1939-1945 : DISNA Jews fight for life at home and abroad

Earlier I had incorrectly assumed that the Alex Aronson from Bronx found on lists of members of an "immigrants from Nesvizh mutual assistance society" (a landsmanshaften) was the Alex Aronson from Vyse Ave Bronx.

The Vyse Ave Aronson family also consisted of Olga the mother and children Charles, Lillian and Samuel.

Charles was one of a pair of America's "last", whose life was saved by becoming the "first" ever in history to receive an antibiotics injection (Penicillin), 75 years ago this October 16th 2015.

To mark this august anniversary, of both the birth of our Age of Antibiotics and the re-birth of some sense of compassion for others, I am trying to retrace Charles' life.

Nesvizh

But while the Nesvizh area Alex may share a very close birthdate with the Vyse Ave Alex, he is a different individual.

Lisa Beth Liel over at GENI lays out his family connections --- including his uncle Jeremiah Arenssen.

It just so happens that out of the ten trillion different ways to spell Aaron's son, a New York Jewish family spelled Arenssen is totally unique.

Usefully so.

Because this uncle from Nesvizh, Jeremiah Arenssen, was the witness for Alex of Vyse Avenue's naturalization process.

And these witnesses were very, very often relatives from home who had arrived in America years earlier.

So the connection, if any, between these two Alex Aronson from the Bronx still remains unresolved.

Vyse Avenue's Alex , before the old Russian Empire broke up, always said he was born in Kieff (Kiev) Russia , today the capital of Ukraine --- a great distance from either Nesvizh or Disna, which are today part of Belarus and between 1919-1939 were part of Poland.

Disna

But he is buried, along with the rest of his family, in a section of New York's New Montefiore cemetery that is set aside for members of the Disna benevolent society - of which a Sam and Lillian Aronson from the Bronx were members in 1967.

And we know these two family members were still living in the Bronx at that time and were the only family members still alive in 1967.

The wartime fate of the Jews of Disna is as dismal as that of the Jews of Nesvizh - virtually all were mass murdered in short order, with only a very few escaping to share the partisans' short and brutish lives and even fewer surviving the entire war.

The Allies could be little better : refusing to give Charles Aronson penicillin to save his life from death from endocarditis because endocarditis was deemed 'not important to the military conduct of the war'.

But one Gentile named Dr Martin Henry Dawson would not stand for that sort of downmarket Nazism.

Rescuing America's Jews, during WWII

He gave up his own life to see that that America's unwanted, blacks like Aaron Leroy Alston and Jews like Charles Aronson (and many more like them) were given a chance at life.

Dawson died tragically young (48) on April 27 1945 but he had finally succeeded in his efforts to see that the Allies' wartime penicillin was freely given to all those dying for lack of it.

Charles Aronson, after twice being cured of then invariably fatal endocarditis by Dawson, lived on six more years after his doctor died - then dying himself on October 16th 1951.

He was almost 40.

A beautiful monument is in that Disna area of the cemetery, raised up in 1964 to honor all those Jews from Disna lost during WWII.

But no monument is there to honor this young man from a family of Disna Jews who was saved during WWII ...

Genealogy, like melodies, is all about those 'permutations and combinations' we learned in school

Every wonder how a composer get a endless stream of unique melodies from 'just seven notes' ?

 Ever wonder how researchers find people lost to history, with only a tiny handful of facts to guide them ?

Math popularizers explain all those wonderfully different melodies and all those wonderful genealogical successes by the simple arithmetic of combinations and permutations.

Why all melodies are so unique

First, remember that most successful melodies don't actually stay in just one key and one octave, which is where all this hot-aired talk about 'only seven (diatonic) notes' comes from.

They always have a few accidentals (chromatic notes) added and usually extend the melody range up to one octave and a fifth --- giving us about 20 notes to work with on each step of the melody.

In reality, to be successful, each new note in a melody is best restricted to a handful of choices most of time (the interval between two successive notes is more likely to be some kind of a third or a second than a flat seventh for example).

But good melodies are good mostly because they do throw in unexpected surprises, in the interval department among others.

So for any average note, the next note can truly be any of ten notes higher or lower in pitch.

(It can also remain at the same pitch or even remain silent.)

In an average dozen note long 'tune', that is already billions of choices (basically 20 x 20 x 20 x 20 x 20 x 20 x 20 x 20 x 20 x 20 etc) - and we haven't even considered the fact that each note can be one of about a dozen common durations.

