By Aylana Meisel
Trudy Wegner, 82, has been a patient at the center for three years. Her husband Henry Wegner is a daily visitor and volunteer. Like many at the center – residents and board members – the Wegners survived the horrors of the Holocaust.
“We were deported from Vienna in '42,” said Henry Wegner, lightly stroking Trudy's face. “She was liberated from Theresienstadt in 1945 by the Soviets and I was liberated from Auschwitz slave labor camp by the Americans. We are married 60 years.”
Trudy “is really in very good hands,” said Wegner, who also heads the American Council for Equal compensation of Nazi Victims from Austria. “I'm very happy that we came here. It's a terrific facility, very humanitarian.”
The center has been serving its residents for over 30 years. It was established in 1971 to serve “as a haven” for Holocaust survivors from as early as 1942, according to Nancy Goldwasser, the director of social services. The center now serves a diverse population, but its mission still emphasizes care tailored to the needs of Holocaust survivors.
“They have experienced a loss of family members, home, country and a sense of identity,” said Goldwasser. Stripped of their relatives and independence once again, “they re-experience that loss when they go to a nursing home. Many survivors have flashbacks,” she said.
The center attempts to ease patients' feelings of displacement and alleviate the lingering psychological effects of the Holocaust through a comprehensive program of social, medical and clinical care. A social worker is assigned to each resident and there is a ratio of one and a half staff members to every patient.
The staff is specially sensitized to residents' needs, according to Goldwasser, who cautioned that even showers are a potentially traumatic experience for survivors. “In the camps you went into showers and you didn't come out,” she said. “We need to reassure (patients) and the social worker is very much a part of giving that support.”
Nearly 80 percent of the center's rooms are private in order to create a comfortable residential environment. Residents also have the chance to participate in a rich selection of recreational activities, lectures, programs for religious study and Sabbath and holiday ceremonies.
The center's clientele receive cutting edge medical care, according to Ken Brown, the center's CEO and president. This is partly due to the center's large staff, and affiliations with several medical facilities and universities.
“We are giving these individuals a home as if it was their own home,” Brown added. “People have this fear of warehousing the aged in a healthcare facility and it's not like that at all. This is a nice place to work, a good place to be, and it cares.”
That philosophy extends to all patients at the facility, where the proportion of Holocaust survivors is diminishing. Survivors comprise under a quarter of the nursing home's 200 residents, although they represented 60 percent of the population through the early 1990s. As a result, the center has broadened its services to reach patient communities from other ethnicities. “The borough of Queens has become so diverse and we also have become diverse,” said Linda Spiegel, the center's director of public affairs. “All of our materials are now translated into Chinese and Spanish and we're working on Indian (languages) and Russian.”
Expansion has been rapid and recent. In 1997, the center unveiled the Medical Model Adult Day Health Care Program, one of the largest of its kind in Queens. Located off-site, the program offers patients a variety of social and recreational opportunities as well as medical care. In 2000, it opened its comfort care unit, the first in-patient hospice care in the borough. In 2002, the center opened a short-term rehabilitation facility. And thanks to a special grant from the United Hospital Fund, the Margaret Tietz center was the first nursing home to develop a holistic program that incorporates palliative care and Chinese medicine including acupuncture, heat treatment and massage.
Further development is planned, said Brown. The center will be “the first not-for-profit nursing center to develop a 'life care retirement community'” slated to open on the Queens Hospital Center Campus, he said. The project, dubbed Skyline Commons, is expected to include independent living facilities, skilled nursing care, enrichment housing, a daycare center and facilities for dialysis.
Construction and renovations aside, one thing is a constant at the center, said Spiegel. “We've updated the way we do business,” she said. “It's a people business and it's a caring business and we want to make sure we're at the cutting edge of programming. One thing that is consistent is the care that people get at Margaret Tietz – it's second to none.”
Reach contributing writer Aylana Meisel via e-mail at feedback@timesledger.com.
