Article from the The Boston Globe, April 15, 2004

THE ESCAPE ARTIST

Author(s):    Joseph P. Kahn, Globe Staff Date: April 15, 2004 Page: D1 Section: Living

NAHANT - Time, like the ocean tides lapping at the beaches of this North Shore town, is gradually erasing the footprints of the World War II generation. They have grown old. Retired. With grandchildren at their feet, or great-grandchildren by now. To a country attuned to other wars and calls to duty, their war stories too often have a scratchy, faded quality. So it was that Dr. Charles Schepens, a Massachusetts ophthalmologist who is regarded as the father of modern retinal surgery, seemed content to live out his years without dwelling on the distant past. Not that he had much time for reflection. At 92, Schepens remains vigorous and professionally engaged, commuting to his Boston office three days a week to see patients, supervise clinical research, and raise money for future projects.

The author of four books and more than 340 scientific papers, Schepens (pronounced SKAY-pens) invented many of the tools and techniques for treating eye disease. One such tool, the indirect binocular ophthalmoscope, is the standard device used for peering inside the human eyeball. He has a lifetime achievement medal from the American Academy of Ophthalmology and his name on the Harvard-affiliated Schepens Eye Research Institute, which he founded in 1950. It is the largest such independent institute in the United States and a fitting monument to a life spent serving others.

In a village nestled deep in the French Pyrenees, outside a Basque country chapel near the Spanish border, stands another monument to Schepens and his work. Few Americans might know about it save for a phone call the doctor fielded 20 years ago. The caller was Meg Ostrum, a Vermont museum consultant. "I have a letter for a Monsieur Jacques Perot," Ostrum said. "And I wonder, are you the person I should deliver it to?"

At the other end, Schepens hesitated. "How did you find me?" he asked cautiously.

Ostrum shifted into French. Schepens listened. She told of a hiking excursion in southern France the previous fall and her chance encounter with a priest in the village of Mendive. The priest spoke warmly of a Belgian eye doctor, now living in Boston, who had done great things for the villagers during the last great war. He wished to send the doctor a letter, Ostrum reported, although he did not know the man's real name. Schepens listened harder.

It would be another three months before Schepens and Ostrum met and the letter changed hands. Though brief, that meeting at a Boston hotel would resurrect an extraordinary chapter in the doctor's past - a tale of courage and cunning that few outside Schepens's immediate family knew in detail.

Schepens and Perot, as Ostrum had suspected, were the same person. And Perot, who had carried out an audacious scheme to smuggle people and documents out of Nazi-occupied France in 1942 and '43, using a lumber business as his cover, was a war hero who had left behind few footprints. Almost none, really, other than the ruins of an old sawmill and a plaque outside a village chapel. After delivering the letter, Ostrum would spend the next 15 years painstakingly retracing his steps so that Jacques Perot might live again.

Now he does, in a book just published by the University of Nebraska Press.

"Was I suspicious at first? Yes, because I did not know if she wanted to write a poetical or romantic story - which I had no interest in," Schepens says one morning in the dining room of his seaside home, with Ostrum beside him. "I had always thought, the less said about this, the best."

The room and house are grandly furnished. A large wraparound porch faces south, toward the Boston skyline. Cette, the doctor's wife of 68 years, offers coffee. The Schepens family moved to Nahant in 1947 and into this house 50 years ago, joining throngs of European immigrants raising children in the land of opportunity after the war. Her eyes sparkle as she greets a visitor. "I've never met a reporter before," Cette Schepens says shyly, extending her hand.

Charles Schepens resumes the interview. The table in front of him is stacked with copies of Ostrum's book. Coffee is poured. Before Ostrum appeared, he is asked, had anyone outside France greeted him by his old nom de guerre?

"No," he replies in a voice as firm as an oak tree. "It didn't really matter to me who knew and who didn't," he goes on. "I was in a different field, living in a different country. So who cares?"

Ostrum smiles. "The harder it was to get to Dr. Schepens, the more it piqued my curiosity," she says.

Ostrum's book, "The Surgeon and the Shepherd," documents Schepens's exploits as a member of the Belgian resistance in Vichy, France. In dry, academic prose, but with echoes of "Schindler's List" and other stirring wartime epics, it tells the story of a seemingly ordinary man who took uncommon risks to subvert the Nazi war machine. (The "shepherd" refers to Jean Sarochar, a villager who aided the smuggling operation; he died in 1975.)

