Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

Copyright © 1960, 2011 by Miklos Nyiszli

Translation copyright © 1993, 2011 by Richard Seaver

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

9781611450118

Printed in the United States of America

IT WAS WITH HESITATION THAT I ACCEPTED the invitation to write a foreword to this book.
Auschwitz,
beyond doubt, is an honest book, and an important one. It tells of events which, though gruesome, need to be told and retold until their meaning for our times is accepted. It is not a book of direct insight into the meaning of the extermination camps, but in the fate of the author lies much of its significance. Least of all, despite the author’s claim, is it the book of a physician. Other physicians have written other books about their experiences in the concentration camps: for example, the psychiatrist Dr. Victor E. Frankl, who also wrote of Auschwitz. But Frankl did not help the SS in their experimentation on human beings; he did not pervert his calling by joining those who have aptly been called doctors of infamy. Instead of helping SS doctors in the killing of people, he suffered as a human being. Speaking of his experiences, he quotes Hebbel: “There are things which must cause one to lose one’s reason, or one has none to lose.” One of Dr. Nyiszli’s fellow doctors did lose his reason, and the description of how it happened is not only one of the most moving parts of the book, but one of the most reassuring. There were, and still are, people who lose their reason when there is sufficient cause to do so.

Others did not lose their reason because, like Dr. Frankl, and thousands of other concentration camp prisoners, they never accepted their fate but fought it. Rightly, Dr. Nyiszli devotes much space to the men of the twelfth
Sonderkommando
, prisoners working in the gas chambers. Alone of all such commandos, it rediscovered freedom in the last days of its existence, and on the very last day regained it; therefore they died as men, not as living corpses. The account of this one
Sonderkommando
alone would make the book an important document. But its fate raises even more acutely the question of why only one of the fourteen such commandos fought back. Why did all others march themselves to their death? Why did millions of other prisoners do the same? Surely the story of these 800-odd men is a heroic saga of the extermination camps; it is a story that restores our trust in human beings. But they did only what we would expect all human beings to do: to use their death, if they could not save their lives, to weaken or hinder the enemy as much as possible; to use even their doomed selves for making extermination harder, or maybe impossible, not a smooth running process. Their story, then, remains within the human dimensions. If they could do it, so could others. Why didn’t they? Why did they throw their lives away instead of making things hard for the enemy? Why did they make a present of their very being to the SS instead of to their families, their friends or even to fellow prisoners; this is the haunting question.

In its clues to an answer lies the importance of this book. It is an unbelievable story, but we all know it is true. We wish to forget it. It just does not fit into our system of value and thought. And rather than to reshape them, we wish to dismiss the story of the German extermination camps. If we could, we would prefer to think it never happened. The closest we can come to believing that is not to think about it so that we need not come to terms with its nightmarish perspectives.

The history of mankind, as of the Western world, abounds in persecutions for religious or political reasons. Large numbers of men were exterminated in other centuries too. Germany itself was depopulated by the Thirty Years War, during which millions of civilians died. And if two atomic bombs had not sufficed, maybe as many millions in Japan would have been exterminated as in the German extermination camps. War is horrible, and man’s inhumanity to man even more so. Yet the importance of accounts on the extermination camps lies not in their all too familiar story but in something far more unusual and horrifying. It lies in a new dimension of man, an aspect we all wish to forget about, but forget only at our own risk. Strange as it may sound, the unique feature of the extermination camps is not that the Germans exterminated millions of people—that this is possible has been accepted in our picture of man, though not for centuries has it happened on that scale, and perhaps never with such callousness. What was new, unique, terrifying, was that millions, like lemmings, marched themselves to their own death. This is what is incredible; this we must come to understand.

Strangely enough, it was an Austrian who forged the tool for such understanding, and another Austrian whose acts forced an inescapable need to understand them upon us. Years before Hitler sent millions to the gas chambers, Freud insisted that human life is one long struggle against what he called the death instinct, and that we must learn to keep these destructive strivings within bounds lest they send us to our destruction. The twentieth century did away with ancient barriers that once prevented our destructive tendencies from running rampant, both in ourselves and in society. State, family, church, society, all were put to question, and found wanting. So their power to restrain or channel our destructive tendencies was weakened. The re-evaluation of all values which Nietzsche (Hitler’s prophet, though Hitler, like others, misunderstood him abysmally) predicted would be required of Western man, were he to survive in the modern machine age, has not yet been achieved. The old means of controlling the death instinct have lost much of their hold, and the new, higher morality that should replace them is not yet achieved. In this interregnum between an old and new social organization—between man’s obsolete inner organization and the new structure not yet achieved—little is left to restrain man’s destructive tendencies. In this age then, only man’s personal ability to control his own death instinct can protect him when the destructive forces of others, as in the Hitler state, run rampant.

