Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account Read online

  I have met many Jews, as well as gentile anti-Nazis, who survived in Germany and in the occupied countries. But they were all people who realized that when a world goes to pieces, when inhumanity reigns supreme, man cannot go on with business as usual. One then has to radically re-evaluate all of what one has done, believed in, stood for. In short, one has to take a stand on the new reality, a firm stand, and not one of retirement into even greater privatization.

  If today, Negroes in Africa march against the guns of a police that defends apartheid—even if hundreds of them will be shot down and tens of thousands rounded up in concentration camps—their march, their fight, will sooner or later assure them of a chance for liberty and equality. The Jews of Europe could equally have marched as free men against the SS, rather than to first grovel, then wait to be rounded up for their own extermination, and finally walk themselves to the gas chambers. It was their passive waiting for the SS to knock at their door without first securing a gun to shoot down at least one SS before being shot down themselves, that was the first step in a voluntary walk into the Reich’s crematoria.

  While all other accounts of the concentration camps that have come to my attention were by persons who never willingly served the SS, to my knowledge Dr. Nyiszli’s is the only report written by one of the many concentration camp prisoners who volunteered to become a tool of the SS to stay alive. But having made his choice, Dr. Nyiszli had, after all, to delude himself at times to be able to live with himself and his experience. And herein lies the true importance of this document for the protection that understanding can offer. Because even in the overpowering setting of Auschwitz, certain defenses still served life, not the death instinct. Most important of these was understanding what went on in oneself, and why. With enough understanding, the individual did not fool himself into believing that saving his skin was the same as saving the total self. He was able to recognize that much of what apparently seemed protective was actually self destroying.

  A most extreme example were those prisoners who volunteered to work in the gas chambers hoping it would somehow save their lives. All of them were killed after a short time. But many of them died sooner, and after weeks of a more horrible life, than might have been true if they had not volunteered.

  How Dr. Nyiszli fooled himself can be seen, for example, in his repeatedly referring to his work as a doctor, though he worked as the assistant of a vicious criminal. He speaks of the Institute for Race, Biological, and Anthropological Investigation as “one of the most qualified medical centers of the Third Reich” though it was devoted to proving falsehoods. That the author was a doctor didn’t at all change the fact that he, like any of the prisoner officials who served the SS better than some SS were willing to serve it, was a participant, an accessory to the crimes of the SS. How then could he do it and survive? By taking pride in his professional skills, irrespective of what purpose they were used for. Again and again this pride in his professional skill permeates his story of his and other prisoners’ sufferings. The important issue here is that Dr. Nyiszli, Dr. Mengele and hundreds of other far more prominent physicians, men trained long before the advent of Hitler to power, were participants in these human experiments and in the pseudo-scientific investigations that went with them. It is this pride in professional skill and knowledge, irrespective of moral implications, that is so dangerous. As a feature of modern society oriented toward technological competence it is still with us, though the concentration camps, the crematoria, the extermination of millions because of race, are no longer here. Auschwitz is gone, but as long as this attitude remains with us we shall not be safe from the criminal indifference to life at its core.

  I recommend to careful reading the description of how the first task of every new Sonderkommando was to cremate the corpses of the preceding kommando, exterminated just a few hours before. I recommend to the reader’s speculation why, though the twelfth Sonderkommando revolted, the thirteenth went quietly to its death without opposition.

  In this single revolt of the twelfth Sonderkommando, seventy SS were killed, including one commissioned officer and seventeen non-commissioned officers; one of the crematoria was totally destroyed and another severely damaged. True, all eight hundred and fifty-three prisoners of the kommando died. But this proves that a position in the Sonderkommando gave prisoners a chance of about ten to one to destroy the SS, a higher ratio than existed in the ordinary concentration camp. The one Sonderkommando that revolted and took such heavy toll of the enemy did not die much differently than all other Sonderkommandos. Why, then—and this is the question that haunts all who study the extermination camps—why then did millions walk quietly, without resistance, to their death when right before them were examples such as this commando that managed to destroy and damage its own death chambers and kill 10% of their own number in SS? Why did so few of the millions of prisoners die like men, as did the men of only one of these commandos?

  Perhaps comparing the two physicians who survived Auschwitz may suggest an answer. Dr. Frankl, who during imprisonment searched continuously for the personal meaning of his experience as a concentration camp prisoner, thereby found the deeper meaning of his life and life in general. Other prisoners who, like Doctor Nyiszli, were concerned with mere survival—even if it meant helping SS doctors in their nefarious experiments with human beings—gained no deeper meaning from their horrible experience. And so they survived in body, haunted by remorse and nightmarish recollections.

  This book then is most of all a cautionary tale, as old as mankind. Those who seek to protect the body at all cost die many times over. Those who risk the body to survive as men have a good chance to live on.