Like German industrialist Oskar Schindler, Schepens concealed his methods and motives from virtually everyone around him. Few knew the true purpose of the mill or suspected its director of being a highly skilled surgeon and dedicated patriot. Returning to the village and unmasking himself after the war, Schepens was greeted at first with incredulity. Photos of Schepens on fake identification cards issued to Perot, however, confirmed the doctor's real identity. Decades later the French and Belgian governments would decorate Schepens for his heroics. A recent Belgian TV documentary on World War II resistance activities re-created the Mendive saga and Schepens's role in it.

A reluctant hero, maybe. An authentic one, certainly.

"I grew up in the '60s, the age of the antihero," says Ostrum, who made six trips to Belgium and France and interviewed more than 30 eyewitnesses for the book. "To encounter someone who, at the same age I was [early 30s] when I started the project, could put aside his professional career and pull off such a feat of self-sacrifice was amazing to me."

The turning point

Born in 1912 to a Begian physician, Schepens had completed his medical training and joined the military medical corps by the time Germany invaded Belgium in May 1940. That October, he was arrested by the Gestapo on trumped-up charges alleging suspicion of owning a bus used to transport Allied pilots out of Belgium. Though Schepens was released 10 days later, it was a turning point for the young doctor, who had been largely apolitical until then. Allying himself with the Belgian underground, Schepens allowed his medical office to be used to transfer sensitive documents such as maps, diagrams of troop movements, and lists of escapees. In 1942, again under scrutiny by the Gestapo,

Schepens fled to France and took the alias (later shortened) Jacques Perot-Spengler.

The discovery by Schepens and a group of fellow resistants of a defunct sawmill in the Pyrenees, in a valley bordering the Iraty Forest, enabled him to realize two goals: expanding his underground activities and moving his family out of harm's way, or so he hoped. An outdoorsman, he adapted quickly to the rugged terrain, which would prove useful later after he was cornered by German authorities for the final time and escaped on foot through the Pyrenees.

The mill was purchased by him and others in July 1942 and restored for operation by year's end. The lumber enterprise was genuine - real orders were being filled and payrolls met - yet the factory operation, connected to a cable system that transported timber from the mountaintop forest above it, concealed a greater purpose: Men assigned to manual labor outside the mill were given the means and opportunity to slip over the border into Spain, helped by Sarochar and others. From there, escapees made their way to England and other safe havens. Mill employees were issued identity cards that provided further protection from the German patrols that increased throughout the border region as the war progressed.

Schepens's enterprise also funneled currency, underground literature, and other materials vital to the resistance movement in and out of the region. But the traffic in human lives was its most daring clandestine function - and its most dangerous.

Who got out? A handful of high-ranking Belgian government officials and resistance leaders, according to Ostrum's research, plus a number of prisoners of war and downed Allied pilots. The majority, however, were young Frenchmen who faced a choice of being forced to work in German-run factories or being imprisoned (or worse) if they refused.

Schepens kept his profile as low as possible during the months he ran the mill, according to Ostrum's account, cultivating friendly relations with the Germans while never so much as hinting he knew the first thing about medicine. Many around Mendive suspected he was a Nazi collaborator. How wrong they were.

"By playing the role of double agent," writes Ostrum, "by insulating himself from the actual relay of people and parcels, and by guarding the secret as closely as possible Perot was confident" he would never be caught.

His confidence quickly vanished in July 1943, when a resistant was arrested and interrogated by the Germans. Perot, the man confessed, had been smuggling people and money into Spain through the mill operation. Shortly thereafter, the Gestapo arrived. Before they had a chance to question him further, Schepens sized up the situation - and literally ran for his life. His family was placed under house arrest, and a 100,000-franc reward was posted for Perot's capture. The Germans hoped to set a trap for Schepens, using family members as bait, Ostrum writes. But the plan was thwarted when Cette Schepens took her children and made another bold escape, on foot, through the Pyrenees. Nine months after he fled Mandive, the family reunited in England.

Despite a number of unanswered questions that linger over the so-called "epic of Iraty" - the passage of time and lack of documents makes verifying recollections impossible in many cases, according to Ostrum - it is believed that at least 100 people and countless secret documents found safe passage out of France thanks to Schepens and his cohorts.

"What's unknown is how many people escaped during 1943 and '44, after Dr. Schepens left," says Ostrum. Many who slipped away never understood the larger scheme at work, she adds. Once the book is published in French, she says, it is hoped a fuller picture of what happened at the Mendive mill will finally be recognized by survivors and their descendants.

Lessons to learn

After the war, Charles and Cette Schepens had two more children. They have since added eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. To Claire, the couple's eldest child, the Perot saga is more than a treasured piece of family history. Having spent much of her life in Brussels, she says there are valuable lessons here for Americans who have never experienced the pain of foreign occupation.

"It's important to know how so many people risked their lives - and how secret the resistance movement was," she says. Her parents rarely discussed these events for good reason, she adds. "It was too painful for my mother to talk about. Too much suffering was involved. But for my family now, it's extremely important. This is their grandfather - and great-grandfather - who did this."

