Auschwitz_ A Doctor's Eyewitness Account - Miklos Nyiszli [8]
In addition to those questions must be added the one raised so poignantly and insistently by Bruno Bettelheim in his foreword to Nyiszli’s book: Why did the Jews allow themselves to be arrested, deported, and killed without resisting? And why, even more to the point, did only one of the fourteen Sonderkommando groups rise up in rebellion at the hour of their death? Knowing the length of their days, knowing they had liquidated their predecessors and that their successors would in like manner eliminate them, why did they not all “die as men, not as living corpses”? I think the answer to all those questions is best if not fully answered by Walter Laqueur’s reminder, in his foreword to Danuta Czech’s magisterial work, that we should bear in mind two very different elements of the Holocaust experience. Many if not most European Jews were integrated into the societies in which they lived. The Germans, after all, were the people of Bach and Beethoven, Kant, Goethe, and Schiller. How “bad” could such a people really be? Hitler, an aberration, would doubtless soon pass. Laqueur and others also remind us that Auschwitz, in addition to its other inmates, at one point housed thirteen thousand Russian prisoners of war, robust young men who, if anyone could, should have risen up and gone to their death fighting. Yet only ninety-two survived, and there was no Russian uprising. Very simply, in the unfair game of life then staged, all the camp’s victims—were they Jews, Gypsies, or POWs—were powerless before the masters’ whims and wishes.
By a conservative estimate, twelve million people perished in the Nazi concentration camps. Most were murdered in cold blood, but countless others died by starvation, illness, and suicide. The numbers are too staggering to comprehend. The value of Dr. Nyiszli’s book is not in its insights. Its importance lies in its ability to show us, firsthand, what that netherworld really was. It tells, as Bruno Bettelheim says, “of events which, though gruesome, need to be told and retold until their meaning for our times is accepted.”
—RICHARD SEAVER
DECLARATION
I, THE UNDERSIGNED, DR. MIKLOS Nyiszli, physician, former prisoner of the German concentration camps, declare that this work, which relates the darkest days in the history of mankind, was drawn up by me in strict accordance with reality, and without the slightest exaggeration, in my capacity as an eyewitness and involuntary participant in the work of the Auschwitz crematoriums, into whose fires millions of fathers, mothers and children disappeared.
As chief physician of the Auschwitz crematoriums, I drafted numerous affidavits of dissection and forensic medicine findings which I signed with my own tattoo number. I sent these documents by mail, counter signed by my superior, Dr. Mengele, to the Berlin-Dahlem address of the “Institut für Rassenbiologische und Anthropologische Forschungen,” one of the most qualified medical centers of the Third Reich. It should still be possible to find them today in the archives of this Research Institute.
In writing this work I am not aiming for any literary success. When I lived through these horrors, which were beyond all imagining, I was not a writer but a doctor. Today, in telling about them, I write not as a reporter but as a doctor.
Done at Oradea-Nagyvarad, March 1946.
Signed:
Dr. Miklos Nyiszli
To my wife and daughter—returned from the Camp of the Dead
I
MAY, 1944. INSIDE EACH OF THE locked cattle cars ninety people were jammed. The stench of the urinal buckets, which were so full they overflowed, made the air unbreathable.
The train of the deportees. For four days, forty identical cars had been rolling endlessly on, first across Slovakia, then across the territory of the Central Government, bearing us towards an unknown destination. We were part of the first group