(Half notes, 16th notes, tied notes, triplets,swing 8ths, etc - on and on.)

Now we're up to trillions of choices.

Thrown in the fact that every successful tune has a meter and musical style indicated at the top of the score sheet that imply* a built in set of expectations of varying accents (loudness,brightness,forcefulness) on each note.

Accents that we are also free to ignore, momentarily, to provide some more of those wonderful musical surprises.

Now we're climbing into the cosmos of infinite choices.

While melody building adds choice , genealogical research reduces choice

Genealogy also starts with just a few notes, err, facts.

Say just a person's first name, last name, year of birth and the area where they lived.

So Columbia Presbyterian hospital SBE patient Charles Aronson, born 1913 and living in the New York City area in October 1940 and again in April 1944.

But a melody is truly unique only over the run of its dozen or so notes - it builds up it uniqueness.

By contrast, finding a lost historical figure requires , in a real sense, that each note in a tune be totally unique in its pitch x duration x accent - it seeks to cut down a long long humdrum melody to a single unique note.

Genealogy is helped by the fact that the choices for each of its equivalents to pitch, duration and accent are much, much larger than that of music.

For at any moment in time there are only about 100 possible birth years involving living people.

But with the sort of dead people that we can hope to find more about (say the fairly recent past of the last 200 years), we now get a choice of several hundred birth years.

Even when shared amongst ten billion people (counting everyone who ever lived in the past 200 years), we still find that , on average, only about 50 million people shared each birth year.

But that reflects today's huge populations and drop in childhood deaths --- probably only a million people worldwide survived childhood to share the birth year of 1913 by the year 1940.

We also have a first name.

Now Charles is a very common name in western culture - but there are literally hundreds of names as common as Charles in our culture and in total tens and tens of thousands of possible first names worldwide.

Let us guess wildly and say  100,000 people in 1940  had the name Charles.

Aronson is a relatively uncommon last name in a world of tens and tens of thousands of last names.

Uncommon except among Eastern European Jews immigrants - two million who lived in NYC area between 1913 and 1940.

Maybe 100,000 people were named Aronson worldwide in 1940.

So say 5000 people named Aronson lived in NYC area in those years and 20,000 in total in the two Americas.

(In wartime, I don't feel anyone but from the two Americas would have/could have travelled to New York to treat an illness --- particularly a disease mostly found among the poor.)

How many were both Charles and Aronson in all of the two Americas ?

At best, I feel maybe 400.

How many are Charles Aronsons in the Americas  born in 1913 ?

Two.

At least as far as I have found by searching the half dozen national and local census produced between 1915 and 1940 in the US and Canada.

One born and raised in the NYC area and living on Vyse Avenue in the Bronx in 1940 , the other born in the Mid-West who wandered widely over his life - living in the metropolitan Detroit area in 1940.

Now it is still a very, very remotely possible the Detroit Charles Aronson might have travelled specially a thousand miles, only to end up to a public (charity) ward in a 1940 NYC hospital.

There to be treated as extensively as all public charity cases are always treated (joke !).

And to treated for a rapidly invariably fatal disease by a doctor who had never been known for treating this disease, until now.

But it doesn't seem likely, now does it - if one is going to die at the hands of a relative amateur - why not do so more cheaply and comfortably at home ?

And remember the known medical history of our Charles Aronson is relatively extensive and seems to indicate he remained in close contact with the doctors at Columbia Presbyterian in 1940-1941 and 1944-1945 - again suggesting he was from the NY area.

(For wartime travel was almost as difficult within America as it was travelling to America in the war years.)

So of the literally thousands of metropolitan areas in the two Americas, I have further restricted my choice down to just one - albeit by far the biggest one, if looking for Aronson names !

These are the cumulative reasons  why I have focussed all my efforts in finding the Charles Aronson who was the first patient in history to receive an antibiotic, upon this Bronx Charles Aronson.....

* My good friend, Queens Professor Margaret Little , had a good classical education on piano but had never heard any Rolling Stones songs and tried, one day in 1980, to play some of their songs from a conventional piano score.

She accurately followed the score, including the meter, but did not understand the implied musical conventions. The results were - my other good friend Paul Withers would agree - interesting !

They sounds totally not at all like the actual tune.

