(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)June 24, 2019

MAHWAH, N.J. – On April 25, Dr. Victor Borden, a retired obstetrician and gynecologist from Bergen County, recounted how his parents escaped the Holocaust in a presentation titled, “Flight from German Oppression: Lodz, Arkhangelsk, Teheran, Tel-Aviv, & Paterson.”  The program was presented under the auspices of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

With only approximately 10 percent of Polish Jews having survived the Holocaust (about 330,000 people), the vast majority did so by escaping to the Soviet Union. As Dr. Borden’s talk made clear, the U.S.S.R. provided a refuge that may have been inadvertent and involuntary, and conditions were extremely harsh for those who endured them. For example, by deporting his parents and other members of his family to a slave labor camp near Arkhangelsk (Archangel in English) in the Russian frozen north, the Soviet authorities saved their lives. How they fared in captivity and eventually ended up in Iran and pre-independence Israel formed the rest of Dr. Borden’s remarkable story. His parents’ ordeal notwithstanding, he made it clear that his parents were among the few members of their families to survive the Holocaust.

After graduating with a B.A. from Temple University in 1965, Dr. Boden attended Philadelphia’s Hahnemann Medical College (today the Drexel University Medical College), where he received his M.D. in 1969. He continued his training as a physician at the Sinai Hospital of Baltimore, where he completed his residency and chief residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology in 1973. Following a stint as a major in the U.S. Air Force from 1973 to 1975, Dr. Borden was in private practice in Bergen County, in addition to holding various positions at Englewood Hospital and Medical Center and other local institutions until his retirement in 2013. From 2014 to 2017, he was a physician at the Bergen Volunteer Medical Institute. A frequent presenter at medical conferences relating to his specialty, Dr. Borden was a fellow of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology from 1977 to 2013 and, since 2014, is a Life Fellow.

The demise of his own parents and the survivor generation generally has impelled Dr. Borden to take up where they left off in transmitting their story and its lessons to the young people of tomorrow. He also has spoken at Stockton University and several local high schools.

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