Heritage Corner: The remarkable life of Ingeborg Rapoport, MD, PhD
The chair of Pediatrics at Cincinnati Children’s had a real crisis on his hands: Two of the most respected members of his medical staff – and personal friends of his – had been publicly accused of sedition. The press and members of the Board of Trustees were clamoring for their immediate ouster. The reputation of Cincinnati Children’s and, one might reasonably infer, its future funding, was in jeopardy. What was he to do?
The year was 1950. The chair was Ashley Weech. And the accused were Drs. Sam and Inge Rapoport, two of the most colorful and tragic individuals who ever worked at the medical center. Inge’s recent death in March 2017, at the age of 104, was the last chapter in a remarkable story that deserves to be retold.
Ingeborg Syllm was born in Cameroon in 1912; she grew up in Germany and studied at the University of Hamburg. In 1938, she submitted her doctoral dissertation on diphtheria but was prohibited from receiving her degree when the Nazis discovered her Jewish ancestry. And so, she immigrated to the US to pursue her medical studies.
As she wrote to Weech in 1950: “Social conditions I saw during my ambulance experience in Brooklyn and later in 1942 during my outpatient obstetrical service in Philadelphia made a very deep impression on me and forced me to think what could be done besides helping medically to create a world in which there will not be any unjust misery and suffering.” She became convinced that socialism offered the best solution to these complex problems.
She came to Cincinnati in 1944 for her pediatric residency, and this is where she met and married Sam Rapoport, one of the hospital’s most brilliant and prolific researchers. Sam had come to Cincinnati in 1937 from Vienna. Like Inge, he was fully committed to socialism, so much so that he joined the Communist Party from 1942-1947.
After completing her residency, Inge stayed on as a Children’s Hospital Research Foundation scholar and served a brief term as assistant director of the Outpatient Department. Then, as was customary at the time, she put her career temporarily on hold when she became a mother. Three children were born between 1947 and 1950.
Nowhere to hide
Their happy life in the city and country that they loved suddenly fell apart in the summer of 1950. Their names were placed before the House Committee on Un-American Activities as potential subversives. The Cincinnati press went wild with unsubstantiated allegations, and some members of the Cincinnati Children’s Board of Trustees demanded immediate action.
The Rapoports were in Zurich at a pediatric conference when the story broke. Weech jumped into the fray, trying to put out the fire and negotiate solutions. Inquiring about job prospects for Sam at Oxford, he wrote to a colleague on August 14, “I am able to state definitely that he has not been associated with Communistic activities for….several years. Nevertheless, conditions in this city are at fever heat. There is an insistent demand that he be removed both from the Children’s Hospital and…the University. Only among an informed group is there a willingness to balance judgment by giving weight to Dr. Rapoport’s positive contributions to science….”
In late August, Weech left for a family vacation to Fire Island. Learning that Inge would be returning to the US via New York, he arranged for a clandestine meeting where they could speak frankly about the crisis. His secretary wrote Inge: “He suggests the front of the men’s smoking room in Penn Station as a suitable rendezvous.”
“You don’t know how much it meant to me that I could openly talk to you in NY, that you accepted me as always,” Inge wrote to Weech some months later. They must have discussed options for Sam to return to the US and keep his job, but this soon became impossible. Sam could only survive by recanting and “naming names,” and now their safety was in jeopardy. Sam wrote Weech that his family had endured “...threats by telephone and in person, stone throws, not to mention the publicity. It went so far that our children could not be safely on our own lawn.”
This was the last straw for Inge. She gathered up her children and fled to Zurich. She was seven months pregnant with their fourth child at the time.
Inge wrote to Weech on October 1, “I think one of the greatest pains in my leaving came from having to ‘steal away’ without an open explanation to people I love, like you.…I don’t need to tell you what it means to leave home for the second time a country which has meant an unexpectedly lovely haven after what I had seen in Germany, and more, what pain it causes me to see the same nightmarish things rise as did in Germany….”
Starting over
Sam tendered his resignation from Children’s. The Rapoports relocated to Vienna where for two years they struggled to find work. Weech wrote to colleagues all over Europe trying to find them a situation. In 1952, Sam was offered a position as professor of biochemistry at Humboldt University in East Germany. Inge went to work there at the Charite Hospital where she founded the specialty of neonatology and served as that department’s first chair.
She and Sam were treated well by the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and they both enjoyed long and distinguished careers. They remained committed socialists and were disappointed when the GDR collapsed. They nevertheless retained fond memories of their lives in Cincinnati, due certainly in part to the support of Ashley Weech during their crisis. Members of the Cincinnati Children’s staff visited them in East Germany from time to time. Most recently, Dr. Alan Oestreich and his wife became acquainted with Inge when they were visiting Berlin in 2007. (Sam had passed away in 2004.) They found her “absolutely charming” and have remained in touch with her and her family.
Inge wrote an autobiography, Meine Ersten Drei Leben (My First Three Lives), in 1997, and more recently, a children’s novel Eselsohren (Donkey-ears), which colloquially refers to the “dog-eared” pages of a well-loved book.
A few years ago, the dean at the University of Hamburg offered Inge the opportunity to receive her long-deferred PhD. She refused an “honorary” degree and set herself the task of updating her original thesis. Due to her failing eyesight, family members and relatives read her the relevant articles. She passed her oral exam and was awarded her PhD on June 9, 2015. She was 102 years old.
Inge and Sam Rapoport were elected to Cincinnati Children’s Hall of Fame in recognition of their many contributions to the hospital and the university. They were immigrants fleeing discrimination, who worked for the betterment of humanity in their adopted country, yet were persecuted for their radical views and associations. Some would consider their story as relevant today as it was many years ago.
-- M. Elaine Billmire, MD, July 2017