The search for Antibiotics' PATIENT ZERO .... in lead-up to celebration of 75 years of life-saving antibiotics

ABSTRACT : Patient Zero of the Age of Antibiotics (seventy five years young as of October 16th 2015) was Charles Aronson , a Jewish youth from 1202 Vyse Street in East Tremont, Bronx, New York.

Born about 1913, he was a newspaper teletype operator in 1940.

His parents Alex (born in 1889) and Olga (born 1890) were from the old Polish part of the old (pre-Soviet) Russian Empire while he and his sister Lillian (born about 1915) and younger brother Samuel (born about 1920) were born in New York.

Olga was a homemaker and Alex was a ladies coat maker (probably cutting ladies' fur coats at the famous Levine and Smith firm in lower Manhattan) and their two other children were belt-makers.

Charles had a lifelong affinity/weakness for deadly diseases caused by strep throats, combined with an amazing ability to cheat death from them --- over and over.

As a small child , he had a near fatal case of Rheumatic Fever, that affected not only his joints temporarily and his heart valves permanently , but also led to severe neurological effects.

Then he was quickly swept up in the frequently fatal mysterious "sleepy sickness" that ran its course worldwide from 1917 to 1927. Oliver Sacks made it famous in the book and movie called Awakenings.

Those it didn't quickly kill outright, it would often leave in a coma or catatonic state.

Again he survived this disease as he did its frequent Parkinson-like aftereffects.

Despite all these brain-related attacks, he not only managed to finish High School during the hard times of the Great Depression but also to find a good skilled job as a teletype operator at a newspaper.

He then survived two attacks of fatal SBE thanks to receiving history's first penicillin , only to get a severe stroke in 1944 that left him paralyzed and speechless.

Again he survived at least until the beginning of 1949, when he passes out of the public record.

I currently believe he died in October 1951 and is buried at the NEW MONTEFIORE cemetery in West Babylon (Long Island) , along with his parents and two siblings.

****************************

Penicillin-the-Antiseptic was already twelve years old in October 1940 and a relative laggard in the human discovery and use  of antibiotics (maybe antibiotic number twelve ?) --- at least by the dictionary definition of antibiotics.

The dictionaries describe antibiotics as lethal substances produced by one microbe to keep other microbes at bay.

But you and I - mere laypeople and not dictionary editors - know exactly what Antibiotics are and are not (that's a capital "A" there , by the way !)

They are not some minor external antiseptic your mom dabs on your scraped knee when you fall off your tricycle, as penicillin had only been used  for from the Fall of 1928 to the Fall of 1940.

Rather they are highly potent lifesavers that you take internally as a ten day course of pills - or in a real emergency, get many times a day via injections.

In one sense we already know a good deal about injected penicillin's INDEX PATIENT , the individual who started the whole thing by inspiring Dr Dawson to birth the Age of Antibiotics.

His name was Aaron (Leroy) Alston and he had had his 'invariably fatal' condition of SBE (subacute bacterial endocarditis, a Rheumatic Heart Disease usually caused by Rheumatic Fever) for about a year.

The latest conventional treatment was to give the patient as much of the latest (least toxic, most powerful) sulfa drug as their body could endure.

(All sulfa drugs are toxic in high doses  and the size of the doses of sulfa that 99% of SBE cases need for a cure would result in patient death long before they cured.)

Alston had all the latest sulfa drugs and many of the other proposed SBE cures besides and none were working.

But I believe that the first patient to actually get that historic  first needle of penicillin , our historic PATIENT ZERO , even if only moments before Alston, was a last minute patient called Charles Aronson.

If Aaron Leroy Alston had been cured by his historic course of injected penicillin , the ever-present and very jealous Alpha Males among medical scientists would have quickly trashed this claim - crediting sulfa drugs for the success instead.

But if Charles Aronson, a patient so new he hadn't yet had time to be put on the conventional sulfa treatment , was cured of SBE after a course of penicillin , the critics would all be left speechless.

Better then to 'do' him first, to make a stronger lead in the subsequent medical article.

Penicillin did not cure Alston and he died three months later.

Nor did penicillin - alone - cure Aronson.

But a little penicillin (more morale booster than medicine) a lot of sulfa and a miracle from heaven above let Aronson be that very rare person, maybe one in a hundred or one in a thousand who survived more than three years after first contracting SBE.

