Auschwitz_ A Doctor's Eyewitness Account - Miklos Nyiszli [1]
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