Auschwitz_ A Doctor's Eyewitness Account - Miklos Nyiszli [67]
And now they were in number one crematorium. Once again I was struck by the horrible irony of the situation. I, a Jewish doctor, had to examine them with exact clinical methods before they died, and then perform the dissection on their still warm bodies. So shaken was I by the situation, about which I was powerless to do anything at all, that I suddenly felt myself spinning close to the edge of madness. By whose will had such evil, such a succession of horrors been made to descend upon our wretched people? Could this be the will of God? No; I could not believe it.
By an immense effort of self-control I got hold of myself and examined the boy. On his right foot I noticed a congenital deformity: some of the muscles were lacking.
The medical term used to describe this deformity is hypomyelia. I could see that extremely expert hands had practiced several operations on him, but as a result one foot was shorter than the other. With a bandage and orthopedic socks, however, he could walk perfectly well. I saw no other deformity to be indicated.
I asked them if they wanted something to eat.
“We haven’t had anything to eat for some time,” they told me.
I called a man from the Sonderkommando and had some food brought for them: a plate of stewed beef and macaroni, a dish not to be found outside the confines of the Sonderkommando. They began to eat ravenously, unaware that this was their “Last Supper.”
Scarcely half an hour later Oberschaarführer Mussfeld appeared with four Sonderkommando men. They took the two prisoners into the furnace room and had them undress. Then the Ober’s revolver cracked twice. Father and son were stretched out on the concrete, covered with blood, dead. Oberschaarführer Mussfeld had faithfully executed Dr. Mengele’s orders.
Now it was my turn again. The two bodies were brought back into the dissecting room. So sickened was I by what had just happened that I entrusted the dissection to my associates and confined myself to recording the data. The dissection revealed nothing more than I had previously ascertained in my in vivo examination. The cases were banal, but could nevertheless very easily be utilized as propaganda in support of the Third Reich’s theory concerning the degeneracy of the Jewish race.
Late in the afternoon, already having sent at least 10,000 men to their death, Dr. Mengele arrived. He listened attentively to my report concerning both the in vivo and post mortem observations made on the two victims.
“These bodies must not be cremated,” he said. “They must be prepared and their skeletons sent to the Anthropological Museum in Berlin. What systems do you know for the preparation of skeletons?”
“There are two methods,” I said. “The first consists of immersing the bodies in lime chloride, which consumes all the soft parts in about two weeks’ time. Then the bodies are immersed in a gasoline bath, which dissolves all the fat and makes the skeletons dry, odorless and white. Then there’s a second method: by cooking. What you do there is boil the bodies in water until the flesh can easily be stripped from the bones. Then the same gasoline bath is applied.”
Dr. Mengele ordered me to use the quickest method: by cooking.
In the KZ orders were always cursory. How the prisoners should go about procuring the materials necessary for their execution was never specified. The order had to be carried out, and that was as much as was known. I was therefore faced with a serious problem: what could I have the bodies cooked in? I put the question to Oberschaarführer Mussfeld. I told him that I had two bodies that had to be cooked, but that I didn’t have any. . . .
Even he was horrified by my tale.