About four years later , he got an onset of a new SBE attack and this time got a decent amount of penicillin from the same doctor and was cured.

So who was he ?

The doctor who gave those first needles , Dr Martin Henry Dawson, had never been a lead doctor on treating an SBE case before - he was newly appointed to  a middle rank position in the hospital pecking order - only having substantive control over one public (semi-free /teaching) ward.

Such wards tended to attract poor patients and their poor relatives, who liked getting free or cheap treatment in a world class hospital that was only a short bus trip away.

Dawson had no reputation for his SBE work having never dealt with any - so his public ward patients were almost certain attracted to the closest cheapest quality hospital rather than to him personally.

The other historic penicillin patient, Aaron Alston , proved that so - he lived about two miles south of the hospital.

In any case, there were only two men named Charles Aronson in the 1940 national US census that were born around 1913.

I contacted the children of the one who lived a thousand kilometres away from NYC at the time - they said he was never sick - let alone sick with all the severe diseases as described by Dr Dawson's medical report on his Charles Aronson.

The only other Charles Aronson the right age in America in 1940 was lived in the Bronx, a mere four miles directly east of the hospital.

He had to be PATIENT ZERO.

I have already described what we know of him in the abstract above --- basically not much.

For unlike Alston (and the third penicillin-the-Antibiotic patient, George Conant) Charles Aronson and his family seemed to have left almost no mark in the public record.

Even so, it is hard to believe that an entire Jewish family of five that lived in the same part of the Bronx for over fifty years are remembered by no one.

In the 1930s, the Bronx was the world's biggest Jewish community and while those days are long gone , literally millions of North American Jews still have some sort of family link to the pre-war Bronx.

There is something else I should mention.

Dr Dawson, a gentile , literally gave up his life during WWII to save the lives of  Rheumatic Heart Disease patients sentenced to a Code Slow death by an uncaring Allied Anglo-American medical establishment.

We know the names of only six of those patients - and yet four of the six have Jewish sounding names .

Because Rheumatic Fever and SBE hit the poor , minorities and immigrants the hardest and many metro New York area Jews in those days were very poor I suspect this ratio would hold if we knew the names of all those saved from death by his efforts.

(Because Dawson also inspired a then small soda pop supplier in Brooklyn (Pfizer) to develop the natural fermentation process we still use to make 95% of all our antibiotics , we all owe him a big debt of gratitude.)

A direct counterpart to Charles Aronson, a German man named Martin Bader, a man with the same chronic conditions as Aronson and who like Charles was a productive employed citizen , wasn't so lucky.

His condition rendered him in the Nazi mind as a life unworthy of life and he was one of the first killed by the Aktion T4 program as part of the run up to the Holocaust.

Yet America and New York were the ones who actually birthed eugenics , not Germany , and if America was unwilling to directly murder 'unfit' Jews such as Aronson, they came damn close by officially denying them access to wartime penicillin.

Dawson gave up his life to combat these values and in the end he was successful  - the powerful War Production Board  (WPB) reversed course and made penicillin-for-all a vital wartime priority.

So Charles Aronson's story is that distinct rarity , a wartime story of Jews and eugenics that ends up a good news story with world wide benefits for all of us.

Yet another reason to find out more about this elusive PATIENT ZERO of the Age of Antibiotics ....

Penicillin's first MIRACLE : that at the height of race prejudice in 1940 America, the first two to receive the miracle drug were a Jew and a Black

If you are Jewish and your family was from Greater NYC , in particular from the Bronx between the 1910s and the 1960s , I could really really use your help

The patient initially intended to receive history's first ever penicillin shot was Aaron Leroy Alston from St Nicholas Ave in Harlem.

But when Charles Aronson arrived at NYC's CUMC hospital with the same disease (SBE - a form of endocarditis) just before the historical first injection began, he was added in at the last moment.

So both young men shared in that historic 'first in the world' penicillin shot , on October 16th 1940.

When Alston died and Aronson went home cured of SBE, a third man - a private (full paying) patient named George Milton Conant from Middletown in upstate New York - got the penicillin intended for Alston.

I have located the families of Alston and Conant  , so now only Aronson's relatives remain to be found .

(We know nothing at all of the fourth and fifth patient in this historic series of penicillin cases.

An eyewitness to their treatment, bacteriologist Dr Gladys Hobby (part of the small four person team involved in making and using this early hospital-made medication) wrote a book on early penicillin thirty years later.