  —BRUNO BETTELHEIM

  University of Chicago

  May, 1960

  INTRODUCTION

  IT IS NOW MORE THAN SIXTY YEARS after the almost unimaginable events this book describes, and despite all efforts to make sure that the twelve incredible years of Hitler’s sway will never be forgotten, the fact remains that few of those who experienced the Nazi concentration camps are alive to bear witness. Inevitably and inexorably, history reduces the personal to the impersonal, subsumes the individual into the collective, renders the immediate remote. Monuments and museums, however eloquent, can never truly or fully convey the experience itself. That is why Dr. Miklos Nyiszli’s book remains so important some six decades after it was written, more than fifty years after it first appeared in Jean-Paul Sartre’s monthly review, Les Temps Modernes. One of the earliest books published on the subject—at a time when many preferred not to know what really went on day to day in the death camps—Auschwitz, for all the moral ambiguity of its author’s stance (which is duly noted by Bruno Bettelheim in his eloquent foreword), remains, as the New York Review of Books noted in a roundup of several books on the subject, “the best brief account of the Auschwitz experience available to a reader.” For this new edition, a few words of background are in order.

  In mid-March 1944 the Germans invaded Hungary. All Jews were immediately consigned to house arrest, in conformance with Hitler’s longstanding Schutzhaft, which he introduced in 1933 immediately after coming to power, to cow and control all those who might conceivably pose a threat to his then new regime. Deportations began soon afterward. In April, Dr. Nyiszli and his family, together with all the Jews of his city, Oradea-Nagyvarad, were shipped to Auschwitz, in the all too familiar cattle cars the Nazis used to accomplish the first, debasing step of their Final Solution. Separated from his wife and daughter upon arrival, Dr. Nyiszli was shortly chosen by the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele to take charge of all the pathological work carried on in the camp. As such, Nyiszli became a member of the Sonderkommando, the specially qualified and privileged group of prisoners who worked exclusively inside the crematoriums. This Sonderkommando, also known as the “kommando of the living dead,” was made up of 860 male prisoners chosen for their various professional abilities as well as their physical strength and hardy constitution. As long as they lived, the
ir lot within the camp was relatively good, but in general they lived for only four months from the day they first took up their duties inside the crematoriums. At the end of that brief period they were summarily liquidated and replaced by a new group of prisoners. In this way, the Nazi authorities hoped to keep from the world any knowledge of what was going on in these “death factories.”

  They very nearly succeeded. To start, all members of the SS who served in the camps—and in Auschwitz they numbered several thousand from April 1940 when the camp opened to its liberation in January 1945—had to swear that they would never reveal what they saw. Further, in 1944 German authorities destroyed the transport lists of all Jews who had been sent to Auschwitz up to that point, and in the succeeding months ordered the destruction of all other incriminating documents. Later, as the Russian armies drew near Auschwitz early in 1945, other evidence was either burned or transferred to camps farther west. In mid-January, the SS hastily executed thousands of prisoners; then, sometime after midnight on January 18, they fled, leaving the camp unmanned. Many of the remaining Auschwitz inmates, as Nyiszli describes, in turn took advantage of the suddenly empty towers and open Auschwitz gates to flee the camp, fearing that if they waited the Germans, who were retreating before the Russian offensive, might pause to murder them as well before proceeding west. When the Russians did arrive, on January 27, 1945, they found the bodies of the SS’s final victims. But they also found seven thousand inmates who had chosen not to leave the camp, mostly because they were too ill or weak to flee. Thus, despite their considerable efforts, the Nazis failed to destroy all evidence of the camps. Both the magnitude of the crime itself and the Germans’ predisposition for bureaucratic efficiency made it inevitable that the truth would ultimately be revealed.

  While hundreds of documents and books on the subject of the KZ (the Nazi concentration camps) have appeared over the past forty to fifty years—from the autobiography of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess to personal accounts of survivors, and culminating in Danuta Czech’s monumental Auschwitz Chronicle, 1939–1945—none to my knowledge has ever recounted in detail what went on every day inside the crematoriums, for the simple reason that the gate to the crematoriums was the gate to death.

  Almost miraculously, Dr. Nyiszli survived. Through his eyes we can relive those exceptional times, and from his unique viewpoint witness as well the slow disintegration of a mad, grandiose empire built to last a thousand years. For the picture that unfolds beneath the doctor’s untutored pen spans the period from the “selections” made upon arrival at the camp to the methodical exterminations of 1944 and early 1945, ending with the nightmarish exodus that marked the Nazi collapse in the winter of 1945. I say “untutored pen” because, as Dr. Nyiszli himself states: “When I lived through these horrors, which are beyond all imagining, I was not a writer but a doctor. Today in writing about them I write not as a reporter but as a doctor.” But stylistic inadequacies are of little importance here; what matters in a book of this nature is the raw material.

