Auschwitz

It is a scene of apocalyptic proportions. Grotesque brick chimneys point their sombre fingers to the heavens, whilst all that remains of the majority of the wooden barracks are their ruined foundations. The rubble of a crematorium cowers under the weight of its own atrocities. A brittle wind scours the air. It is what is missing that renders this scene so powerful, for many of the barracks and crematoria were razed to the ground in the Nazis’ frantic attempt to erase their crimes before the Red Army discovered Birkenau. The desolation is overwhelming.

In 1940, a former Polish army garrison in the town of Oświęcim was identified as a suitable facility for a new concentration camp to incarcerate opponents of the Nazi regime. Its purpose was to relieve the overcrowded prisons in Silesia and to cope with the inevitability of further mass arrests in the future. The town was commandeered by the Nazis and retitled Auschwitz. It was also conveniently situated at an important railway junction, making it easily accessible for trains from as far away as Italy, France and Greece; this position would prove to be crucial in the coming years. Auschwitz I became the alma mater of a network of camps comprising three main sites – Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II-Birkenau and Auschwitz III-Monowitz – as well as over forty smaller ones. Over the next five years, more than one-and-a-half million people – a quarter of those who died in the Holocaust – would be murdered here.

The concentration camp at Auschwitz shocks with its brutality and indifference to life, but to visit Birkenau is to gaze into the abyss of inhumanity and to witness the void that remains when man abandons all morality. The anguish of the past is still snagged on the barbed wire, and a terrible misery stagnates over the camp, its spores infiltrating the hearts of visitors in the 21^st century. Built by prisoners who became its first victims, each crematorium attended to the daily slaughter of several thousand innocent people. Three-quarters of all arrivals to this Golgotha were sent straight to their deaths in the gas chambers. The atmosphere is saturated with a distinct and visceral horror, for it was an extermination camp unrivalled in its capacity for torment. In order to plumb the depths of its harrowing past, however, we must entrust ourselves to the memories of others. Miklós Nyiszli’s account of his time there, ‘Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account,’ is searing in its intensity and honesty, for he assisted the very men who orchestrated the deaths of thousands.

Nyiszli was a Hungarian Jew who was transported to Auschwitz with his wife and daughter in May 1944. After spending a month working at the synthetic rubber factory in Monowitz, he was deployed to Birkenau, where he was exposed to the ‘nauseating odour of burning flesh and scorched hair.’ A forensic pathologist, he was selected to assist Dr Josef Mengele, the camp doctor infamous for his genetic experiments and callous selection of victims on the railway ramp. This was a role that would both damn Nyiszli and save him. From a total of 800,000 Hungarian Jews, 437,000 were deported when German troops occupied their homeland. 90% of those dispatched to Auschwitz were killed in the gas chambers.

In some respects, he was relatively fortunate: residing in comparative comfort, he continued to practise his profession by conducting autopsies instead of being sentenced to hard labour. On several occasions, swift thinking and Fate appear to have intervened to deliver him from death when others perished. Yet he lived knowing that his compatriots were being massacred, whilst he was an accessory of the regime, observing the abominations of the SS at first hand. As a member of the Sonderkommando – a ‘special unit’ of prisoners – he endured the everyday terror that ‘hovered over our heads, suspended by the thinnest of threads… it would descend bringing with it instantaneous death, leaving in its wake only a pile of silvery ashes.’ The Sonderkommando, whose primary duty was to burn corpses in ovens, had intimate experience of the genocide and were thus deemed a liability. To prevent their secrets from reaching the outside world, the Nazis systematically gassed all members of the Sonderkommando after they had served only four months’ labour. The first task of new members was to cremate their predecessors; some prisoners recalled as many as twelve generations of Sonderkommando.

Nyiszli’s job required expertise and skill, thereby making him less dispensable than his contemporaries. He worked closely with Dr Mengele, and it was under his aegis that Nyiszli was able to obtain privileges such as contact with his family. Mengele was a ‘criminal doctor’ who had sent ‘millions of people to death merely because, according to a racial theory, they were inferior.’ He was the camp’s ‘most dreaded figure’ who, according to Professor Richard J. Evans, entered ‘a Faustian pact with the regime and its ideology that ultimately destroyed the scientific validity of his work just as it violated every moral canon of the discipline he professed to follow.’ He was particularly notorious for his experiments on those he regarded as abnormal, from twins to cripples, and dwarves to pregnant women. Nyiszli, it must be noted, never helped him in this regard; he was instead commissioned to perform autopsies when Mengele had finished with his living specimens.

Nyiszli was forced to exercise immense self-restraint during his time in Auschwitz, and this is reflected in his measured and clinical prose, which is needed to disinfect his mind of the deadening horrors of the camp. The factual tone of his descriptions of the autopsies further indicate his necessary emotional detachment. Retrospective vilification or condemnation would have weakened his account, so when his loathing for Mengele manifests itself, it does so with the rarity and might of a lightning bolt.

The scale of the slaughter numbs the reader. A group of seventy women selected each evening to be shot in the back of the neck seems almost insignificant when compared to the 45,000 inmates of Camp C who, upon the decision to liquidate their camps, were ‘herded passively into the gas chambers’ where they met the ‘hand of the sure physician, Death.’ Nyiszli draws together specific details and encounters to create a disturbing portrayal of the camp’s depravities. Consider the fate of the girl who, having been sent into the gas chamber, was knocked to the ground and found her face pressed against the damp floor. Miraculously, ‘that bit of humidity had kept her from being asphyxiated,’ and Nyiszli managed to revive her. An appeal for her life to be spared was rejected though, and, half an hour later, she was ‘led, or rather carried, into the furnace room hallway’ where she was shot in the neck.

Many layers of deception were implemented in order to deceive the condemned until the last moment: the Nazis’ cynicism was ‘complete and terrible.’ A ‘reassuring’ sign in various languages by the gas chambers read ‘Baths and Disinfecting Room,’ dispelling the fears of even the most suspicious so they ‘went down the stairs almost gaily.’ Those undressing were instructed to remember the number of their coat hanger ‘in order to avoid all useless confusion upon his return from the bath.’ The Nazis took it upon themselves to ensure that the plundering of every arrival was as complete and profitable as possible. Thus notices were issued to those being deported, stipulating that they should bring their worldly possessions with them, including tools, suitable winter clothing and food. Such items were taken straightaway and amalgamated into the Nazi behemoth. It was organised robbery executed in the most manipulative of ways. To quash rumours about the camp, prisoners were commanded to write postcards under the false heading of ‘a resort town located not far from the Swiss border.’ Replies from family and friends desperate for contact with their loved ones were destroyed immediately. This was ultimately of little consequence, for the ‘addressees had been burned before the letters.’ 

One can attempt to rationalise the acts of a lone murderer or psychopath by attributing them to an individual madness and deeming the guilty an aberration. When, however, it is a crime with so many perpetrators, there seems to be no explanation for their behaviour: it is hard to comprehend such collective and pervasive evil. It was, of course, one man’s vitriol which polluted the waters of a nation. Yet this raises the question: does everyone have a dormant ‘homo homini lupus’ trait? Primo Levi suggested instead ‘Monsters exist, but they are too few in numbers to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.’ For Nyiszli, it was therefore imperative to ‘tell the world about the dark mysteries of these death factories’ so that it would never forget, and to make it aware of the ‘unimaginable cruelty and sordidness of a people who pretended to be superior.’ His life’s purpose was to ensure that truth escaped from the camp, even if he did not; he strove to survive in order to bear testament to the suffering of his race and the tragedy of millions.