarene, also in conjunction with Schweitzer, such as the little volume “The Story of My Pelican”, text by Schweitzer, photographs by Anna, which came out in many languages. Periodically Anna would travel to Europe - to medical conferences, to her publishers, and at times to meet Schweitzer himself, as she did when he received the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in 1953.

Anna had clear blue eyes and a fair complexion and beautifully sculpted hands, wore no make-up and dressed conservatively without regard for fashion. Never did I see her in the company of a man, and the notion of a romantic involvement seemed irrelevant to her, or else deeply concealed and zealously guarded. We never spoke about things like that, naturally, and in this Anna remained an enigma to me.

Imperceptibly, perhaps unconsciously, I found myself following Anna’s footsteps. From the day I photographed those indigenous portraits in the Old City, my attitude to our Arab neighbors mellowed. Belonging as I did to the generation fated to fight the Germans, the British and the Arabs, there was not much room left for compassion. Anna changed that in me – without saying a word, perhaps even without knowing it. While at film school in California I too, like Anna, went into the wilds, filming stone-age Urubu Indians deep in the Amazon basin. Upon graduating in the early 50’s with a prize-winning short to my credit, I felt ready to embark on a singular and noteworthy project: a documentary feature of the Schweitzer hospital in Lambarene.

When I approached The Albert Schweitzer Fellowship, a New York organization raising funds for the hospital, I was dumbfounded to learn that the Fellowship discouraged exposing documentation of the hospital, both because the facility was antiquated, never having been updated since its founding in 1913, and because of Schweitzer’s legendary ethic of ‘Reverence for Life,’ which allowed chickens and stray monkeys to roam freely through the wards. If people saw this the Fellowship feared donations would cease.

I decided to give the idea another try, and approached the great man himself. A meeting was set up for me at Schweitzer’s home in Guensbach, where he stayed during the summer. Schweitzer greeted me cordially, and invited me into his comfortable Biedermeier living room. In his middle seventies, Schweitzer was a big, impressive man with a strong deep voice. I sensed right away, however, that the meeting was doomed. With his signature mustache, dressed in classic nineteenth-century fashion, he might have been a character in a period play. Schweitzer had hardly ever seen a movie, much less a documentary. The notion of him becoming a film actor, which he was convinced would be required, seemed ludicrous to him. Presuming I was a medical man, he proposed that I join his staff in Lambarene. He was visibly disappointed when he realized I was not a doctor. Before I left, Schweitzer autographed a photo for me, a prized possession I still display on my harpsichord at home in Tel Aviv.

Soon afterwards I ended up among the Yoruba in the Benin area of Nigeria, making a semi-documentary feature about globalization (a word not yet in use at the time) permeating into an isolated jungle community up the River Niger. Harry Belafonte, seeing the film in the making, volunteered to contribute a personal introduction. The mighty Niger thus became the closest I ever got to the Ogowe River.

In 1955, amid wide publicity, a new book appeared, titled “The World of Albert Schweitzer”, by New York photographer Erica Anderson. It contained stunning and revealing shots of Schweitzer and of his hospital. On one of my stops in New York I asked to visit Ms. Anderson, and was cordially invited to her studio. I was struck by Erica’s resemblance to Anna. She spoke in a similar manner, slow and kindly, and with the same respect and awe toward Schweitzer as Anna had shown. Erica’s roomy loft, rather in a state of disarray, was filled with photos of Schweitzer and the hospital. Readily she told me of the many times she had been to Lambarene over the years. She had even switched to using a movie camera, but her lack of film experience and Schweitzer’s lack of enthusiasm for a film did not give her much hope. After I had left her studio, it occurred to me that photographs other than those of Schweitzer had been conspicuously absent in her surroundings. I could not help wondering where the thin line rested between professional interest and true infatuation. Erica continued her extended visits to Schweitzer, and completed her film in 1958. She obtained Schweitzer’s permission to release it, and won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature that year.

In a totally coincidental way, Anna’s life story continued to revisit me. In 1956 a book came out titled “The Nun’s Story”, by Kathryn Hulme, and became an instant bestseller. Hulme, an American memoirist and author, told the story of a young Belgian woman who became a nun, and was sent out as a nurse to a mission hospital in the Congo, where she was assigned to assist an opinionated lay surgeon. She found satisfaction in her work at the mission, which was not without peril, until a bout of tuberculosis forced her to return to Europe for treatment. Cured, she was allowed back to her station, and returned to Africa with renewed enthusiasm. Having discovered, however, the cruel devastation caused by the Germans in WW2, in which her physician father, tending wounded civilians, was indiscriminately killed, she could no longer reconcile her vows of universal compassion with her feelings of abhorrence and condemnation. She asked to be relieved of her vows and left Africa and the convent.

