An exemplary editor and mentor

Abstract

Olga Zimoch was born Olga Zukowska on 9 January, 1919 in Wilno, Poland. She graduated in medicine in Poland in the late 1930s, intending to be an ear, nose and throat surgeon. Of course, the war intervened and, once her skills were identified, Olga was deported by the Nazis to Germany, where she treated Poles and others working as slave labour in the mines. After the war she worked for the United Nations Refugee Relief Agency. In 1947 he married Franiszek Zimoch in Bamberg, Germany. The marriage was dissolved three years later in 1950 in Sydney after she'd come to Australia as a Displaced Person. At some time after the end of the war, and presumably before her marriage, she'd discovered that her mother, her fiancé, indeed all the people in her village, had been killed in the war. I can't imagine how she could have coped with this and what it did to her. The term 'displaced person' merely hints at the physical and psychological turmoil he must have suffered. Australia did not exactly welcome her with open arms. Olga rightly felt that she should be able to practice medicine but her qualifications were not recognised. The medical profession in Australia is still a very closed shop, but it was much more so back then. Foreign graduates were forced to jump through ridiculous and expensive hoops to prove their equality with Australian doctors. As a refugee with no assets, she was never able to get enough money together to enable her to study to qualify as a medical practitioner in Australia. This embittered her considerably since she felt European degrees were far superior to any offered by Australian universities. However, she put that to one side and used her enormous reserves of self-discipline to complete a course in copywriting while she held down a variety of menial jobs. Once she had her new qualification she worked first for Woolworths, then for the Australian Consumers' Association on Choice, and then for John Wiley as a book editor. In 1976, she was appointed Chief Copy Editor at the Medical Journal of Australia.