  What Miklos Nyiszli lived through and witnessed many will prefer not to believe, even today, for the human mind tends to turn away from suffering and whatever is repugnant. From that to denying that such treatment and torture, such debasement and degradation, such inhumanity to one’s own fellow beings could ever have happened is but a simple step to take. For there are some today who refuse to believe that the extermination of twelve million people, of which five to six million Jews, ever took place, who indeed maintain that it was all a fabrication, or at the very least a gross exaggeration. While they are a tiny minority, there are many others who simply prefer to block it from their minds. And even assuming one knows and does not turn away, one may well ask: What is the point of dwelling on the subject? Why rake over cold ashes, stir up old animosities? Would it not be better to forgive and forget, turn toward the future rather than look back in anger on the fading past? Fair questions indeed. The answer comes from the victims themselves. “These victims of Nazi atrocities,” Meyer Levin once wrote, “hid fragmentary records of their experience, they scratched words on walls, they died hoping the world would some day know, not in statistics but in empathy. We are charged to listen.”

  At least in the early years following their release, those who had lived through the camps were often reluctant or unwilling to talk of the experience, let alone write about it. The subject was too painful to recall; it was time to heal and attempt to get on with their lives. Later the veil was lifted, at least in part, as some felt increasingly obliged to tell their story “so that the world would not forget.” Looking back, the question most often asked seemed to be: How could this have happened? How could the world have allowed it to happen? There is no easy answer, especially since it has become increasingly clear that, in the later stages of World War II, many Western leaders did know if not the grim details at least the general outline of what was happening behind Hitler’s barbed wire. But as events have shown in recent years, the world’s ability to prevent outrage, whether it be in Vietnam in the 1960s, the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s, and, most recently, in Darfur, is painfully limited.

  In addition to those questions must be added the one raised so poignantly and insistently by Bruno Bettelheim in his foreword to Nyiszli’s book: Why did the Jews allow themselves to be arrested, deported, and killed without resisting? And why, even more to the point, did only one of the fourteen Sonderkommando groups rise up in rebellion at the hour of their death? Knowing the length of their days, knowing they had liquidated their predecessors and that their successors would in like manner eliminate them, why did they not all “die as men, not as living corpses”? I think the answer to all those questions is best if not fully answered by Walter Laqueur’s reminder, in his foreword to Danuta Czech’s magisterial work, that we should bear in mind two very different elements of the Holocaust experience. Many if not most European Jews were integrated into the societies in which they lived. The Germans, after all, were the people of Bach and Beethoven, Kant, Goethe, and Schiller. How “bad” could such a people really be? Hitler, an aberration, would doubtless soon pass. Laqueur and others also remind us that Auschwitz, in addition to its other inmates, at one point housed thirteen thousand Russian prisoners of war, robust young men who, if anyone could, should have risen up and gone to their death fighting. Yet only ninety-two survived, and there was no Russian uprising. Very simply, in the unfair game of life then staged, all the camp’s victims—were they Jews, Gypsies, or POWs—were powerless before the masters’ whims and wishes.

  By a conservative estimate, twelve million people perished in the Nazi concentration camps. Most were murdered in cold blood, but countless others died by starvation, illness, and suicide. The numbers are too staggering to comprehend. The value of Dr. Nyiszli’s book is not in its insights. Its importance lies in its ability to show us, firsthand, what that netherworld really was. It tells, as Bruno Bettelheim says, “of events which, though gruesome, need to be told and retold until their meaning for our times is accepted.”

  —RICHARD SEAVER

  DECLARATION

  I, THE UNDERSIGNED, DR. MIKLOS Nyiszli, physician, former prisoner of the German concentration camps, declare that this work, which relates the darkest days in the history of mankind, was drawn up by me in strict accordance with reality, and without the slightest exaggeration, in my capacity as an eyewitness and involuntary participant in the work of the Auschwitz crematoriums, into whose fires millions of fathers, mothers and children disappeared.

  As chief physician of the Auschwitz crematoriums, I drafted numerous affidavits of dissection and forensic medicine findings which I signed with my own tattoo number. I sent these documents by mail, counter signed by my superior, Dr. Mengele, to the Berlin-Dahlem address of the “Institut für Rassenbiologische und Anthropologische Forschungen,” one of the most qualified medical centers of the Third Reich. It should still be possible to find them today in the archives of this Research Institute.

 
; In writing this work I am not aiming for any literary success. When I lived through these horrors, which were beyond all imagining, I was not a writer but a doctor. Today, in telling about them, I write not as a reporter but as a doctor.

  Done at Oradea-Nagyvarad, March 1946.

  Signed:

  Dr. Miklos Nyiszli

  To my wife and daughter—returned from the Camp of the Dead

  I

  MAY, 1944. INSIDE EACH OF THE locked cattle cars ninety people were jammed. The stench of the urinal buckets, which were so full they overflowed, made the air unbreathable.

  The train of the deportees. For four days, forty identical cars had been rolling endlessly on, first across Slovakia, then across the territory of the Central Government, bearing us towards an unknown destination. We were part of the first group of over a million Hungarian Jews condemned to death.

  Leaving Tatra behind us, we passed the stations of Lublin and Krakau. During the war these two cities were used as regroupment camps—or, more exactly, as extermination camps—for here all the anti-Nazis of Europe were herded and sorted out for extermination.

  Scarcely an hour out of Krakau the train ground to a halt before a station of some importance. Signs in Gothic letters announced it as “Auschwitz,” a place which meant nothing to us, for we had never heard of it.