Alexander Libo — Association of Jews of Vilna and vicinity in Israel

My Father – Alexander Libo / by Lyuba Gilon-Libo

It is difficult to write about my father or try to recall what he looked like. He was an integral part of me, living within me.

I see him in all periods of my life. First of all, he was a busy father, wrapped up most of the time in the mystery of his clinic. He only made time to play with me on Sundays. I know that he is a doctor, but I am not allowed to come into contact with all those children I can hear screaming on the other side of the corridor, and I don’t have any idea of what he is doing to them there.

Once, when I was six, an old lady came across me. She hugged me and said: “You must be Dr. Libo’s daughter. Thanks to him you will be blessed. You have no idea what a good father you have”. A few months later, when we were at the Augustovo lakes, father gives up going a boat trip with us in order to give artificial respiration to a girl, for an hour or two, in spite of her showing no signs of life. He manages to save her and then I start to comprehend that my father helps people.

I contracted pneumonia when I was eight. Father reads me the part about Ilyusha’s illness from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. I cry and he has tears in his eyes. My mother contends that this literature is unsuitable for a little girl with a temperature. She may be right but I have inherited my love for Dostoevsky from my father.

Great Expectations by Dickens was the only book in English that we had, and we read it together when in hiding in 1943. The light was dim, barely enough to make out the small print of the book that we took turns in holding, and that’s how we learned English. Reading was only one of my father’s many activities: before the war, we played hide-and-seek in the archives of the monastery next to the Church of the Three Crosses. Father was our shoe-maker, he sewed slippers for all of us from the cloth bindings of books and files from the law courts. He made boxes and saltcellars from carton. He used leftover bread to shape interesting and funny heads. He was also our barber/hairdresser. Whenever there was an argument, he would arbitrate. On my parents’ 15^th wedding anniversary, 26^th March 1943, father wrote such a beautiful greetings card for mother, decorated with hearts and full of gratitude. Even then I saw this as a symbol of the power of love which only strengthened and deepened in the difficult days to come. Father’s love for mother was rare, he also appreciated her inner strength, her optimism and her ability to make decisions. When I was about 17, I complained to my father that mother was spending money on hats which she wore for only two weeks. His answer was: Perhaps that’s true, but he preferred mother with all her weaknesses over us girls.

Father knew how to enjoy and love life. He was interested in everything going on around him. He was hungry for new experiences. He collected books about the Holocaust, loved taking landscape and family photographs. Collected antique cups and stamps, read books in six languages, participated in all the meetings of ear nose and throat doctors and read professional literature. He was involved in skiing in Poland in the 1950s, dragged my sister and I to swim in the pouring rain. When he was in Israel, prior to his death, he would go on trips to the Galilee, since he had still not visited Rosh Hanikra. He familiarized himself with Israel and was always willing to spend his few hours of rest traveling out of the city. When he came to visit us in Ramat HaSharon, he delighted in pruning the branches of the trees in the hedge. He didn’t think twice about mending the broken clothes line, or broken chair. Father loved flowers and picked wild ones near our house. He grew about one hundred different cacti on the balcony of his apartment in Ahad Ha’am Street. When he was hospitalized in Kfar Saba, he asked me to bring him violets from my garden.

Father had the curiosity of a child and an inventor. “Nothing human is foreign to me”, he would say. When he was over 60, he tried fishing for the first time in the Masurian lakes of Poland. Or, in his latter days, he would enthusiastically prepare chopped liver or cookies at home and serve them proudly to his guests.

En route to Israel, in October 1958, we spent a few days in Naples. Father wouldn’t let us, the women, buy anything. The little money we had was spent on visiting sites. We spent four hours at Pompeii with father as our guide. He was delighted that he could recall almost every stone from when he had spent his honeymoon there.

My father’s first year in Israel was very difficult. You need a lot of courage to endure such a drastic change. In Lodz, father was the most popular ear nose and throat doctor, and wasn’t able to receive all the patients who waited on his doorstep. When he first came here, he didn’t have any work. He would travel on three buses from Beit Brodetski in Ramat Aviv in order to stand in for a doctor in a hospital in Petach Tikva. Later on, after we had moved to an apartment in Ahad Ha’am Street in Tel Aviv, he would wait for patients – but they never came. However, once a patient had been treated by my father, they would never go to any other doctor. His patients always felt that father didn’t just love his work and his profession, but he also cared for them. The only difficulty that father faced in his practises, both abroad and in Israel, was that of money. I once saw a few liras being returned to an old lady. Father explained: “When she took the money out of her purse, I felt that she had trouble paying and so, I also gave her the medicine. A lot of patients left the clinic with their medicines. Children were given sweets, boxes, syringes, stamps – all accompanied by Dr. Libo‘s unforgettable smile.

