A
Jew and a medical doctor, the Auschwitz prisoner Miklos
Nyiszli - No. A8450 - was spared death for a
grimmer fate: to perform autopsies and 'scientific
research' on his fellow inmates at Auschwitz under the
supervision of Dr. Josef Mengele, the chief provider for
the gas chambers.
Miraculously, Nyiszli survived to give an horrifying and
sobering account, one of the first books to bring the full
horror of the Nazi death camps to the public - Auschwitz:
A Doctor's Eyewitness Account. You find this account
pp. 114-120:
"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 noise of the elevators
and the sound of their clanging doors reached my room. The
work moved ahead double-time. The gas chambers had to be
cleared, for the arrival of a new convoy had been
announced.
The
chief of the gas chamber kommando 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, where normally the gas kommando men change
clothes for work. 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. He knew that my superior was Dr.
Mengele, the KZ's most dreaded figure, who, goaded by
racial pride, took himself to be one of the most important
representatives of German medical science. He considered
the dispatch of hundreds of thousands of Jews to the gas
chambers as a patriotic duty. The work carried out in the
dissecting room was for the furtherance of German medical
science ...
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 lungfuls 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.
It was obvious that the child could not remain in the
crematorium. One solution would have been to put her in
front of the crematorium gate. A kommando of women always
worked there. She could have slipped back to the camp
barracks after they had finished work. She would never
relate what had happened to her. The presence of one new
face among so many thousands would never be detected, for
no one in the camp knew all the other inmates. If she had
been three or four years older that might have worked. A
girl of twenty would have been able to understand clearly
the miraculous circumstances of her survival, and have
enough foresight not to tell anyone about them. She would
wait for better times, like so many other thousands were
waiting, to recount what she had lived through.
But Mussfeld thought that a young girl of sixteen would in
all nai 'vete' tell the first person she had met where she
had just come from, what she had seen and what she had
lived through. The news would spread like wildfire, and we
would all be forced to pay for it with our lives. "There's
no way of getting round 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."
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