Schepens may have distanced himself from the story yet never from Mendive itself, having made many trips to the village since the war. In 1970, he and Sarochar attended a ceremony honoring the heroes of the Iraty operation. On his most recent visit, he celebrated his 90th birthday at a Mendive farmhouse now owned by one of his grandchildren.

Memories may be fading and the tides of history receding, but for Schepens the region clearly has a powerful, timeless allure. With few regrets, he says, he would have given up medicine years ago and stayed in the lumber business. "It is a wonderful life, you know," he says softly.

Most important, perhaps, Schepens now has something tangible to give family members who urged him to write the Mendive story years ago. In the past he protested that he had no time for that. Time, however, and a chance encounter in a Pyrenees village have taken care of matters for him. What, then, of his own obituary and where Jacques Perot might fit in?

"I really don't know," Schepens replies, "because I have no idea how important it is to tell younger generations what happened." He looks across the table past a small mountain of books with Perot's photo on the dust jacket. "What do you think?" he asks.

Joseph P. Kahn can be reached at jkahn@globe.com.

Article from the The Back Bay Courant, October 30, 2000

In 1940, a young eye doctor started working for the resistance to the German occupation of Belgium. His office became a "letter box," a safe place for agents to leave messages for one another.

Much of the information came from a girl who was working as a translator secretary for the Gestapo. She gave lists of the secret police's suspects to the resistance.

One day the eye doctor's name appeared on these lists once too often. He, his family and a close friend fled to France, where they were asked to find an escape route from Nazi-occupied Europe.

They found it in a small village near the Spanish border in the Pyrenees. The eye doctor, whose real name was Charles Schepens, forged papers identifying himself as Monsieur Perot Spengler. He and his friend restored the rusty cable car system that the town's old sawmill had used to carry logs. They reopened the mill, and began using the cable cars to smuggle people to Spain.

About 15 months later, the Germans captured a French resistance agent on his way back from the sawmill, and tortured him until he revealed Schepens' identity and the mill's real purpose.

When they came to arrest him, Schepens/Spengler did not have time to get into a cable car. He ran through the forest, hid in caves in the mountains for two days and then crossed the border. He made his way to Great Britain, where his wife and two young children eventually joined him.

Schepens got a job at the Moorfields Eye Hospital in London. Shortly after he started, a German bomb hit the building. Schepens sifted through the rubble for scraps of wire, screws and lenses, supplies that were not otherwise available in wartime England. He used them to build a binocular ophthalmoscope, an instrument that gave doctors a three dimensional view of the inside of patients' eyes for the first time.

This was the first in a long series of discoveries for Beacon Hill resident Charles Schepens.

After the war, Schepens moved to Boston, where he worked as a fellow at Harvard Medical School and an assistant at Massachusetts General Hospital. Schepens' specialty was and is the retina, a thin layer of nerve tissue on the inside of the eyeball which transmits information from the eye to the brain. When the retina detaches from the eyeball, blindness results.

In the 1950s, Schepens brought the success rate for retina re-attachment operations from about 40 percent to 90 percent.

He has described eight previously unknown eye diseases, allowing doctors to intervene earlier to save patients' sight. He invented an operation that can partially save the sight of premature babies born before their eyes have developed normally.

He used these techniques with great success in the operating room until just a few years ago, for patients including Ella Fitzgerald, Lauren Bacall, Jason Robards and Gene Autry. At 88, though he no longer does surgery , he still sees patients once a week.

Schepens firmly believes that new tools and surgical procedures are not enough, though. Equally important, he said, "is to discover new facts about [the eye]."

Despite all the progress in eye surgery in the past half century, Schepens said, many diseases still evade doctors. "We don't know how to cure them. We know how to palliate them a little, but it will take another generation" of more abstract research about the eye before scientists find a really effective treatment.

It was this belief that led Schepens to found The Retina Foundation 50 years ago. It began as a few people "with no money, just working from hand to mouth" in a tenement basement, he remembered.

Today, renamed the Schepens Eye Research Institute, it has modern laboratories, a staff of 250 and an annual budget of more than $20 million, Schepens said.

Schepens expects great advances in eye research in the next few decades. He said that one of the most exciting questions is whether scientists can regenerate a retina. Researchers have attempted this for 15 years without success, but working with embryonic brain tissue called stem cells, they are now corning closer than ever before.

Since as Schepens explained, "the retina is really a sheet of brain stuck out like an antenna on a roof," re-growing one would "open up great hopes, not only for retina repair, but also for Parkinson's, Alzheimer's," and other brain diseases.