It would be futile to deny the uncanny parallel between Anna’s narrative and that of the book’s fictitious ‘Sister Luke’. The two were about the same age, for both it was compassion that led them to Africa, and for both - the unpardonable horrors of the war that guided them back. Even more astonishing was the fairly unpublicized fact that the model for Hulme’s protagonist was a real person - Marie Louise Habits, whom Hulme met when both were nurses at a displaced persons camp in Poland immediately after the war, about the time Anna was working in Atlit.  

Hollywood did not stand idly by. Warner Brothers bought the rights to the book and appointed Academy Award winner Fred Zinnemann to direct the picture. Playwright Robert Anderson (“Tea and Sympathy”) wrote the screenplay, and Audrey Hepburn was cast as Sister Luke, with Peter Finch as Dr. Fortunati. The 1959 film was shot in Belgium, in Rome and in the Belgian Congo, and was one of the most prestigious and expensive productions of its time. Zinnemann, who had seen my work from Brazil and Nigeria, chose me to be Second Unit Director, and so the great privilege fell to me, this time on the banks of the immense Congo river, to take part in the recreation of a life story which, thanks to my knowing Anna, was familiar to me long before “The Nun’s Story” was written. 

After Anna retired, she moved to Haifa, where she died in 1987, aged 86. She was survived by a number of relatives in Israel. Albert Schweitzer died in Lambarene in 1965, aged 90. His wife Helene Bresslau, a Jewess four years his junior, died in 1957, after 45 years of marriage. Their daughter Rhena, an only child, took over the hospital after her father’s death, and lived to the age of 90. She was married and had children and grandchildren, and she died in 2009.

The others also are no more. Photographer Erica Anderson died in 1976, aged 62. Author Kathryn Hulme, born in San Francisco in 1900, died on the island of Maui in Hawaii in 1981, with Marie Louise Habets, the ex-nun, at her bedside. The two women had lived together since the war. Marie Louise herself, born in Belgium, remained in Maui and died there five years later, one year before Anna’s death.  

Vienna-born Fred Zinnemann, whose The Nun’s Story won eight Academy Awards and numerous distinctions, died, after a brilliant career, in London in 1997. American-born Robert Anderson, the screenwriter, died in Manhattan in 2009, aged 91. The captivating Audrey Hepburn, born in Belgium, died at 63 in Switzerland where she lived. Peter Finch, born in London, and having served during the war in the British Forces in Palestine, died in Beverly Hills in 1977.

My professor at UCLA and lifelong friend Dr. Kurt Bergel, who encouraged me to seek out Dr. Schweitzer, died in Orange, California, in 2001. After leaving UCLA, he founded the Albert Schweitzer Institute at Chapman College, and directed it well beyond his retirement. The three African countries involved, European colonies then, have long since won independence. Their names were changed, and their borders randomly redrawn, not without bloodshed. The names of the three great rivers – the Ogowe, the Niger, and the Congo – alone remain the same as they were then, unaltered to this day.

 

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Comments

Caroline
2010-11-14
TO SAM ZEBBA - TODA RABA Dear Mr. Zebba, You are the first author ever from whom I ve heard more about Anna Wildikann. I am researching her life as well as that of other Jewish doctors and nurses who worked with Schweitzer during WW II. My impression is that he did not regard the cause of their plight and fate as high rank priority - he hardly ever, almost never referred to this issue after 1945 when he could have. Anna Wildikann ´s emigration to Israel and the way he mentioned her in his diaries has struck me as casual - perhaps it was only discreet. But also the story of his wife s Jewish family did not seem to occupy large space in his concerns. I might be wrong - I d just like to know more and better. Now, I wonder whether you know who inherited Anna Wildikann s pictures, her writings etc. and how I might get in touch with whoever it may be. Sorry for being so forthright about my skepticism regarding Schweitzer. My deep impression is that he could have and should been more outspoken about Germany s barbaric history after 1945. Few people have spoken up about this so far, especially in Germany. I, born in 1958, have been conducting research on this whole issue since 1990. I hope one day to publish my findings and I am grateful for any additional information. If you dont know any more about this, please simply forget about my request. Sending you my kindest regards and very best wishes, Caroline Fetscher
Ruth P. Zager, MD
2014-09-08
Thank you for your article about Anna Wildikann, an immensely interesting person whom my husband and I met in July 1956 aboard the S.S. Independence going to Europe. We saw her again in Israel later that summer, and spent many fascinating hours listening to her life story and experiences. She also generously took us on a walking tour of Jerusalem pointing out many of the sites she had seen and photographed over the years. As we left, she gave us a copy of the Pelican book she had photographed for Schweitzer. Since then, we have often thought of her and wondered what had happened to her. Regrettably--for us--the press of professional and family obligations occupied most of our time and attention, and precluded our returning to Jerusalem for many years. We wish you well with your continuing work, Ruth Zager

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About the author

Sam Zebba

Born in 1924, Dr. Sam Zebba immigrated to Palestine from Latvia with his parents when he was 9. He served in the Haganah and in the British Army during WW2. A literary scholar and occasional writ...
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