Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account (4 page)

FOR THE MOMENT MY SITUATION WAS tolerable. Dr. Mengele expected me to perform the work of a physician. I would probably be sent to some German city as a replacement for a German doctor who had been drafted into military service, and whose functions had included pathology and forensic medicine. Moreover, I was filled with hope by the fact that, by Dr. Mengele’s orders, I had not been issued a prisoner’s burlap, but an excellent suit of civilian clothes.

It was already past midnight, but my curiosity kept me from feeling tired. I listened carefully to the barracks chief’s every word. He knew the complete organization of the KZ, the names of the SS commanders in each camp section, as well as those of the prisoners who occupied important posts. I learned that the Auschwitz KZ was not a work camp, but the largest extermination camp in the Third Reich. He also told me of the “selections” that were made daily in the hospitals and the barracks. Hundreds of prisoners were loaded every day onto trucks and transported to the crematoriums, only a few hundred yards away.

From his tales I learned of life in the barracks. Eight hundred to a thousand people were crammed into the superimposed compartments of each barracks. Unable to stretch out completely, they slept there both lengthwise and crosswise, with one man’s feet on another’s head, neck, or chest. Stripped of all human dignity, they pushed and shoved and bit and kicked each other in an effort to get a few more inches’ space on which to sleep a little more comfortably. For they did not have long to sleep: reveille sounded at three in the morning. Then guards, armed with rubber clubs, drove the prisoners from their “beds.” Still half asleep, they poured from the barracks, elbowing and shoving, and immediately lined up outside. Then began the most inhumane part of the KZ program: roll call. The prisoners were standing in rows of five. Those in charge arranged them in order. The barracks clerk lined them up by height, the taller ones in front and the shorter behind. Then another guard arrived, the day’s duty guard for the section, and he, lashing out with his fists as he went, pushed the taller men back and had the short men brought up front. Then, finally, the barracks leader arrived, well dressed and well fed. He too was dressed in prison garb, but his uniform was clean and neatly pressed. He paused and haughtily scanned the ranks to see if everything was in order. Naturally it was not, so he began swinging with closed fists at those in the front rank who were wearing glasses, and drove them into the back rank. Why? Nobody knew. In fact you did not even think about it, for this was the KZ, and no one would even think of hunting for a reasonable explanation for such acts.

This sport continued for several hours. They counted the rows of men more than fifteen times, from front to back and back to front and in every other possible direction they could devise. If a row was not straight the entire barracks remained squatting for an hour, their hands raised above their heads, their legs trembling with fatigue and cold. For even in summer the Auschwitz dawns were cold, and the prisoners’ light burlap served as scant protection against the rain and cold. But, winter and summer, roll call began at 3:00 A.M. and ended at 7:00, when the SS officers arrived.

The barracks leader, an obsequious servant of the SS, was invariably a common law criminal, whose green insignia distinguished him from the other prisoners. He snapped to attention and made his report, giving a muster of those men under his command. Next it was the turn of the SS to inspect the ranks: they counted the columns and inscribed the numbers in their notebooks. If there were any dead in the barracks—and there were generally five or six a day, sometimes as many as ten—they too had to be present for the inspection. And not only present in name, but physically present, standing, stark naked, supported by two living prisoners until the muster was over. For, living or dead, the prescribed number of prisoners had to be present and accounted for. It sometimes happened that when they were overworked, the kommando whose job it was to transport the dead in wheelbarrows failed to pass by for several days. Then the dead had to be brought to each inspection until the transportation kommando finally arrived to take charge of them. Only then were their names crossed off the muster list.

After all I had learned, I was not sorry to have acted boldly and tried to better my lot. By having been chosen, the very first day, to work as a doctor, I had been able to escape the fate of being lost in the mass and drowned in the filth of the quarantine camp.
¹

Thanks to my civilian clothes, I had managed to maintain a human appearance, and this evening I would sleep in the medical room bed of the twelfth “hospital” barracks.

At seven in the morning: reveille. The doctors in my section, as well as the personnel of the hospital, lined up in front of the barracks to be counted. That took about two or three minutes. They also counted the bed-ridden, as well as the previous night’s dead. Here too the dead were stretched out beside the living.

During breakfast, which we took in our rooms, I met my colleagues. The head doctor of barracks-hospital number 12 was Dr. Levy, professor at the University of Strasbourg; his associate was Dr. Gras, professor at the University of Zagreb; both were excellent practitioners, known throughout Europe for their skill.

