Harry Urban (Garri Semionovitch Urban)
Authors: Tim Bullamore
Journal: BMJ (2004)

Harry Urban's medical training at Padua University in the late 1930s could scarcely have prepared him for the horrors he was to experience as a prisoner in a Soviet labour camp inside the Arctic Circle, or in Tashkent and the furthest reaches of Kazakhstan, or—after the second world war—dealing with tropical diseases in the remote plains of Apure in Venezuela.

Despite coming from Poland (the son of a farmer; his mother died when he was 14) he went to university in Italy because of the quota imposed on Jewish students in the 1930s by the Polish government. He graduated in 1939 and returned home, but as Poland disintegrated found himself in the south of the country, in Galicia. On Christmas Eve that year he attempted to swim across the River Prut and into Romania but was shot, captured, and sentenced by the Moscow Troika court to five years hard labour at Niva III camp, near Kandalaksha in the Arctic Circle, 150 miles from the Finnish border.

There, amid a Kafkaesque world of intrigue and betrayal, his medical skills became indispensable to the prison authorities. But Urban was not content to comply meekly with their wishes. In between making advances towards female officers and being punished for organising prayers at Yom Kippur, he plotted to escape. Succeeding, by wearing a stolen uniform, he made his way to Moscow, where he found informal work among diplomats and the foreign community and delighted in seducing more women. He also resisted attempts to turn him into an informer.

As the Nazis moved east in the summer of 1941 Urban and many others left Moscow. He made his way to Tashkent in Uzbekistan, acquired a fiancee—a fashion magazine editor called Nokka Kapranova—was arrested once more in January 1943, shared a prison cell with Rachmaninov's brother, was tortured, sentenced to death, faced a mock firing squad, tried to kill himself by biting through his veins, and then escaped and fled to Kazakhstan.

There the authorities, desperate for doctors, took a different view of Urban's “crimes,” so much so that by the end of January 1944 he had been appointed chief medical officer on a train repatriating Ukrainians to the newly liberated Kiev. Once in the city he opened a sexually transmitted diseases clinic that proved to be exceptionally busy—particularly with local Communist apparatchiks. He later worked as a health inspector, a post that required him to oversee the state victory banquet, presided over by Nikita Khrushchev.​Khrushchev.




Figure 1




In his book Tovarisch, I Am Not Dead (1980) Urban documents in graphic detail many of the horrors he witnessed between 1939 and 1946. He applied almost as much care to liberal descriptions of his sexual exploits during the same period, for as he says as early as page 8 (after his first time in bed with a female Soviet officer), “War is surprisingly inducive to love-making.” By page 9 he has enjoyed the company of two Polish women at the same time.

After the war Urban worked initially with the United Nations Relief Rehabilitation Administration in his native Poland and later in Munich. He was dealing with displaced persons, mainly Holocaust survivors, and saw his role as partly political (confronting surviving rogue elements of the fallen Nazi regime who would gladly have seen the survivors suffer further) and partly medical (treating the effects of starvation and brutality in the concentration camps).

His passionate, impetuous, and robust approach brought him into frequent conflict with the occupying powers, and he was not sorry to move on to Belgium to study tropical medicine. Venezuela and the Congo were his two options as an ultimate destination. He chose Venezuela and, little knowing what he was letting himself in for, journeyed to the grassy interior plains of Apure, a region few native doctors would visit. There, as in the Arctic prison camp, he tackled every form of illness and infection that presented itself, including malaria and leprosy. His patients included local head-hunters.

By the late 1950s Urban, who had several bouts of ill health while in Apure, had opened a physiotherapy clinic in Caracas. He had also been appointed doctor to the country's National Guard. He later chose to move into business, as a jeweller and then as a hotelier, owning the Plaza Hotel in Caracas. It was in Caracas that he met his British born second wife, Josephine Johnson, a geography PhD student, who brought him to her home country.

Once in Britain Urban discovered that, contrary to previous reports, one of his family had survived the Holocaust. His brother Menachem was alive and well and living on a kibbutz in Israel. He flew out immediately for an emotional reunion.

Although he never practised medicine again, Urban, who spoke 10 languages, retained his vast medical knowledge and his survivor's instinct. On one occasion on a return visit to Venezuela, when his son Stuart was seriously ill with tropical dysentery and the doctors had given up hope, Urban intervened and changed the course of treatment, saving the boy's life.

Harry Urban leaves a wife and two sons.

Harry Urban (b Warsaw 1916; q Padua 1939), d 16 October 2004.