This not being master of one’s own death instinct can take many forms. The form it took in those extermination camp prisoners who walked themselves into the gas chambers began with their adherence to “business as usual.” Those who tried to serve their executioners in what were once their civilian capacities (in this case, as physicians) were merely continuing if not business, then life as usual. Whereby they opened the door to their death.

Quite different was the reaction of those who did away with business as usual and would not join the SS in experimentation or extermination. Some of those who reported on the experience, desperately asked the question: How was it possible that people denied the existence of the gas chambers when all day long they saw the crematoria burning and smelled the odor of burning flesh? How come they preferred not to believe in the extermination just to prevent themselves from fighting for their very own lives? For example, Lengyel (in
Five Chimneys
, the story of Auschwitz, Chicago: Ziff Davis, 1947) reports that although she and her fellow prisoners lived just a few hundred yards from the crematoria and the gas chambers and knew what they were all about, yet after months most prisoners denied knowledge of them. German civilians denied the gas chambers too, but the same denial in them did not have the same meaning. Civilians who faced facts and rebelled, invited death. Prisoners at Auschwitz were already doomed. Rebellion could only have saved either the life they were going to lose anyway, or the lives of others. When Lengyel and many other prisoners were selected to be sent to the gas chambers, they did not try to break away, as she successfully did. Worse, the first time she tried it, some of the fellow prisoners selected with her for the gas chambers called the supervisors, telling them that Lengyel was trying to get away. Lengyel offers no explanation except that they begrudged anyone who might save himself from the common fate, because they lacked enough courage to risk action themselves. I believe they did it because they had given up their will to live, had permitted their death tendencies to flood them. As a result they now identified more closely with the SS who were devoting themselves to executing destructive tendencies, than to those fellow prisoners who still held a grip on life and hence managed to escape death.

But this was only a last step in giving up living one’s own life, in no longer defying the death instinct which, in more scientific terms, has been called the principle of inertia. Because the first step was taken long before one entered the death camp. Inertia it was that led millions of Jews into the ghettos the SS created for them. It was inertia that made hundreds of thousands of Jews sit home, waiting for their executioners, when they were restricted to their homes. Those who did not allow inertia to take over used the imposing of such restrictions as a warning that it was high time to go underground, join resistance movements, provide themselves with forged papers, etc., if they had not done so long ago. Most of them survived. Again, inertia among non-Jews was not the same thing. It was not certain death that stared them in the face, but oppression. Submission, and a denial of the crimes of the Gestapo were, in their case, desperate efforts at survival. The remaining margin for a human existence shrank severely, but it existed. So one and the same pattern of behavior helped survival in one case, in the other did not; it was realistic behavior for Germans, self-delusion for Jews and for prisoners in the extermination camps, of whom a majority were Jews. When prisoners began to serve their executioners, to help them speed the death of their own kind, things had gone beyond simple inertia. By then, death instinct running rampant had been added to inertia.

Lengyel, too, mentions Dr. Mengele, one of the protagonists of
Auschwitz,
in a typical example of the “business as usual” attitude that enabled some prisoners, and certainly the SS, to retain whatever inner balance they could despite what they were doing. She describes how Dr. Mengele took all correct medical precautions during childbirth; for example, rigorously observing all aseptic principles, cutting the umbilical cord with greatest care, etc. But only half an hour later he sent mother and infant to be burnt in the crematorium.

The same business-as-usual attitude that enabled Dr. Nyiszli to function as a doctor in the camp, that motivated him to volunteer his help to the SS, enabled millions of Jews to live in ghettos where they not only worked for the Nazis but selected fellow Jews for them to send to the gas chambers. It was similar inertia if not also the “business-as-usual” attitude that postponed the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto till hardly any people or any strength was left for fighting, and certainly far too few to make a break-through that might have saved thousands of lives.

