01 Jan Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account
Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account
(1946, 1960, 2011) Dr. Miklos Nyiszli was a Jewish physician in Hungary who in June of 1944 was sent with his wife and young daughter to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Once he arrived he volunteered to work as a doctor and ended up working under the direct supervision of Dr. Josef Mengele as chief physician of the crematoriums.
He and so many others who were there were obsessed with the hope that someone would be able to escape and let the world know what was really happening there. Somehow and not easily Dr. Nyiszli, prisoner number A8450, lived until the end of the war. In 1946 he wrote this chilling and detailed account.
If I didn’t know better I would have said I was reading a violent graphic novel. Or watching the most hideous slasher film.
Bruno Bettelheim, University of Chicago, wrote the Forward in 1960. He was an Austrian psychologist. Jewish by birth, who spent nearly a year 1938-1939 in Dachau and Buchenwald. According to Wikipedia, he was set free as a result of an amnesty declared for Hitler’s birthday. From there he went to the United States. This was so early in the war that he couldn’t have experienced the true horrors of what those camps became. Perhaps that explains his focus on the question: Why didn’t more Jews fight back? I’m surprised that after reading Dr. Nyiszli’s account that he didn’t have a better understanding. I certainly did.
In order not to go mad during his months at Auschwitz Dr. Nyiszli was able to compartmentalize the atrocities around him by focusing on his medical and surgical procedures. He did get out. His wife and daughter survived the camps also. The doctor wrote this important historical account and ten years later died of a heart attack.
No wonder.
Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account at amazon.com
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