Auschwitz_ A Doctor's Eyewitness Account - Miklos Nyiszli [64]
In the dissecting room, for lack of something better to do—ut aliquid videatur—I invented some jobs to keep my colleagues occupied. I had them clean the surgical instruments till they shone like display pieces, then sort them and put them away. The mosquito netting, after the battle of the previous day, was also in need of repair. As for myself, I was seated at the table, my head swathed in bandages and adhesive tape, mentally compiling a list of complaints and requests I wanted to present to Dr. Mengele at the earliest possible opportunity.
For one thing, I planned to tell him that none of the crematorium rooms was suitable as a dissecting room, for the simple reason that, no matter where you happened to be here, you could not escape the heart-rending screams of the deported on their way to death, screams that pierced to the very marrow of your bones. Whether it was the gas chamber or a bullet in the neck, the screams were the same. It was impossible for me to concentrate properly on my work here. Since the day of my arrival, when I had learned the fate of the eleven preceding kommandos, I had lived in a world of constant dread: four months of nerve-racking tension, waiting, day by day, for the moment when our kommando would meet with the same fate.
I also planned to ask him to be lenient with my work in the future if it proved to be inaccurate. Why? Because, no later than yesterday, October 6th, 1944, when I had been ordered to perform an autopsy on the body of a Russian officer and to prepare the dissection report, number three crematorium had blown up before my eyes, and we had been attacked by a battalion of SS troops. Howitzers had been brought up and police dogs unleashed against us. Hand grenades had exploded around us. SS soldiers, with fixed bayonets, had charged into this so-called scientific institute I was supposed to direct and run us into the courtyard, striking and kicking us as we went. Then we had been made to lie down in the mud. I had come within a hair’s breadth of being transformed from a coroner into a subject for dissection myself. It was true that Dr. Mengele had saved me from this fate and rescued me from the rows of the damned, but only to be returned to this house of sorrow for a new reprieve of four months. I would ask him to admit, frankly, what an impossible situation ours had been yesterday afternoon and evening. For even after the worst was over, I had yet had to give first aid to two SS non-coms who five hours earlier had kicked and struck me unmercifully and then waited, their guns aimed at my head, for the signal to pull the trigger.
Such were the complaints I intended making to my chief. But principally I wanted to prevail upon him to have the dissecting room and its personnel transferred to some place in the KZ better suited to research.
Just as I reached this point in my musings, Dr. Mengele opened the door. As the rules prescribed, I rose and came to attention and, as the senior member present, announced: “Captain, three doctors and one lab assistant at their posts.”
He looked quizzically at my bandaged head.
“What happened to you?” he asked with an enigmatic smile that seemed half-serious, half-joking. The nature of his question gave me the impression that he would have liked to pretend that yesterday’s events had never occurred. So I did not answer him. My list of complaints withered, till only the one obsessing request remained.
“Captain,” I said unconvincingly, “this environment is highly unsuitable for scientific research. Wouldn’t it be possible to transfer the dissecting room to a better place?”
He looked at me steadily, his expression hardening. “What’s wrong?” he said coldly. “Getting sentimental?”
I regretted having let myself go, having momentarily forgotten the discretion I usually displayed in his presence. I had dared criticize the one place, the one environment where my soft-brained superior really felt at home: the blazing glow of the pyres and the spiraling smoke of the crematorium stacks; the air heavy with the odor