Physician kept her dark past hidden

Anne Spoerry was a French-born doctor who spent nearly 50 years in Africa, flying her plane from village to village and helping people throughout the continent, one vaccination, one improvised suture at a time.

Her work was fundamental to the eradication of smallpox in Kenya. Spoerry’s patients dubbed her “Mama Daktari,” or “Mother Doctor,” and although they were sometimes terrified of her short temper and long syringes, they would wait expectantly for her to appear in the sky, land with a lurch and bark instructions at them.

But Spoerry’s humanitarian work is only a small part of her life story.

In his fascinating biography, “In Full Flight,” John Heminway offers a fuller picture of this complicated woman.

Although Spoerry (pronounced Shpeuri) has been hailed by many as a savior, her reputation has been marred by questions about her actions during World War II.

Shortly after she died • "In Full Flight: A Story of Africa and Atonement" (Knopf, 316 pages, $27.95) by John Heminway

in 1999, a family member discovered, locked away in a safe, a document indicating that Spoerry had been wanted for war crimes — specifically for torturing prisoners at Ravensbruck, a German concentration camp for women where she had been held for helping the Resistance in France.

With this book, Heminway, a documentary filmmaker who befriended Spoerry while working in Africa, seeks to figure out who Spoerry really was: Heroine or villain? Healer or killer?

It is a captivating — if at times frustratingly told — tale of complex truths and motivations.

Heminway has done his research, interviewing hundreds of people, diving into family archives, visiting Ravensbruck and reading Spoerry’s journals. He quotes women who survived the camp and remembered Spoerry. Some cursed her; others praised her. He is respectful even as he exposes Spoerry’s controversial past.

At the center of Heminway’s investigation is the strange relationship between Spoerry and Carmen Mory, a “block elder” at Ravensbruck who became Spoerry’s confidante (and perhaps her lover).

Mory took Spoerry under her wing and, Heminway suggests, might have forced the young medical student to harm fellow prisoners. According to interviews with survivors, Spoerry became Mory’s accomplice in terrible acts: throwing buckets of cold water at sick inmates, administering lethal injections and more.

Spoerry, some former prisoners recalled, helped guards select prisoners for the gas chamber. But others testified that away from Mory, Spoerry treated the sick admirably, even with tenderness — a trait that defined her medical career in Africa.

Spoerry was freed from Ravensbruck in 1945. She resumed her medical studies and tried to return to a semblance of her prewar life. But in 1946, a French Court of Honor charged her with impersonating a doctor and “with having administered injections of Evipan and of air, leading to the death of at least one patient.”

Spoerry, the court determined, “had engaged in ‘anti-French and antipatriotic behavior.’” She was exiled from the country. Spoerry resumed her medical studies in Switzerland, where she was later imprisoned; Mory implicated her in a very public trial in Hamburg, Germany.

Finally, aided by her family, she fled to Africa. In Kenya, Spoerry began practicing medicine, her muddy personal history a secret.

“”n Full Flight” is a daring and devastating story of a woman who sailed oceans and flew across a continent to escape her past — even if it’s never fully clear what that past was.