All this would be past history except that the very same business-as-usual is behind our trying to forget two things: that twentieth century men like us sent millions into the gas chambers, and that millions of men like us walked to their death without resistance. In Buchenwald, I talked to hundreds of German Jewish prisoners who were brought there in the fall of 1938. I asked them why they had not left Germany because of the utterly degrading and discriminating conditions they were subjected to. Their answer was: How could we leave? It would have meant giving up our homes, our places of business. Their earthly possessions had so taken possession of them that they could not move; instead of using them, they were run by them. As a matter of fact the discriminatory laws against the Jews were meant to force them to leave Germany, leaving most of their possessions behind. For a long time the intention of the Nazis was to force undesirable minorities, such as the Jews, into emigration. Only when this did not work was the extermination policy instituted, following also the inner logic of the Nazi racial ideology. But one wonders whether the notion that millions of Jews (and later foreign nationals) would submit to their extermination did not also result from seeing what degradation they were willing to accept without fighting back. The persecution of the Jews was aggravated, slow step by slow step, when no violent fighting back occurred. It may have been Jewish acceptance, without retaliatory fight, of ever harsher discrimination and degradation that first gave the SS the idea that they could be gotten to the point where they would walk to the gas chambers on their own. Most Jews in Poland who did not believe in business-as-usual survived the Second World War. As the Germans approached, they left everything behind and fled to Russia, much as many of them distrusted the Soviet system. But there, while perhaps citizens of a second order, they were at least accepted as human beings. Those who stayed on to continue business-as-usual moved toward their own destruction and perished. Thus in the deepest sense the walk to the gas chamber was only the last consequence of a philosophy of business-as-usual. True, the same suicidal behavior has another meaning. It means that man can be pushed so far and no further; that beyond a certain point he chooses death to an inhuman existence. But the initial step toward this terrible choice was the inertia that preceded it.

Perhaps a remark on the universal success of the
Diary of Anne Frank
may stress how much we all wish to subscribe to this business-as-usual philosophy, and to forget that it hastens our destruction. It is an onerous task to take apart such a humane, such a moving story that arouses so much compassion for gentle Anne Frank. But I believe that the worldwide acclaim of her story cannot be explained unless we recognize our wish to forget the gas chambers and to glorify the attitude of going on with business-as-usual, even in a holocaust. While the Franks were making their preparations for going passively into hiding, thousands of other Jews in Holland and elsewhere in Europe were trying to escape to the free world, the better to be able to fight their executioners. Others who could not do so went underground—not simply to hide from the SS, waiting passively, without preparation for fight, for the day when they would be caught—but to fight the Germans, and with it for humanity. All the Franks wanted was to go on with life as much as possible in the usual fashion. Little Anne, too, wanted only to go on with life as usual, and nobody can blame her. But hers was certainly not a necessary fate, much less a heroic one; it was a senseless fate. The Franks could have faced the facts and survived, as did many Jews living in Holland. Anne could have had a good chance to survive, as did many Jewish children in Holland. But for that she would have had to be separated from her parents and gone to live with a Dutch family as their own child. Everybody who recognized the obvious knew that the hardest way to go underground was to do it as a family; that to hide as a family made detection by the SS most likely. The Franks, with their excellent connections among gentile Dutch families should have had an easy time hiding out singly, each with a different family. But instead of planning for this, the main principle of their planning was to continue as much as possible with the kind of family life they were accustomed to. Any other course would have meant not merely giving up the beloved family life as usual, but also accepting as reality man’s inhumanity to man. Most of all it would have forced their acceptance that business-as-usual was not an absolute value, but can sometimes be the most destructive of all attitudes. There is little doubt that the Franks, who were able to provide themselves with so much, could have provided themselves with a gun or two had they wished. They could have shot down at least one or two of the SS men who came for them. There was no surplus of SS men. The loss of an SS with every Jew arrested would have noticeably hindered the functioning of the police state. The fate of the Franks wouldn’t have been any different, because they all died anyway except for Anne’s father, though he hardly meant to pay for his survival with the extermination of his whole family. They could have sold their lives dearly instead of walking to their death.