Sylvia Hoişie – A triumph of humanity

This post was supposed to go up yesterday, for International Women's Day, but I didn't have time for it. The article itself was written for the Fundition Magazine last year, in a second issue that was never published. I felt kinda sad that no one got the chance to read it, so I'm just going to postit here, today, on the 9th of march. Well, technically it's still the 8th of march somewhere out there.

[Sylvia Hoșie to the right, photo is from her personal archive, hosted by Adevarul.ro]

One of the greatest things about the internet is that it allows us to share information that we normally wouldn’t have access to. We can learn of things and people that changed the world, that may inspire us to achieve greatness. To leave behind a better world with better people. And one such person is Sylvia Hoișie [e.n. the letter ș is pronnounced like the “sh” sound in English].
You won’t find her listed in Wikipedia and you won’t really find much about her on the web in English or in most other international languages. And yet, she is without a doubt a person that has shaped the present, at least in a very small part of the world. She is, what I can call, a hero of Romania, because she was one of the key people involved in the development of the Polidin. This was, for half a century, the nation’s main immunity boosting vaccine. It was cheap, it was effective, it helped fight off everything from the common cold to complications related to breast cancer. I may be exaggerating this, but odds are I’m still alive because of it. I used to be very sick as a child, due to some improper medical treatments after I was born and living in conditions that were usually not all that great. And Polidin was one of the things that kept me going. So, in a way, I could probably say that I owe Sylvia Hoişie my life. A lot of people in Romania would say that. We owe her, we owe her quite a lot. Especially when you consider what happened to her when she was a child.

For those that can’t place Romania on a map, let me draw you a mental picture. Imagine a buffer zone slapped in between empires, former empires and global superpowers, that by some fluke and utter stubbornness will not crumble to dust. Sylvia was born in a city called Câmpulung Moldovenesc, in the northern part of the country. This was right after World War 1, when the country gained a bit of land, a bit of stability, and for a while it seemed like things would be going great. Until World War 2 started, Russia annexed the eastern and northern parts of the country, and through the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact it placed the country in the sphere of influence of Nazi Germany. This meant that very soon you would see German policies being implemented across the country after 1940, to the protests of quite a few people, like the then king of Romania, Mihai the 1st, or Michael I of Romania, as you’d know him better. And it also posed a very difficult problem for Sylvia, because she was of Jewish descent. She was 14 years old when this happened, when the discriminatory laws went into effect, limiting her freedoms, painting her like an “other”, an enemy. And what shocked her was that this wasn’t just something happening at a high level. The people around her, the people she knew, the people she grew up with turned on her family, on her. To this day she remembers with horror the teasing and the harassment she got from her school mates, from girls she had known since kindergarten, who had often visited her home. And things would only get worse.

She, along with her entire family, and many other Jewish families in Câmpulung Moldovenesc were loaded up into trains, in livestock transport cars, and taken east. By this time, the non-aggression pact between Russia and Germany was broken, the war now had an eastern front. Sylvia and her family were taken through the recently reconquered territories and unloaded in the north of Basarabia, currently the Republic of Moldova. Here she saw things that would break a person. Houses with walls full of blood and the names of the murdered written on them. The city pharmacist from Câmpulung Moldovenesc, which she had, went insane from the shock. He was then tied to a tree and executed. All their valuables were taken from them, all they had that they could use to trade, and they were shipped again to Moghilev, a city that now resides in Ukraine. Back then, it was war zone. Just about everything was torn down by artillery, burned down, run down. From here the family was supposed to be taken at a later date with a different transport to a more permanent camp. They managed to avoid it, finding shelter along with around 30 other families in the local cultural center. By this time, both her grandparents had already died, they were over 80 years old and just couldn’t take the hardship of the journey. And what followed wasn’t going to be easy. They managed to bribe a few German soldiers with what little they had left to take them to Djurîn, where they wouldn’t be taken from and put into a camp. At first, they were housed along with six other families in a three room house, with clay walls, no beds, no light, no heating, no running water. Then, they lived in a disused stables. They traded their clothes for scraps of food and worked 12 hours a day for some some lentil soup and potatoes. Sylvia and her family lived like that for three years, enduring starvation at times and the harshness of the weather. In 1944, Romania switched sides, the fascist laws that exiled her were no longer in effect, so the family walked the nearly 50 kilometers to the nearest town with a train station, and returned home

An experience like this would break some people. Heck, we live in an age where some claim to have PTSD from Twitter. Sylvia, however wasn’t broken. The family tried to pick up their life where it left off. Having little to nothing left, it wasn’t an easy thing to accomplish, especially in post-WW2 Romania. Even so, Sylvia endured and quickly returned to her studies and tried to put what happened behind her. When she was young, Syvlia’s dream was to one day be a teacher, but the war changed that. She followed in the footsteps of her sister and went into medicine. After six years of medical school, where she met her husband, she went to work at the Cantacuzino Institute in Iași. Here she learned much and worked very hard on new types of medication. One of them was an immunity stimulation vaccine that they would call Polidin. It was similar to what she had seen was being used in western countries, but it was built entirely in house, with local technology and local ingredients. That is the main reason why it worked. Vaccines tend to be horrible if they are brought in from some place else, because they can’t really treat the local version of a virus or a bacterial infection. They’re too different.

When Polidin was developed, in the early ‘60s, Romania was under communist rule. There wasn’t much in the way of norms for testing, human trials, and all that stuff. So they began by testing it out white mice, rabbits and the likes, but when it came time for human trials, all the people involved in developing it chose to use themselves as test subjects. They would dose themselves with Polidin for a week and noted if there were any unusual side effects. After it was proven to be safe for them, they expanded the test to children, to pregnant women, to verify if there were any other risk factors. There weren’t. Polidin worked. Not only did it help prevent things like the flew, but taking it even after infection would lessen the impact of the disease.

The first production lot was of only 10 vials. But at its peak, Polidin was shipping 15 million vials a year, to everyone. Even to those people that two decades ago harassed her, even to the people that kicked her out of her home, to their children, and their children’s children. Her work saved lives and brought much needed relief to many, even those that wronged her. And if that is not a triumph of humanity, then I don’t know what would be. To have gone through so much, and to not be twisted by it. To have endured such unfair treatment, and still work to help those responsible. That is what a hero does. And Sylvia Hoişie is nothing less than a hero.

Sadly, as time went on, and political systems changed, the Cantacuzino Institute hit hard times. With a perpetually disinterested government, corruption and strict EU regulations, the production of Polidin ceased, leaving us basically without a locally made proper vaccine. We have to import it, but since it’s based on non-local disease strains, we’re not really getting the effective protection we had decades ago.

Sylvia is retired now, she lives in Iași. Last June she celebrated her 91st birthday. Colloquially, people around here usually call her Madame Doctor Polidin. Though, she was în charge of developing plenty of other medications over the years, but this one was without a doubt the most important.

I hope her story will resonate with you as much as it did with me, and that I’ve managed to honor her with this article.