She evidently found nothing in her memory or in hospital records worth recounting of these two SBE patients in her book (Penicillin : Meeting the Challenge).

We know only that they were almost certainly males, that they was suffering from SBE endocarditis and that they probably died sometime in 1941 -- probably at CUMC.)

Here is what we know for certain about Charles Aronson - followed by what we can surmise about him.

He was born in 1913 and soon demonstrated that he was both (A) extraordinarily susceptible to death-dealing diseases caused by strep bacteria and (B) very capable of repeatedly fighting them off.

Dr Dawson, his penicillin doctor, does not detail all of Charles' very complicated medical record but shows enough to prove my claim.

 For at least six times he snatched himself out of death's jaws.

In 1921, at age eight, he has full blown acute Rheumatic Fever.

His immune system over-reacted to strep throat by damaging his heart valves and temporarily giving him arthritis and attacking his nerve and brain cells , so called chorea,  a fairly severe neurological condition thought to eventually resolve itself.

In 1926, age 13, Aronson gets severe sleeping sickness (a la Oliver Sacks and L-dopa) - a disease now believed to also be an auto-immune over-reaction to strep throat.

Again it did not kill him but leaves him with a severe post-sleeping sickness Parkinson's syndrome which he also survives.

In 1940 he gets his first bout of SBE endocarditis , a disease of mouth strep bacteria settling in and destroying damaged heart valves caused by Rheumatic Fever.

It then was usually considered to kill 99 out every 100 patients. But - once again - with a little penicillin and a lot of sulfa drugs he survives !

In 1944 he gets SBE again , survives it with much more of Dr Dawson's penicillin only to get a severe life-threatening stroke that leaves him paralyzed.

Again he survives and is alive two years later (in a chronic care hospital).

He doesn't appear on the indexed NYC death registry up to its close-off in 1948 and I can find no further trace of him.

Because Dawson had not been involved in endocarditis research before Alston and Aronson, he couldn't have been the type of doctor to attract patients from far and near.

Instead he was just a relatively newly promoted middle level doctor now allowed to look after one (male) public ward without too much heavy hand from his superiors.

Its non-paying patients usually were relatively poor and as a result tended to come from a catchment area just a few miles around CUMC --- so their equally poor relatives could visit them easily and still sleep at home at night.

In 1940 that catchment area meant (A) then mostly black Harlem (Alston) and (B) then mostly Jewish Bronx (Aronson).

Or so it seems to me.

Dr Dawson's notes on him shows a detailed knowledge of Aronson's post-hospital care in 1940-1941 and again in 1944 and again in 1944-1945 , which suggests he was living close enough to Dawson at CUMC for the doctor to easily keep tabs on him.

This led me to seek any Charles Aronson born in 1913 and living in the greater NYC cum tri-state area in 1940 - conveniently also a federal census year.

You try this yourself, in archives.com etc.

I found just one - living on Vyse Avenue, Bronx - just a few miles from CUMC.

Father Alex (Alexander) , mother Olga - Jewish , in their fifties, from the former Russian Empire . She is a homemaker and he is a machine operator in a ladies cloak factory.

Charles has a brother Samuel who is born about 1919 and a sister Lillian born about 1914. Both work in a ladies belt factory.

Charles has been an office clerk and now is a teletype operator in a newspaper plant - he is working full time , getting more hours annually than the rest of the family.

We can consistently trace this family backwards through federal and state censuses till the turn of the century -they lived in Bronx for at least a half century.

But so far, a total dead end after 1940 for all five members.

A hint that a Samuel Aronson from the Bronx might have become a wartime merchant seaman - another hint that a Lillian Aronson from the Bronx never married .

Hints from the social security index that Alexander dies in 1971, Samuel in 1976 and Lillian in 1980 --- all in NYC  .

The NYC death index shows an Alexander Aronson dying in Manhattan (at a Manhattan hospital ?) June 10 1947 aged 65 - birth 1887 - which also fits well.

I'd like to find someone who says that 'combining that unique medical history with that birth date and name --- my family knew of just such a Charles Aronson !'

And I'd like it soon - because next October 2015 is the 75th anniversary of history's first ever penicillin shots - and it would be extra nice if Aronson's relatives also joined Alston's relatives in receiving the accolades from around the world....