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Surviving the Holocaust, she helps others survive the horror of Alzheimer’s

Olga Lipschitz Pioneered the Care and Treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease at Cobble Hill Health Center

April 21, 2017 By Andy Katz Special to Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Lipschitz shows pictures of relatives. Eagle photos by Andy Katz
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Olga Lipschitz learned the importance of administration from at a very early age.

In 1940, Olga’s father Benjamin Spitzer left the family in their native Hungary to travel to America where he would work until he earned enough money to send tickets for their passage away from the growing peril of war and repression. Benjamin did well. By late 1941, he had saved enough money to send tickets for the whole family. His wife gathered their children and set out for Budapest and the American embassy to await the visas that would permit them entry into the safety of the New World.

“We waited there all day,” she recalled. “Until a man in charge came out and told us there would be no more travel. The Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor. Now America was in the war, too.”

They returned home. In spite of increasingly strict restrictions imposed on Jewish businesses and participation in public life from Regent Miklos Horthy’s Fascist government, Hungary remained a relatively safe haven for the country’s 900,000 Hungarian speaking Jews.

Then, in early 1944, the Germans occupied Hungary.

She recounts: “We were one of the last families gathered up. It was June-July and hot.  Our cattle car had no windows. We were two weeks riding to Auschwitz. There was no food. There was no water. My mother had a small bottle of vinegar which she rubbed on my lips to help with the thirst … Finally we stopped. I could see the gate of the vast camp before us. The arch upon which was written, ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ … but we stayed on the train. Even we could see the SS men didn’t know what was going on. We never got off the train there. Eventually, the train started moving again.”

Olga would later learn that Rabbi Weissmandl, a leader of the Working Group, an underground organization developed in Slovakia to aid Jews avoiding deportation to the Nazi death camps, had been inside Auschwitz negotiating to pay $50,000 in U.S. dollars to the SS in order that her train be redirected to camps within the Reich. There, inmates might be put to work rather than summarily slaughtered upon arrival.

“By then I was burning up with fever. The train eventually arrived in Austria … there was an open field, and we all got off.  A senior SS officer arrived. The officer told the men he will show them how to do the selection: If more than half of a family could work, then they would be sent to factories in the Reich. He lined us up — my brothers and sisters. I was the middle child, in my 11th year. The officer came to me and put his hand on my shoulder: ‘Are you able to work? Do you want to work?’ he asked me. I was frozen, unable to speak, until my sister pinched me: ‘Tell him yes, you can work!’ she whispered to me in Hungarian. So I did.”

The senior SS officer who queried Olga in that hot Austrian field was the same man who received Rabbi Weissmandl’s bribe — Obersturbanfuhrer SS Adolf Eichmann, a vacuous man of no particular merit other than a brilliant mind for organizational improvisation, which he put to use expediting humanity’s greatest crime against itself.

Olga’s answer saved her family from extermination. Hounded by constant hunger, they worked, scrounged for food and survived until the Red Army’s western drive brought them to Theresienstadt. There, U.S. forces set them free.

Decades later, married with children of her own, Olga chanced to visit a nursing home: “What I saw there was unbelievable,” she sighed.  “I thought I would never again see anything like that. The home was called ‘The Incurables.’ It bothered me tremendously. People laying all day in bed, their linens fouled, no one paying any attention at all to them.”

After she was told that all the nursing homes were like The Incurables, Olga said, “I was young. I was going to change the world.” Summoning organization skills of her own, Olga gathered together a crew of volunteers, young mothers like her, to travel to different facilities and help care for the patients.

In time she realized that to make a real difference in their lives, she would have to take over the front office.

Olga received her long-term care administrator’s license around the time major scandals about the quality of care in east coast skilled nursing facilities were reported in the press, with many facilities and parent corporations accused of fraudulent Medicaid billing and neglecting to care for their patients.

Olga’s work caught the eye of then NY State Commissioner of Health, David Axelrod.

“Dr. Axelrod told me there is a nursing home in Brooklyn … ‘Olga’, he told me, ‘You go clean it up.’ It was in receivership because the care was unacceptable.”

This was the one-time St. Peter’s Hospital, then Congress Nursing Home, and later to become Cobble Hill Health Center, a 500-plus bed facility with a unionized staff and seemingly endless array of problems.

Rolling up her sleeves, Olga took on the troubled behemoth by aligning herself with the union-protected staff, leading by example, putting in long hours and displaying no fear of hard work.

“There was this one fellow, a union delegate,” she explained, “who thought he was something special. I realized I had to make friends with him. I went to him and I said, ‘I want you to be my eyes and ears. You will go from floor to floor. You will be like my assistant, and you will make sure everybody does their work.’ And, lo and behold, it worked!”

During this period, the late 1970s, Olga made a significant administrative breakthrough when she observed that patients diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease required entirely different levels of care than those with other senile and pre-senile dementias.

“They [the Alzheimer’s patients] were far more active, walking, moving about, tending to wander than so many others who suffered strokes or other conditions that also reduced their mobility,” she said.

Up until that point, it was typical to bundle Alzheimer’s patients with any others who required total care. Olga realized, however, that Alzheimer’s patients demanded different levels of reimbursement in order to provide for their needs and keep them safe.

Her efforts on their behalf led to Cobble Hill Health Center becoming a paradigm in the care of Alzheimer’s patients. Cobble Hill would be the first facility in the U.S. to have a dedicated Alzheimer’s unit that provides vital education to relatives and caregivers of Alzheimer’s patients, as well as pioneering the use of non-pharmaceutical interventions such as music therapy and an adult day care center that permits patients to continue living in their own homes.

 

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