With practically no medicines, working with defective instruments and in surroundings where the most elementary aseptics and antiseptics were lacking, unmindful of their personal tragedy, unconscious of fatigue and danger, they did their best to care for the sick and ease the sufferings of their fellow men.

In the Auschwitz KZ the healthiest individual was given three or four weeks to collapse from hunger, filth, blows and inhuman labor. How can one describe the state of those who were already organically ill when they reached the camp? In circumstances where it was difficult to forget that one was a human being, and a doctor besides, they practiced their profession with complete devotion. Their example was faithfully followed by the subaltern medical corps, which was composed of six doctors. They were all young French or Greek doctors. For three years they had been eating the KZ bread made from wild chestnuts sprinkled with sawdust. Their wives, their children, their relatives and friends had been liquidated upon arrival. Or rather, burned. If by chance they had been directed to the right-hand column they had been unable to stand up under the ordeal for more than two or three months and, as the “chosen,” had disappeared into the flames.

Overcome by despair, resigned, apathetic, they nevertheless attempted, with the utmost devotion, to help the living-dead whose fate was in their hands. For the prisoners of that hospital
were
the living-dead. One had to be seriously ill before being admitted to the KZ hospital. For the most part they were living skeletons: dehydrated, emaciated, their lips were cracked, their faces swollen, and they had incurable dysentery. Their bodies were covered with enormous and repulsive running sores and suppurating ulcers. Such were the KZ’s sick. Such were those one had to care for and comfort.

I STILL HAD NO CLEARLY DEFINED JOB. During a visit around the camp in the company of a French doctor, I noticed a sort of annex jutting out from one side of a KZ barracks. From the outside it looked like a toolshed. Inside, however, I saw a table about as high as a man’s head, built of unplaned, rather thick boards; a chair; a box of dissecting instruments; and, in one corner, a pail. I asked my colleague what it was used for.

“That’s the KZ’s only dissecting room,” he said. “It hasn’t been used for some time. As a matter of fact, I don’t know of any specialist in the camp who’s qualified to perform dissections, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to learn that your presence here is tied in with Dr. Mengele’s plans for reactivating it.”

The very thought dampened my spirits, for I had pictured myself working in a modern dissecting room, not in this camp shed. In the course of my entire medical career I had never had to work with such defective instruments as these, or in a room so primitively equipped. Even when I had been called into the provinces on cases of murder and suicide, where the autopsy had had to be performed on the spot, I had been better equipped and installed.

Nevertheless I resigned myself to the inevitable, and accepted even this eventuality, for in the KZ this was still a favored position. And yet I still could not understand why I had been given almost new civilian clothes if I were slated to work in a dirty shed. It didn’t make sense. But I decided not to waste my time worrying about such apparent contradictions.

Still in the company of my French colleague, I gazed out across the barbed wire enclosures. Naked dark-skinned children were running and playing. Women with Creole-like faces and gaily colored clothes, and half-naked men, seated on the ground in groups, chatted as they watched the children play. This was the famous “Gypsy Camp.” The Third Reich’s ethnological experts had classified gypsies as an inferior race. Accordingly, they had been rounded up, not only in Germany itself, but throughout the occupied countries, and herded here. Because they were Catholics, they were allowed the privilege of remaining in family groups.

There were about 4,500 of them in all. They did no work, but were assigned the job of policing the neighboring Jewish camps and barracks, where they exercised their authority with unimaginable cruelty.

The Gypsy Camp offered one curiosity: the experimental barracks. The director of the Research Laboratory was Dr. Epstein, professor at the University of Prague, a pediatrician of world renown, a KZ prisoner since 1940. His assistant was Dr. Bendel, of the University of Paris Medical School.

Three categories of experiments were performed here: the first consisted of research into the origin and causes of dual births, a study which the birth of the Dionne quintuplets ten years before had caused to be pursued with renewed interest. The second was the search to discover the biological and pathological causes for the birth of dwarfs and giants. And the third was the study of the causes and treatment of a disease commonly called “dry gangrene of the face.”

This terrible disease is exceptionally rare; in ordinary practice you scarcely ever come across it. But here in the Gypsy Camp it was fairly common among both children and adolescents. And so, because of its prevalence, research had been greatly facilitated and considerable progress made towards finding an effective method of treating it.

According to established medical concepts, “dry gangrene of the face” generally appears in conjunction with measles, scarlet fever and typhoid fever. But these diseases, plus the camp’s deplorable sanitary conditions, seemed only to be the factors that favored its development, since it also existed in the Czech, Polish and Jewish camps. But it was especially prevalent among gypsy children, and from this it had been deduced that its presence must be directly related to hereditary syphilis, for the syphilis rate in the Gypsy Camp was extremely high.

