Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account

Dr. Miklos Nyiszli,  “Auschwitz”, Arcade Publishing Digital, 2011, 240 pp. (Kindle Version).  Note: Original version pub 1946

This book was written by a survivor of Auschwitz: Dr. Miklos Nyiszli, a Jew, spared from death when Dr. Josef Mengele chose him to perform autopsies after Mengele’s experiments.  Nyiszli became the chief physician of the Auschwitz crematoriums.  Miraculously, he survived to give this account, written in 1946.  I have read other accounts from survivors but not by anyone so deeply involved in the work at the crematoriums.

I don’t believe in hell, at least not the one described in Sunday school or displayed in medieval paintings, etc.  But after reading this book I found a hell every bit as terrifying as the one I had been taught about.  This real-life hell existed in Birkenau, behind the four crematoriums by the little yellow house.  Here, when the volume of those to be killed could not be accommodated by gassing and then cremating, the over-flow victims were forced to undress in the little yellow house and then to go down a path where flames were shooting into the sky from burning bodies.  Here, if they were lucky they were shot in the back of the head and pitched into the fire—if not so lucky, they were pitched into the fire while still alive.  The process by the little yellow house could kill and burn more people than any of the crematoriums could—but it was much messier.

I have always wondered how ordinary people could involve themselves in the atrocities of the death camps, particularly Auschwitz-Birkenau; a place which I visited some years ago.  The author provides a partial answer.  The SS set up a system where the inmates themselves carried out most of the killings in desperate attempts to prolong their own lives—that’s how the author of this book lived.  Of course, this doesn’t explain the many murders carried out in Eastern Europe by the soldiers themselves. 

To get a flavor of the book I present a section from pages 114 to 120:

In number one's crematorium's gas chamber 3,000 dead bodies were piled up. The Sonderkommando had already begun to untangle the lattice of flesh ... The chief of the gas chamber kommandos almost tore the hinges off the door to my room as he arrived out of breath, his eyes wide with fear or surprise. "Doctor," he said, "come quickly. We just found a girl alive at the bottom of a pile of corpses".

I grabbed my instrument case, which was always ready, and dashed to the gas chamber. Against the wall, near the entrance to the immense room, half-covered with other bodies, I saw a girl in the throes of a death rattle, her body seized with convulsions. The gas kommando men around me were in a state of panic. Nothing like this had ever happened in the course of their horrible career.

We moved the still-living body from the corpses pressing against it. I gathered the tiny adolescent body into my arms and carried it back to the room adjoining the gas chamber ... I laid the body on a bench. A frail young girl, almost a child, she could have been no more than fifteen.

I took out my syringe and, taking her arm - she had not yet recovered consciousness and was breathing with difficulty - I administered three intravenous injections. My companions covered her body which was as cold as ice with a heavy overcoat. One ran to the kitchen to fetch some tea and warm broth. Everybody wanted to help as if she were his own child.

The reaction was swift. The child was seized by a fit of coughing which brought up a thick globule of phlegm from her lungs. She opened her eyes and looked fixedly at the ceiling. I kept a close watch for every sign of life. Her breathing became deeper and more and more regular. Her lungs, tortured by the gas, inhaled the fresh air avidly. Her pulse became perceptible, the result of the injections. I waited impatiently. I saw that within a few minutes she was going to regain consciousness: her circulation began to bring color back into her cheeks, and her delicate face became human again ..

I made a sign for my companions to withdraw. I was going to attempt something I knew without saying was doomed to failure ... From our numerous contacts, I had been able to ascertain that Mussfeld had a high esteem for the medical expert's professional qualities ... And this was the man I had to deal with, the man I had to talk into allowing a single life to be spared.

I calmly related the terrible case we found ourselves confronted with. I described for his benefit what pains the child must have suffered in the undressing room, and the horrible scenes that preceded death in the gas chamber. When the room had been plunged into darkness, she had breathed in a few lung fulls of cyclon gas. Only a few, though, for her fragile body had given way under the pushing and shoving of the mass as they fought against death. By chance she had fallen with her face against the wet concrete floor. That bit of humidity had kept her from being asphyxiated, for cyclon gas does not react under humid conditions.

These were my arguments, and I asked him to do something for the child. He listened to me attentively then asked me exactly what I proposed doing. I saw by his expression that I had put him face to face with a practically impossible problem.

"There's no way of getting around it," he said, "the child will have to die.

Half an hour later the young girl was led, or rather carried, into the furnace room hallway, and there Mussfeld sent another in his place to do the job. A bullet in the back of the neck .."