Father had the patience to explain the nature of the illness to his patients, to prepare a drawing of the tonsils and polyps which were congested in some patients. Father was a specialist in his field. He invented a special device to remove objects from the ear (in Vilna he had a box full of beads, beans and pebbles which he had removed from ears. After the war, he started a new collection of which he could be proud). Father cured sinusitis by injecting penicillin into the sinus instead of prescribing antibiotics as was the norm with most doctors. Actors and singers would come to him for his excellent treatment of the vocal cords. My father also derived a lot of pleasure from his patients. In Vilna before the war, they would show their sentiments in many ways, by bringing eggs or jam, bread or woollen socks from ‘the other side’ into the ghetto. In Lodz, there were more flowers and paintings.

Father knew how to tell stories. I remember stories from every period of his life. Just segments. The story of his entrance exam to the Russian gymnasia in Vilna, when he recited a proverb from Krilov and the examiner made fun of his guttural ‘R’, about the fun he had as a student at Dorft, about how he spent WW1 as a young doctor, falling asleep on horseback due to fatigue, how he saw, for the first time, Russian soldiers dying from the poison gas unleashed by the Germans, his clinic’s first patient, how he had courted mother. Just like Shalom Aleichem whose books father loved to read and recite from, father knew how to tell a story with a touch of humor, and how, in the Lukiškės prison together with three others, they turned over in unison at night as there was only one blanket between them.

Father would tell us about plays he had seen, concerts he had listened to, about the roles played by the actor Avrom Morevski, about the actor’s appetite, how we would ask the restaurant owner Walwake Osian “What is the cost per hour to eat here?”. About Chaliapin, about Vakhtangov’s theatre, about Esther Rachel Kaminska. Father loved the theatre. He could recite parts of plays which he loved by heart. I can still hear the words from The Lower Depths by Gorky: ‘How proud the word rings - Man’, and the words of the old man who quoted them in order to explain why people become soft. Father also enjoyed going to the theatre in Israel. The last play we saw together was Ish Hasid Haya (A Pious Man). By then, he was not feeling well, but insisted on going and subsequently enjoyed the play.

He didn’t give up on life until his dying day. He spoke to other patients who shared his hospital room, with a black man from Nigeria, with the author Uchmani. He was happy when friends came, was enthusiastic about a book that had something new to say about Modigliani, the artist. When I went to visit him during Purim 1970, with our children in fancy dress costumes, father took their photos, even though it was difficult for him to stand holding a camera. He asked about their school, the kindergarten, and was cheered by the drawings the children used to bring him.

Father loved Vilna. He would collect every little thing which had a connection to Vilna: photos of Bolhak and himself, charity stamps, pictures, books. He was happy that I hadn’t forgotten our long skiing trips to Zekert, along Mele Pohulanka Street, the small streets of the ghetto, Ostara Berma, Anatokol, Wolokumpie, where we spent each summer before the war. I was amazed that father was able to swim across the Vilia River. When he went with my sister to Vilna in 1956, he  took photos of all the historical sites. Father dreamt of a Vilna House in Israel to enable our children to see, know and never forget.

Father belonged to the generation that knew how to write and loved writing letters. There were many people all over the world who were lucky to have received letters from him. Each week, he would spend the evening after a long day’s work, even sometimes after a meeting, writing dozens of letters. He would correspond with childhood friends who he hadn’t seen for 50 years; with friends who had helped us a lot during the German occupation; with the priest, Stakauskas, who had organized hiding places for us and our friends in the country.

He also used to love writing me letters. Father was shy and it was often difficult for him to express his feelings, such as love or rebuke. That’s why I still have and cherish several pages covered with his beautiful and neat handwriting. These letters contain a great deal of guidance, morality, quotes from Ovid and Shakespeare, advice, requests, critiques, expressing regret that there was no time left for a quiet talk. Reflections, dreams. Pages containing so much love – the precious thing he bestowed upon me and to all those who knew my father – Dr. Alexander Libo.