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Kurt Steinitz
Kurt Steinitz was born in 1907 in Breslau, as the son of pediatrican Dr. Franz Steinitz. Went to school there, joined the "Kameraden" (German Jewish youth movement), where he met his future wife Elisabeth. Studied medicine and Chemistry in Breslau, Heidelberg and Leipzig.
After graduating had his first medical appointment at "Siloah" Hospital in Hannover, where his uncle Ernst Steinitz was director. When his father Franz died of a heart attack in 1931 he came back to Breslau to be with his mother and worked at Wenzel-Hanfe-Hospital with Professor Erich Frank on a grant by Schering Company.
He got engaged to Elisabeth. While he was on duty a friend from the Kameraden was brought in beaten to death by the Nazis. When on April 1st 1933 the Nazis forbade all doctors to even enter their place of work at the hospital, he decided to leave Germany immediately and within the same month left for Milano, Italy, where his mother knew a colleague of his father, who allowed him to work at his hospital but without a salary. After a few months he felt that anti-semitism was also ripe in Italy and he decided to go to Palestine.
On the boat from Trieste to Haifa he fell ill with Hepatitis which was so serious that he had to begin his life in Palestine in Hospital. After recovering he realized that there were too many doctors in that small country and he joined his cousin Ernst, who was also a young doctor to learn agriculture, especially chicken farming and beekeeping in Kfar Malal near the future Ramot Hashavim.
When his Breslau boss professor Frank was called to Istanbul to establish a department at a University Hospital he asked for Kurt to come with him to establish and lead a medical laboratory. Kurt had to share his post with Elisabeth's sister Erika Bruck who had just completed her medical degree. Kurt came back to Breslau for a few days, married and went back to Palestine only to arrange formalities and to obtain a medical license. He met with Elisabeth in Istanbul where he worked and they lived for 9 years. Every year there was a period of anxiety whether the government contract would be renewed.
Their daughter Irene Rachel was born there in 1936. Meanwhile his mother and his sister Renate with family had come to Palestine and Kurt with wife and daughter immigrated into Palestine in 1943. He worked under very difficult economic conditions in Haifa, eventually establishing a private medical laboratory. His main interest was medical research but with so little technical help that he had to perform all the routine work besides his research. His main interest were Thyroid function, Renal function and Glycogene deficiency diseases. He built the first artificial kidney with the most primitive materials in 1948 when the war of independence had started. In 1946 his second daughter Ilana was born while the family was living with another family in the Arab part of Haifa surrounded by bordellos. In her first year of life Ilana contracted diphtheria and shortly afterward polio. By luck the family could move up to Mount Carmel just before the war started.
As in those years in Palestine conditions did not allow a scientist to devote himself to serious research, Kurt wanted to go to the United States where he would certainly have had a great future. He had tried out conditions on a short trip there in September 1938 exactly at the time of the Munich meeting between Hitler and Chamberlain. Kurt tried again in 1947, but when in the spring of 1948 his sister's husband Rudi Kestler was killed in the war of independence and his mother's home in Jerusalem destroyed by war action he decided to stay in Haifa. Later he was called to Beilinson hopsital in Petach Tikvah, one of the largest hospitals in Israel, to help the biochemistry lab and teach students at Tel Aviv University. He died of a second heart attack on February 26th 1966, aged 58.
[Lore Steinitz]