George Berci, refugee from the Nazis who went on to develop keyhole surgery

Berci’s work transformed surgery, allowing surgeons to remove diseased organs and rectify internal disorders with rapid recovery times

George Berci, who has died aged 103, was a Hungarian Jew who escaped the Holocaust and later pioneered minimally invasive or “keyhole” surgery, developing laparoscopic and other endoscopic techniques that are now in widespread use to diagnose and treat diseases of the body’s internal organs.
An only child, he was born György Bleier on March 14 1921 in Szeged, Hungary, to Alexander, a timpanist and orchestral conductor, and Ella, née Rosensohn, a piano teacher. In 1922 his father was appointed assistant conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and the family moved to the Austrian capital. In 1924 his father left to conduct an orchestra in India; his parents later divorced. 
In 1936, with anti-Semitism on the rise in Austria, George, his mother and other family members moved to Budapest. Things were little better there, however, and George, unable to attend university as a Jew, became an apprentice in an electrical shop then worked for two years as a mechanical engineer – an invaluable experience, as it turned out.
In November 1940 Hungary became the fourth member of the Axis and in 1942 Berci was transported to a forced labour camp of 5,000 young men near Bereck, not far from the Romanian border (today known as Brețcu, in Romania), where they dug anti-tank trenches in the mountains in bitter cold on meagre rations. Many of his comrades died. 
Transferred to Poland, he was tasked with loading ammunition and explosives on to lorries at a railway station. “We would throw the crates to the other guy, and we hoped it would explode,” he recalled. “Sometimes, the German soldiers would say, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ But we didn’t care. It was hard to care about life by that point.”
In 1944, with German forces now occupying Hungary, Berci and a group of fellow prisoners were forced aboard a train. Their final destination was Auschwitz, but there was a change of trains at Budapest.
The Hungarian capital was then under heavy bombardment by the Allies, as a result of which Berci’s labour camp guards, fearing the train would be hit, suddenly disappeared. “We disappeared, too,” Berci recalled. 
He joined the Hungarian underground, becoming involved in  forging fake IDs and delivering them to Jews in hiding, once posing as an electrician to copy an official stamp at Gestapo headquarters.
As a child it seemed that young George would follow in the family musical tradition. He learnt violin from the age of three and by the age of 10 was playing concertos. When the war ended he hoped to resume a career in music, but his family was destitute and his mother told him to become a doctor instead. 
Changing his name to Berci to avoid anti-Semitism, he attended the University of Szeged Medical School, financing his education by cleaning surgical instruments. Convinced that many were outdated, he began to think of how surgical techniques and equipment could be improved.
In November 1956, when Russian forces crushed an anti-Soviet uprising, killing thousands of people, Berci was working at a Budapest hospital. He and other surgeons operated on some 250 casualties but found themselves overwhelmed. “Patients died in the hospital corridors,” he said in 2019. “This horrendous picture has forever been in my memory.”
Determined to join the thousands of Hungarians trying to flee the regime, on a wet and freezing November night Berci carried his mother across a cornfield and over the border into Austria, somehow evading the Russian border guards.
They made their way to Vienna, where Berci was awarded a Rockefeller fellowship in experimental surgery, with the opportunity to move to Boston in the US. But with the Cold War at its height he decided to go “as far away as possible from the next war” and chose Australia. 
There, working mainly at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, he put his engineering experience to use by adapting an existing miniature television camera and attaching it to an endoscope, so that procedures inside the body could be shown on monitors. In 1961 he published a paper, “Medicine and Television”, in a medical journal, then televised a live bronchoscopy performed on a dog.
Working with Harold Hopkins, a pioneer in zoom lenses and fibre optics at Imperial College London, and with the German medical instrument-maker Karl Storz, Berci developed instruments to illuminate the inside of the body in a brighter, cooler and more reliable fashion than electric bulbs. 
He also improved techniques for X-raying the bile duct, co-developing a fluoroscope to provide moving images while limiting potentially harmful radiation emissions.
In 1967 Berci was recruited to the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles as a visiting professor. There, he continued to develop the endoscopic and laparoscopic techniques that enable surgeons to perform operations through small  “keyhole” incisions rather than cutting the body open.
Berci’s work transformed surgery, allowing surgeons to remove diseased organs and rectify serious internal disorders with remarkably fast recovery times. He continued to work at Cedars-Sinai as senior director of Minimally Invasive Endoscopic Research into his 104th year, though, as he told a documentary-maker in 2014, music remained his first love, and he always thought of himself as a musician. “I’m still thinking that I would have been a superb conductor,” he said.
Berci was the author or co-author of numerous books and scientific papers, including a wittily titled history of  biliary surgery – No Stones Left Unturned – written  with Frederick Greene. The Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons established a lifetime achievement award in his name.
Berci’s marriages to Irene Celikovic, Suzanne Buckland and Suzie Diack ended in divorce. In 1988 he married Barbara Weiss. She died in 2018, and he is survived by a son and daughter, a stepdaughter and a stepson. Another daughter predeceased him.
George Berci, born March 14 1921, died August 30 2024