Auschwitz_ A Doctor's Eyewitness Account - Miklos Nyiszli [0]
A Doctor's Eyewitness Account
Miklos Nyiszli
Richard Seaver
Tibère Kremer
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
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION
DECLARATION
Dedication
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
XXV
XXVI
XXVII
XXVIII
XXIX
XXX
XXXI
XXXII
XXXIII
XXXIV
XXXV
XXXVI
XXXVII
XXXVIII
EPILOGUE
FOREWORD
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