Thaddeus Stabholz. Translated by Jacques Grunblatt and Hilda R. Grunblatt. 361 pages. New York: Holocaust Library; 1991. $12.95.

In September 1939, Thaddeus Stabholz was wrenched out of a Polish medical school by the German invasion and its aftermath. He was interred in the Warsaw Ghetto and contributed to the uprising until he was captured. Bereft of his murdered family and fiancee and starved nearly to death, Stabholz stayed alive, somehow, in the concentration camps. After the war, he wrote Seven Hells, a cogent, straightforward and unforgettable report, from a Displaced Persons camp. He then emigrated to the United States, attended the University of Vermont School of Medicine, married, had children, and became a primary care physician in Ohio, where he continues to practice today. A decade ago, the translators approached him, and this book is now available in English for the first time.

With a deep shudder, the reader remembers anew the perversion of law in Nazi Germany, recalling vividly that physicians do not live outside their social milieu. Yet it is difficult for any doctor to find the time and means to address social ills. So what to do? Awareness of the lessons of history is an important step. No books about the Holocaust are palatable; none offers an easy means to encounter it. There is no "right time" when the demands of medicine slacken and foster enough emotional reserve that one can bear to dwell on it. Doctors tend to pay more attention to an account given by a colleague than to that by an unselected citizen. The unflinchingly painful details about existence in the concentration camps that Dr. Stabholz inhabited make one put aside the volume repeatedly. The account is not predominantly about medicine but provides descriptions of the clinics and hospitals operating within the concentration camps and of interventions available to prisoner-physicians. A theme that emerges plainly is that decent and humane behavior made a difference, even when death was in the offing. That idea cannot be reinforced too strongly or too often.

What sustained Stabholz's will during the ordeal and afterward? What enabled him to tackle the rigor of training in a new language and a new country? At these one must guess, because the author offers little explicit comment. If a few physicians feel a renewed sense of service and social context from his book, it will doubtless gratify the author and others who have not lost faith in all mankind.

The point is not simply to find our own frustrations more manageable by contrast. It would be a grave mistake to trivialize Dr. Stabholz's experience or the Holocaust by reducing either to the level of easing our own discomfitures. We need the lessons of this book for more subtle and more pervasive reasons, including an enhanced sense of the emotional needs of any Holocaust survivors in our own care. Perhaps best for the physician reader, however, is what amidst the unending frustrations of practice we are liable to forget: the degree to which our every word and action can serve patient and family. To recognize this is to escape from underestimating, and therefore underplaying, the power to heal, even when a biomolecular cure is not available.