Lives Lived

Ejnar Gottlieb attended medical school in Germany as a naval officer during World War II. The fall of Germany found Dr. Gottlieb and his wife, Owanta, destitute and frantic to leave the country. In October 1945 they escaped Germany by crossing barbed wire barriers and swimming across the Rhine River to enter Switzerland illegally.

A friend told the Gottliebs of a Dr. Fleishcer who had just come from Canada via the Bahamas where he came to know a big industrialist, Wallace Groves. Groves was looking for a doctor to take care of 800 employees of a lumbering operation. In March 1949 Gottlieb received a telegram “Bahamian landing permit granted – when can you come?” signed W. Groves.

The Gottliebs borrowed money and booked passage on the immigrant ship, the “Vulcania” to New York City. From Nassau they traveled via seaplane directly to Little Whale Cay where we met Groves for the first time. They were warned of the primitive conditions at Pine Ridge.

From Little Whale Cay, they flew, via seaplane, to the north shore of Grand Bahama where they were transported by a small dingy to the dock. They rode a “pop shot”, rattling over crooked rails, through a marshy flat landscape to the center of the island. A few grey wooden shacks, clustered around a modern sawmill with a high smoking chimney greeted them at Pine Ridge lumber camp.

Dr. Gottlieb soon discovered that the one room clinic contained nothing but a wooden bench and a shelf. Their home was an empty shack, divided by two wooden walls. Steam locomotives rattled past the shack, whistling loudly, pulling cars loaded with timber to the north shore. Noise from the sawmill competed with the open theatre that showed Western movies every Wednesday and Saturday nights. Opposite their home stood the bar, a scene for many a fight, and the only store. The community church, ten yards from the front door, transmitted sermons over loudspeakers, in an effort to convert the godless.

Within days of arrival, Dr. Gottlieb began caring for up to 80 patients a day. Owanta, through necessity, became his competent nursing assistant. They found a high incidence of malnutrition, hypertension and venereal disease. He charged £2 – £10 ($7.00) for delivery of baby.