Holocaust relived
At the Apotex Centre, Jewish Home for the Aged in Toronto, the dental clinic has no gas for anaesthesia. When flu shots are offered, no one takes part. Residents are afraid to report pain and weakness to nurses. At night, flashlights are avoided by the staff, as are brisk walks in block-heeled shoes. Residents are frightened of showers and hide food in their rooms. Dining rooms and facilities are intentionally intimate and non-institutional. When one adult child of a resident asked a construction company to take down the barbed wire surrounding a lot across the street, they did.
Half of the geriatric patients with dementia are Holocaust survivors. And without short term memory, their past becomes their present. Sixty years later, safe in a plush Canadian facility, the residents relive the Holocaust.
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