Doctor Robert, an Irish hero

Readers familiar with Thomas Keneally’s Booker Prize-winning Schindler’s Ark will recognise the moving true story of a Polish industrialist who saved some 1,200 prisoners from their fate at Auschwitz at the end of World War II. The book was subsequently made into the Academy Award-winning Schindler’s List directed by Steven Spielberg, a tale of heroism and sacrifice during civilisation’s darkest hour. But then war, which brings out the worst in some people, also brings out the best in others.

Recently, I was reminded of an Irish paediatrician who has done more than his fair share for humanity, while also contributing significantly to the annals of English literature. William Robert Collis was born in 1900 in Dublin. The son of a solicitor, he was educated at Rugby before finally, in 1918, he volunteered as a cadet in the British Army. He left just a year later in favour of a career in medicine. In his subsequent professional life, he was better known as Dr Bob Collis of the Department of Paediatrics in the Rotunda Hospital. In 1932, he was appointed physician to the National Children’s Hospital in Harcourt Street, and was a pioneer in the development of neonatal services and the nurture of premature babies. He was also the founder of Cerebral Palsy Ireland, which later became Enable Ireland.

Collis was no stranger to foreign travel, and spent some time as a doctor in Africa. With the outbreak of World War II, he volunteered for the Red Cross and, as the prevailing Allied troops eventually marched through Germany, Collis arrived upon the Bergen Belsen concentration camp and witnessed the chilling atrocities of the Nazi regime. Zoltan Zinn-Collis describes the setting well in his recently published autobiography, Final Witness: My Journey from the Holocaust to Ireland. Aged only five at the time, and having lost most of his family in the camp, Zoltan recalls being brought to see the doctor. Apparently his first words to Collis were: “My father is dead; you are now my father”, whereupon the doctor – not understanding German – simply replied, “yes”.  

Zoltan and his elder sister Edit were among five orphans whom Collis rescued and brought back to Ireland in 1946. Later, he would adopt Zoltan and Edit and raise them as his own, alongside his two boys, Dermot and Robby. Collis’s status as one of the leading doctors of his generation was to continue to prove fortuitous, according to Zoltan in his autobiography. The young boy’s time in Belsen had left him with tuberculosis of the spine, among other legacies. A complication of this occurred in the late 1940s, when he developed meningitis and seemed on the verge of his demise. Collis apparently succeeded in persuading Sir Alexander Fleming to donate his entire experimental supply of the then-new antibiotic streptomycin with which Zoltan was subsequently treated.

The family lived in Fitzwilliam Square in Dublin, and holidayed in the Wicklow Mountains. Alas, Collis and his first wife Phyllis were eventually divorced, and he married Han Hogerzeil, a nurse with the Dutch Red Cross who had been his colleague in Belsen. Throughout all of this, Collis wrote prolifically. It ran in the family, of course – both his twin brother John Stewart and his elder brother Maurice were writers, the latter a noted biographer and the former best known for While Following the Plough (1946). Robert Collis was no less successful as a scribe; not only did his essay The State of Medicine in Ireland (1943) win the Carmichael Prize, but he also co-authored paediatric textbooks and seminal scientific papers that included Some Paediatric Problems Presented at Belsen Camp (1946). 

In the late 1930s, Collis wrote a play about the slums of Dublin, entitled Marrowbone Lane (1942). This was famously rejected by the Abbey Theatre and later accepted by the Gate, where it played for at least two seasons. But Collis is perhaps better known for his memoirs and commentaries. He penned an autobiography entitled The Silver Fleece (1936) and two additional memoirs of his time in Africa – A Doctor’s Nigeria (1960) and Nigeria in Conflict (1970). Collis and Hogerzeil co-wrote Straight On (1947) about the liberation of Belsen, while Collis’s book The Ultimate Value (1951) describes the plight of refugee children. His final memoir, To Be a Pilgrim, was published around the time of his death in 1975.

As if all this were not enough, Collis has one final claim to fame. He was a mentor to Christy Brown, author of My Left Foot (1954), later made into a film of the same title by Jim Sheridan. Collis proofread Brown’s original manuscript and contributed an introduction to the final published volume. Robert Collis – paediatrician, father, writer and humanitarian – was indeed a man of considerable talent. Perhaps Ireland, too, has its share of heroes.