Roger Sheridan RIP

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Roger Sheridan obituary - Times Online

Physician who fought to save hundreds of lives at the newly liberated Belsen concentration camp

Roger Sheridan was one of a group of medical students who were flown to the concentration camp of Bergen Belsen - its official name - between Hamburg and Hanover, two days

after its liberation on April 15, l945. They found 10,000 dead who had not yet been buried. Lying among the corpses were men and women who were starving but not yet dead. Sheridan's first harrowing job was to sort the dead from the living, and the dying from those who had at least a slender chance of survival.

For weeks after his arrival about 500 inmates still perished daily of typhus in spite of the injections and other medication he and his fellow doctors, aided by a group of Swiss nurses, applied. Sheridan had one extra qualification to help the patients - he had grandparents in London who had come from Eastern Europe and still spoke Yiddish, the language of the East European Jewish masses. So he was readily able to communicate with his new patients and to comfort the dying in their native language.

Because of his religious background he was also able to perform one other non-medical service in the camp. On occasion he led Sabbath prayers for the surviving inmates before they could be transferred to displaced persons camps or return to their old homes in the rare cases where those still existed.

He worked in the camp until the last patient had been removed in June l945, about six weeks into the new peace that had settled over Western Europe. Then he was flown back to his medical school at University College Hospital in London.

Of the l5 colleagues from UCH who went out with him, three died within a year, two from diseases acquired at Belsen. One took his own life. Sheridan himself in those eight weeks at Belsen shed the last vestiges of his adolescence and acquired a sometimes sad, and always sober, outlook on life, which stayed with him to the end of his own days.

Sheridan had originally been part of a group of medical students recruited by the British Red Cross in early l944, before the opening of the “Second Front” in Western Europe, to go to the Netherlands in the latter part of the war to give injections of intravenous protein to thousands suffering from starvation oedema. They were in their second day of waiting at Blackbushe Aerodrome in Hampshire for a flight to Holland, when they were told to embark and were flown to Celle in Germany instead.

After two months it was back to medical school. But soon after qualifying, he was recruited into the Royal Army Medical Corps to do his two years of National Service. During his six-week initial training he squeezed in a “quickie” wedding to his fiancée, Yvonne Brook.

He was then posted to Singapore and was rapidly promoted to become the ear, nose and throat surgeon for the whole of the Far East Land Forces — his predecessor had been allowed home, also to marry. From the tropics he was sent to his final posting in the contrasting climate of Klagenfurt, Austria.

On demobilisation he went into general practice in North London and became a non-resident registrar in anaesthesia at the North Middlesex Hospital in the Tottenham area. He served on the Edmonton Group Hospitals Management Committee for many years. One of his colleagues there, the local MP Sir Fred Messer, persuaded him to go on the magistrates bench. He gave that service for 34 years. Unusually, at the end of his time as a magistrate he was asked by the Lord Chancellor of the time to sit as a judge in the Crown Court, which he did for another three years.

His other voluntary work included a decades-long association with the British Red Cross Society and as a medical officer to the British Boxing Board of Control. However, he resigned from that position in protest at the inadequate accommodation that was provided for boxers at so many of the venues where rings were erected for them.

Yvonne died in l996, and Sheridan is survived by his second wife, Wendy Sheinman, a friend from his youth, whom he married in l998, and by a son of his first marriage.

Roger Sheridan, physician who fought for eight weeks to save lives at Belsen concentration camp, was born on November 11, 1923. He died on October 28, 2007, aged 83