Prof. Dr. Hugo Picard

Hugo Picard was the youngest son of Salomon and Eugenie. His birth in 1888 is registered in Konstanz. He presented his PhD-thesis in Heidelberg in 1913, but he also studied medicine in Berlin and Munich.

Searching the online presentation of the Charite, the renowned hospital in Berlin, one can find out, that according to the first new law passed by the nazis to get rid of jewish officials, Hugo was forced to retire from his position as a professor at the Charite in 1933.

But there are also happy news from Berlin. In this year, Hugo got married to Helene Obermann from Schwelm. In their apartment in Luetzowplatz 23 the couple gave shelter to mother Eugenie from Konstanz. Soon Hugo was installed as the director of the new Jewish Hospital Berlin and the head of its surgical departement. However, Hugo and Helene did not trust this new routine. They turned to the organization CARA, a council for refugees from the nationalsocialist repression with academic background in London, and in 1934 Hugo was offered a position as a first class surgeon in the jewish hospital in Cairo. In September 1934, the couple left Venice on the "Marco Polo" for Egypt.

In Cairo the elegant and urbane couple was soon embedded in a large circle of Germans who had found exile in Egypt, among them the egyptologist Ludwig Borchardt and the ophthalmologist Max Meyerhof, whom his Egyptian patients lovingly called "Dr. Max" because he treated the poorest among them for free.

In the Journal of the International College of Surgeons VIII(9) 1945 Hugo paid tribute to the eye surgeon after his death: "The house of Max Meyerhof was a central meeting point for all the refugees. Scholars from East and West met there."

Hugo and Helene stayed in the beautiful Borchardt's house in Cairo from 1940 to 1951. In the early fifties, Hugo made several trips to Europe, where he stayed in his house in Sils-Baselgia in Switzerland, he spent several months in Konstanz, Berne or Berlin. But Egypt remained the center of his professional life inspite of the turbulences at the beginning of the Nasser era.

With some patience, in the online files of the Leo-Baeck-Institute concerning the writer Jacob Picard who looked for relatives after the war, some postcards written by Hugo and Ernst can be found. There is also a photograph showing Hugo on horseback. The accompanying lines are a good example of Hugo's sense of humor. Alluding to a silly war song, he rhymes in German referring to some bad spine problems: "Today I am proudly sitting on a horse, tomorrow I'll be enclosed in a plaster corset."

Hugo and Helene must later have settled down in Zurich. His last known address was in Ackermannstrasse in Zurich-Fluntern. He died in 1974.