Husband. Father. Holocaust survivor. Dentist. Born June 2, 1922, in Essen, Germany; died Nov. 26, 2016, in Montreal, of complications from a fall; age 94.
One of Dr. Baer's patients remarked that she was reluctant to call him about a toothache: "He felt so badly for me," she said. Long before the concept of holistic care was popular, Dr. Baer practised that way. It was just as important to understand the context of patients' lives as to provide skilled dental care.
Health care was a family tradition when Charles was born to Arthur (an ophthalmologist) and Emily Baer, in Essen, Germany. In 1938, he and his father were deported to the Dachau concentration camp, but freedom was available to those with the resources. Charles's grandmother put up the funds so he could escape Germany through the Kindertransport project. Charles was one of 10,000 unaccompanied children sent to Britain a effort supported by the Central British Fund for German Jewry.
But it was to be a short stay. Faced with a threatened German invasion, Britain sent "enemy aliens" to the colonies. Arriving safely in Canada in 1940, Charles was sent to an internment camp in New Brunswick, and then to Île aux Noix in Quebec. Henry Oelberg, who befriended him there, recalled that "Charles was constantly studying. He was already planning to become a dentist." Upon graduation in 1949, he took a job in the small town of Baie-Comeau, Que. This was an opportunity, he was told, to "learn a lot because you'll have to do everything."
The words were prophetic. Called to see a lumberjack whose horse had kicked him in the face, Charles single-handedly wired the broken jaw. Decades later, he said, "In the ER [in Montreal], there were four dentists to do a procedure like that." Three months after arriving, he returned to Montreal to marry Eva Marcuse, whom he had met in 1948. Back in Baie-Comeau, they worked side by side, often putting in 13-hour days. Preventive and restorative dentistry was new to a population for whom extractions were the norm.
Charles was all for saving teeth. Dentures, not available locally, had to be ordered from Quebec City. One order went through the ice on the river, along with the snowmobile! Undeterred, Charles remade the dentures himself, setting them to cure in the couple's room in the Manoir Baie-Comeau.
In 1952, Charles and Eva returned to Montreal, where he practised for almost six decades. He served as president of the Mount Royal Dental Society and as an examiner for the Order of Dentists. He was honoured with a fellowship and emeritus status in the L'Academie Dentaire du Québec.
What mattered most, however, were the patients. They, in turn, revered him. One recalls Charles remaining at the hospital with her overnight following an accident. "He would have done that for anyone," she said.
Charles was most proud of his children, Philip, Carolyn and Daniel. He doted on his six grandchildren as well, comforted in the knowledge that his family, nearly wiped out in the Holocaust, had been preserved and was flourishing with each new generation.
Charles, survived by Eva, died peacefully in Montreal.
Janet Chandler Allingham was a patient of Dr. Charles Baer for over 50 years.