Auschwitz_ A Doctor's Eyewitness Account - Miklos Nyiszli [7]
While hundreds of documents and books on the subject of the KZ (the Nazi concentration camps) have appeared over the past forty to fifty years—from the autobiography of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess to personal accounts of survivors, and culminating in Danuta Czech’s monumental Auschwitz Chronicle, 1939–1945—none to my knowledge has ever recounted in detail what went on every day inside the crematoriums, for the simple reason that the gate to the crematoriums was the gate to death.
Almost miraculously, Dr. Nyiszli survived. Through his eyes we can relive those exceptional times, and from his unique viewpoint witness as well the slow disintegration of a mad, grandiose empire built to last a thousand years. For the picture that unfolds beneath the doctor’s untutored pen spans the period from the “selections” made upon arrival at the camp to the methodical exterminations of 1944 and early 1945, ending with the nightmarish exodus that marked the Nazi collapse in the winter of 1945. I say “untutored pen” because, as Dr. Nyiszli himself states: “When I lived through these horrors, which are beyond all imagining, I was not a writer but a doctor. Today in writing about them I write not as a reporter but as a doctor.” But stylistic inadequacies are of little importance here; what matters in a book of this nature is the raw material.
What Miklos Nyiszli lived through and witnessed many will prefer not to believe, even today, for the human mind tends to turn away from suffering and whatever is repugnant. From that to denying that such treatment and torture, such debasement and degradation, such inhumanity to one’s own fellow beings could ever have happened is but a simple step to take. For there are some today who refuse to believe that the extermination of twelve million people, of which five to six million Jews, ever took place, who indeed maintain that it was all a fabrication, or at the very least a gross exaggeration. While they are a tiny minority, there are many others who simply prefer to block it from their minds. And even assuming one knows and does not turn away, one may well ask: What is the point of dwelling on the subject? Why rake over cold ashes, stir up old animosities? Would it not be better to forgive and forget, turn toward the future rather than look back in anger on the fading past? Fair questions indeed. The answer comes from the victims themselves. “These victims of Nazi atrocities,” Meyer Levin once wrote, “hid fragmentary records of their experience, they scratched words on walls, they died hoping the world would some day know, not in statistics but in empathy. We are charged to listen.”
At least in the early years following their release, those who had lived through the camps were often reluctant or unwilling to talk of the experience, let alone write about it. The subject was too painful to recall; it was time to heal and attempt to get on with their lives. Later the veil was lifted, at least in part, as some felt increasingly obliged to tell their story “so that the world would not forget.” Looking back, the question most often asked seemed to be: How could this have happened? How could the world have allowed it to happen? There is no easy answer, especially since it has become increasingly clear that, in the later stages of World War II, many Western leaders did know if not the grim details at least the general outline of what was happening behind Hitler’s barbed