My Dentist Of Years Ago

 

  

Those are two memorable scenes, at least and especially for me, from the movie Marathon Man, starring Dustin Hoffman. The second one always gets to me when you think there really were monsters like that guy torturing children in similar (as in the first video) and much worse ways during WWII in the concentration camps. In fact there were monsters, anyway at least one, post WWII who did likewise years after the war's end.

Over the years I have met several people who were in those camps including one of my dentists. When I was a kid to young adult - he loved using the pick to enlarge cavities (or maybe even create them in a healthy tooth), then the drill likewise - according to him to get the filling in there really well. He told me that with glee and a smile on his face as he dug the pick into my tooth or went at it with the drill, the high pitched whine of it making me clench the arms of the chair and hold on for life while anticipating the pain.

 

 After I turned 24, when on a visit back home in NYC, I visited him for a check-up. I had one cavity (real or maybe created by his pick). Before going in with the drill, he told me he remembered I did not like pain (yes all of my previous cavities were drilled & filled by him without any pain medication at all) and he gave my my first injections of novocaine. The shots hurt like hell, going into the roof of my mouth and my gum too but I admit the subsequent drilling, which would have been terribly worse without the novocaine, was relatively painless.

 

It was during that visit that I, for the very first time, saw the numerical tattoo on his arm. Until then, his sleeves were always down but not that day. That day he had rolled them up. Before then I had never imagined that he had been imprisoned in a concentration camp and even if I had seen the tattoo before then, I may not have relized the significance - but I knew what it meant by then. Damn, my mother used to tell him how wonderful was Germany and how beautiful life was there (she was of German and Gottschee blood); he would go along with her babble, making as if he was a good little German who loved the old country. 

 

I am guessing that talk by my mom only went to fuel his hatred, that was born as a result of being in the camps. I feel for him considering his time in the camps; nonetheless, I see his time in the camps as no excuse for what he did to me and probably many other kids, as the neighborhood was made up of primarily ethnic Germans. It was nothing more or less than torture. I despise his treatments of me still today and will until the day I die; the bastard had tortured me in that manner several times always making me think it was normal to be in pain like that while at the dentist. Damn I hate the noise of the drill all these years later; it still sends shivers down my spine and to every extremity even though today I know it will not hurt because there is no way my dentist today will drill my teeth without a painkiller.

 

All the best,

Glenn B