Dr. med.
Emil Medak
1890 - 1983

Emil Medak was born on February 2, 1890 in Vienna, as the second of five children of Ludwig Medak and Johanna, née Korsower. From 1909 onwards, the Medak family owned the Café Dobner in Vienna, one of the largest coffee houses in the city. The café was aryanized by the Nazis in June 1938, after which the family only received a small fraction of Café Dobner`s value.

Emil Medaks father Ludwig died in 1942. His wife Johanna Medak was deported to and died in 1943 at the Theresienstadt ghetto. Emil Medak’s sister Selma (1895-1935) died in an accident. His three other sisters successfully fled Europe: emigrating to the USA (Ella 1888-1972 and Bettina 1891-1972) and to England (Paula 1902-1990). The family belonged to the Jewish community. Ludwig and Emil Medak were actively involved in Jewish communities and synagogues and served as chairmen of the board at times.

Education and place to work

Emil Medak attended the k.k. Staatsgymnasium in Vienna and graduated on July 9, 1908. He began his medical studies at the Medical Faculty of the University of Vienna in the winter semester of 1908/09.

He passed his medical board exams on March 29, 1911, on October 31, 1913, and on January 15, 1914. Emil Medak also studied physics and chemistry at the Faculty of Philosophy for another semester in 1913/1914. On January 23, 1914, he completed his doctorate in medicine.

Emil Medak served in the Austrian army in Word War 1 as an officer in the  medical corps. First in the Russian front, then in Romania, and finally on the  Italian front. He received several awards, including the Karl Troop Cross and the Military Merit Medal “Signum laudis” in silver on the ribbon of the Military Merit Cross with swords, as well as the bronze version.

Emil Medak received his internal medicine training at the First Medical University Clinic in Vienna under Karl Friedrich Wenckebach. In 1914, he published a paper entitled “Beitrag zur Chemie des Blutes bei anämischen Krankheitsbildern” (Contribution to the chemistry of blood in anemic conditions) in the Biochemische Zeitschrift (Biochemical Journal).

In collaboration with Bruno Oskar Pribram, he published “Klinisch-pathologische Bewertung von Gallenuntersuchungen am Krankenbett” (Clinical-pathological assessments of bile examinations in the clinical setting) in the Berliner Klinische Wochenschrift (Berlin Clinical Publication) in 1915. This particular publication analyzing bile fluids obtained via a duodenal probe is considered to be one of the earliest works regarding differential diagnoses using this method in various diseases. The paper aimed to examine the role of bile in liver diseases and hematological diseases in the context of a time period where the exact physiology of bilirubin was not yet understood. Following the publication, the findings continued to be widely respected.

On November 18, 1919, Emil Medak married Ida Cohn, born on December 3, 1891, from a wealthy merchant family in St. Pölten and Vienna. On September 23, 1920, Emil Madek and Ida Cohen welcomed their daughter Gertrude into the world, followed by the birth of their son Walter on August 25, 1923.

In 1925, Emil Medak established a practice as general practitioner in Bad Vöslau, Lower Austria. This small spa town is located in the district of Baden and belongs to its Jewish religious community. Emil Medak was involved in the religious community in committees as a representative of the Jewish Working Group

After 1933

Even before Austria’s annexation to the German Reich in 1938, Jewish Austrians suffered from increasing anti-Semitism. Lower Austria consisted of 15 Jewish communities and was thereby the province with the second largest Jewish population in Austria after Vienna. Although Bad Vöslau belonged to the fairly large Jewish community of Baden, in 1934 the corresponding Jewish community there consisted of 99 members and one synagogue.

After the pogroms on March 11 and 12, 1938, many Jews fled from Lower Austria to Vienna. In fact, by October 1938, half of the Jewish population of Lower Austria had already fled. On July 25, 1938, Jewish doctors were not only forbidden to treat non-Jews, but were also limited in identifying themselves as “Krankenbehandler” (NS terminology, meaning something like healthcare provider). As 117 of the 1,150 doctors in Lower Austria were Jewish, the communities in Lower Austria faced challenges replacing the excluded doctors. As part of the so-called “de-Jewification” program in Bad Vöslau, Jews were forced to leave the town by October 1, 1938.

Escape to Palestine

Emil Medak’s children flee to Palestine. At the age of 17 years, Gertrude Medak arrived in Palestine on September 13, 1938, and her 15-year-old brother Walter arrived on October 7, 1938. Emil Medak closed his practice in Bad Vöslau on September 30, 1938, and moved with his wife to one of the Jewish houses at Köstlergasse 5 in Vienna. His assets were confiscated and his valuable items had to be handed over to the Dorotheum (auction house in Vienna) on March 27, 1939.

Emil Medak left Austria on April 29, 1939. He traveled illegally to Palestine on the ship S.S. Liesel.

Dr. Medak arrived on June 3, 1939 (or June 4, 1939) in Haifa and was immediately arrested. His wife, Ida Medak, moved to the Jewish house at Berggasse 13. She was deported on Transport 32 from Vienna to Auschwitz on July 17, 1942, and murdered there in 1943.

Immigration was severely restricted during the years of the British Mandate in Palestine. The majority of Jews applied for an entry visa to Palestine in vain. A rise in illegal immigration, organized by a wide variety of organizations correlated to the increasing Jewish persecution at the end of the 1930s.

Refugees who fled from Vienna via the Danube to Romania were among the passengers on the S.S. Liesel journeying across the Black Sea. Since the Danube was considered international waters, only transit visas for Romania were required for the journey. On the evening of April 29, 1939, 720 refugees boarded organized special trams in Vienna and traveled to the Danube Steamship Company station at the Reichsbrücke bridge to embark on a journey to Sulina (Romania). With an additional 200 passengers, the ship set sail from Romania on May 22, 1939, bound for Palestine. Before the planned – illegal – landing, the S.S. Liesel was seized by the British and escorted to Haifa by a warship.

The length of Emil Medak’s imprisonment is unknown. He worked for several months at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, then from November 22, 1940, to March 31, 1948, as a general practitioner in Givat Ada, a small town between Haifa and Tel Aviv that is now part of Benymina. During that time, Givat Ada was an agricultural moshav, a type of settlement in what was then Palestine. An agricultural moshav distinguished itself from a kibbutz, as no collective ownership existed because the farmers were individual farmers with their own means of production.

From July 1, 1948 onwards, Emil Medak lived at 23 Pinsker Street in Tel Aviv, where he also had his practice for many years. He married Elsa Abramowicz (1904 to 1979) in 1956 and died at the age of 93 on April 21, 1983. Dr. Medak is buried in the Kiryat Shaul cemetery in Tel Aviv.