From these observations a new treatment, consisting of a combination of malaria injections and doses of a drug whose trade name is “Novarsenobenzol,” had been developed, with most promising results.

Dr. Mengele paid daily visits to the experimental barracks and participated actively in all phases of the research. He worked in collaboration with two prisoner-doctors and a painter named Dina, whose artistic skill was a great asset to the enterprise. Dina was a native of Prague, and had been a KZ prisoner for three years. As Dr. Mengele’s assistant she was granted certain privileges that ordinary prisoners never enjoyed.

DR. MENGELE WAS INDEFATIGABLE IN the exercise of his functions. He spent long hours in his laboratories, then hurried to the unloading platform, where the daily arrival of four or five trainloads of Hungarian deportees kept him busy half the day.

Unceasingly the new convoys marched off in columns of five, flanked by SS guards. I watched one come in and line up. Although my vantage point was at some distance from the tracks and my view obstructed by the maze of barbed wire fences, I could still see that this convoy had been expelled from some fair-sized city: the prisoners’ clothes were smartly tailored, many were wearing new poplin raincoats, and the suitcases they carried were of expensive leather. In that city, wherever it was, they had managed to create for themselves a pleasant, cultured way of life. And that was the cardinal sin for which they were now paying so dearly.

Despite his numerous functions, Dr. Mengele even found time for me. A cart, drawn by prisoners, drew up before the dissecting room door. The transportation group unloaded two corpses. On their chests the letters Z and S (
Zur Sektion
), marked with a special chalk, indicated that they were to be dissected. The chief of Barracks 12 assigned an intelligent prisoner to assist me. Together we placed one of the bodies on the dissection table. I noticed a thick black line across his neck. Either he had hanged himself, or been hanged. Taking a quick look at the second body, I saw that death had here been caused by electrocution. That much could be deduced from the small superficial skin burns and the yellowish-red coloration around them. I wondered whether he had thrown himself against the high-tension wires, or whether he had been pushed. Both were common in the KZ.

The formalities were the same, whether it was a case of suicide or murder. In the evening, at roll call, the names of the deceased would be scratched from the muster list, and their bodies loaded onto “hearses” for transportation to the camp morgue. There another truck would pick them up, at the rate of forty to fifty a day, and bear them to the crematorium.

The two bodies Dr. Mengele had sent me were the first I had been given to examine. The day before, he had warned me to work on them carefully and do a good job. I planned to carry out his orders to the best of my ability.

A car pulled up. In the barracks the command “Attention” rang out. Dr. Mengele and two senior SS officers had just arrived. They listened as the barracks leader and doctor made their reports, then headed straight for the dissecting room, followed by the F Camp prisoner-doctors. They arranged themselves in a circle around the room, as though this were a pathology class in some important medical center and the case at hand a particularly interesting one. I suddenly realized that I was about to take an examination, and that this was the jury before me, a highly important and dangerous jury. I also knew that my fellow prisoner-doctors were keeping their fingers crossed for me.

No one present knew that I had spent three years at the Boroslo Institute of Forensic Medicine, where I had had a chance to study every possible form of suicide under the supervision of Professor Strasseman. I realized that, as prisoner-doctor A 8450, I had better remember now all that Dr. Miklos Nyiszli had formerly known.

I began the dissection. I proceeded to open first the skull, then the thorax and finally the abdominal cavity. I extracted all the organs, noted everything that was abnormal, and replied without hesitation to all the numerous questions they fired at me. Their faces showed that their curiosity had been satisfied, and from their approving nods and glances I surmised that I had passed the examination. After the second dissection Dr. Mengele ordered me to prepare the statement of my findings. Somebody would stop by to pick it up on the following day. After the SS doctors had left I conversed a while with my fellow prisoners.

On the following day three more bodies arrived for dissection. The same public appeared, but this time the atmosphere was less tense, for they knew me and had seen my work. Those present took a more lively interest, made a number of astute and provocative comments, and on certain points the discussion grew quite animated.

After the departure of the SS doctors, several French and Greek doctors paid me a call and asked if I would instruct them in the technique of lumbar punctures. They also requested me to grant them authorization to try the operation on some of the bodies given me, a request I readily granted. I was deeply moved to find that, even inside the barbed wire fences, they continued to manifest such an interest in their profession. They attempted the puncture and after six or seven tries at last succeeded, then withdrew, quite pleased with their afternoon’s work.