Auschwitz_ A Doctor's Eyewitness Account - Miklos Nyiszli [42]
“Don’t save him,” one of them said. “You’ll only be prolonging the agony. And you can see for yourself he wanted to escape it now, instead of waiting for the firing squad in a few weeks.”
Others offered much the same argument, but I silently went about preparing my instruments. Seeing that their arguments had had no effect, and that I was preparing to inject the antidote, some of the men lost their tempers and spared no words as they told me what they thought of my action. Nevertheless I finished the injections and left the room. Unless he contracted pneumonia during the next five or six days, the Captain would live. Then for several weeks he would continue to stoke the furnaces that burned the bodies of thousands upon thousands of his fellow men, tortured and killed by gas. Till one day the Sonderkommando’s final hour would toll, and he and his companions would line up outside the crematorium. A machine-gun blast and all would be over. He and the others would fall, their eyes filled with horror and astonishment.
Now that I was no longer beside his bed, now that his face no longer called forth the doctor in me, the purely human side of my nature was forced to admit that the Captain’s friends had been right. I should have “let him go his way,” not in front of the cold steel barrel of a machine gun, but in the pleasant narcosis that now enveloped him, where he was free from all moral and physical pain.
I finished my rounds and returned to number one. I glanced around the dissection room and saw that my new colleagues were busy working, with the zeal of neophytes, on the dysentery-racked bodies provided by Dr. Wolff. They were clean shaven and were wearing spotless smocks, new clothes and decent shoes. They looked human again. To see them standing around the dissection table in their white smocks and rubber gloves, anyone unacquainted with the work that went on here might easily have taken this to be the laboratory and dissecting room of some serious scientific institute. But I who had worked here for three months knew that it was not an institute of science, but of pseudo-science. Like the ethnological studies, like the notions of a Master Race, Dr. Mengele’s research into the origins of dual births was nothing more than a pseudo-science. Just as false was the theory concerning the degeneracy of the dwarfs and cripples sent to the butchers, in order to demonstrate the inferiority of the Jewish race. To be sure, all this was not to be propagated immediately, for the German people were not yet ready to swallow it. But when the race of Supermen had achieved final victory, having won the war and acquired the territory vital to its needs, then the skeletons of these cripples and dwarfs who had been murdered here would be put on display in the spacious halls of great museums, along with a descriptive plaque giving their name, age, nationality, occupation, etc. Then, on the anniversary of Victory Day, thousands of students of this Third Reich, built to endure a thousand years, would be led through these halls by their professors, to pay homage to their illustrious forebears. Their forebears who, by this victory, and the realization of the sacred mission which History had entrusted to the Master Race, had pushed the surrounding peoples—French, Belgians, Russians, Poles—into the niches corresponding to their inferiority. Better still, they would have completely annihilated one European people, the Jews, who had a long history behind them, a history of 6,000 years, but who had no right to exist a few centuries