Ewald Fabian

Dr Ewald Fabian

Dr Ewald Fabian (4 November 1885, in Berlin – 17 February 1944, in New York City) was a socialist Dentist, working in Berlin in the 1930s. He was the editor of Der Sozialistische Arzt (The Socialist Doctor), organiser of Verbandes sozialistischer Aerzte in Deutschland and the Secretary of the International Socialist Medical Association. This is an insert from a different author: Dr. Ewald Fabian was my father-in-law. My information differs from that shown here in several aspects. I know he had a brother, Richard who was a physician and Socialist, and a sister, Meta, who survived WW 2 in Berlin. Richard and his son escaped to Southern Rhodesia. Ewald was married twice—no children from first marriage. He then married Michalina Endelman in 1928. She was also a physician. Their only child, Tommi, was born 31 Oct. 1931. In 1933 they left Berlin for Prague. I have pictures of Ewald throughout his life. He was tall and never heavy. He was captured in France by French Resistance and incarcerated in a French concentration camp because he had German papers, until he escaped with new forged papers. He eventually got passage to New York—assisted, we think, by Varian Fry, and arrived in New York City 21 November 1940 from Lisbon on the ship: Excaliber. He and Michalina had separated but remained in contact. She and Tom arrived in NYC 4 days later, 25 Nov. 1940 . Ewald's health was affected by his incarceration and he was not certified to practice dentistry in the US. Tom and I married 10 Sept. 1960. I have traveled in London and remember seeing a sign for a dentist named Fabian, but I do not know if there is a family connection. It was after my husband died, but neither he nor his mother ever mentioned Ewald in England. However I do know that Ewald and Clement Attlee were friends and political allies. It could have been briefly, before 1928. (the end of my insert)

He is credited by Charles Brook with inspiring the formation of the Socialist Medical Association (later the Socialist Health Association) which played a prominent part in establishing the British National Health Service. He corresponded with and eventually met Dr Brook in 1930. Brook explains that Fabian was a man of heavy build and when he got in his fragile car, which was contemptuously referred to by his friends as “The Dung Cart,” the front passenger seat collapsed.^[1] The SMA later helped him by securing his release from a French internment camp at the beginning of the Second World War.^[2]

Ewald had a brother called James Fabian who had a son named as Frank Gerd Fabian who graduated at Guys Hospital London and now lives in Oxford England as a dentist and founded his own business that is under the management of one of his four daughters, Louise Rene Fabian Hunt who is an experienced dentist with her own successful family.

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