I must have been all of 4 or 5 years old that evening when the doorbell rang.
My father opened the door. Bounding into the living room was a middle-aged man with a charisma, energy, and passion for living wholly unfamiliar to this relative newbie.
He took a beeline path to the piano that sat maybe 15 feet away. He began banging on its keys, churning out note after note of what I guess all these years later was classical music.
What day or even time of year it was, or what his business there was that evening, I couldn’t say.
But I had just been introduced to Dr. Feliks Gwozdz, the Tarrant County Medical Examiner who knew my parents as the choir director at St. Andrew Catholic Church. He was the choir. He was its personality. He was its maestro.
I never much knew him. He died prematurely at age 58 in 1979, but medicine and music held equal shares of his affection. Music perhaps a greater share, I don’t know.
Dr. Gwozdz, though, is a significant figure in Fort Worth’s past. A street near the John Peter Smith Hospital complex bears his name.
“We just lost one of the greatest men I’ve ever known,” an investigator with the medical examiner’s office said at the time of Gwozdz’s death.
Said another: “He was above all else a humanitarian.”
He was Tarrant County’s second medical examiner, from 1969-79 — and before that deputy medical examiner — succeeding Dr. T.C. Terrell. Since the establishment of the medical examiner’s office in 1965, four men have served as its chief. In addition to Drs. Terrell and Gwozdz, Nizam Peerwani and Kendall Crowns have held the job on a permanent basis.
During his tenure, Gwozdz administered thousands of autopsies, the final word on how thousands had met their deaths.
Among the core values of his office was an uncommon respect and dignity for the life lost.
“He always said that body on the slab is someone’s mother or brother,” the investigator said. “He always insisted they be treated with respect.”
Said Gwozdz in an interview with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram: “I essentially feel sorry for every lost human being.”
He was a regular at the courthouse, testifying in hundreds, maybe thousands, of criminal trials of homicide victims in Tarrant County. The most notable of those was likely in Amarillo in the case of the State of Texas v. Thomas Cullen Davis in 1977.
He was also quite funny, full of one-liners and a wit quicker than a lightning strike. During a showing of “La Traviata” in the late 1960s, he had met the star of the show, soprano Maralin Niska, during the final intermission. As Violetta, Niska had a particularly difficult and prolonged death scene in the final act.
“Don’t worry,” he said in his heavy Polish accent. “I pronounce you dead in a big hurry — from ‘natural causes.’ Then we all get to the party afterward right away.”
The most fascinating part of Dr. Gwozdz, however, is indisputably his backstory, still relevant after all these years.
He was born in the ancient Polish capital of Krakow in 1920. In 1939, his father was taken hostage by the German army, never to be seen again. While studying medicine in Krakow, he was drafted into the Polish army. Not quite a year later, the Wehrmacht blitzkrieg hit Poland. Gwozdz was taken prisoner and sent to Stalag XXI, a camp in Schubin, Poland.
After a year in captivity, Gwozdz was released along with thousands of other POWs to make room for prisoners taken at Dunkirk and Paris.
He returned to Krakow, earning a living as a pianist. In 1941, he married Eugenia Nelke.
In 1942, he was rearrested, accused of taking part in underground, guerilla-warfare bombings, an allegation he denied. But he was sent to a concentration camp at Flossenburg and later Dachau. Eugenia was sent to another prison.
When Gwozdz was liberated at the end of the war, he weighed 80 pounds with an enlarged heart and 37 ulcers on one leg. He was so weak he could barely talk.
It wasn’t until a few years after her father’s death that their daughter learned her parents were Jews.
“My parents were Catholic,” Donna Gwozdz Farwell told the Valdosta Daily Times in 2012. “I thought they were political prisoners from Poland in the concentration camps.”
Desiring to move to the U.S. in 1951 and concerned they would be denied a visa and worried their children would one day confront a second Holocaust, Feliks and Eugenia Gwozdz converted.
When they became American citizens in 1954, they both held tightly their “displaced persons” cards, no doubt as a reminder of how they were no longer displaced but now part of the American family.
At Dr. Gwozdz’s funeral, Fr. Don Miehls called him “the closest thing to a genius I have ever known,” noting that he often did the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle in under 50 minutes.
Miehls told the story of Gwozdz’s philosophy of life.
“I asked him what his secret was.”
The priest said that Dr. Gwozdz looked at him and answered: “Life is never yesterday. You drown in yesterday. Life is now.”
