Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

by Miklos Nyiszli

  XX

  NEXT DOOR TO THE SS LIVING QUARTERS, on the second story of number two crematorium, was a carpenter’s shop, where three carpenters plied their trade, fulfilling any and all requests that were sent to them. For the moment they were busy filling a “private order.” Oberchaarführer Mussfeld, taking advantage of the opportunity, had ordered the carpenters to make him a “recamier,” a sort of double bed that could also serve as a large sofa. It was to be completed as quickly as possible.

  It was no easy job, but in the crematoriums there was no such word as “impossible” when an order was given. The carpenters had salvaged the necessary wood from among the construction materials scattered about the crematorium grounds. The springs had come from the easy chairs that certain deportees had brought with them to make the journey more comfortable for their ailing parents. There were hundreds of these abandoned chairs in the crematorium courtyard and we used to sit in them after work to rest awhile and catch a few breaths of fresh air.

  So the recamier was built according to instructions. For me it had become an object of curiosity. I had followed all phases of its construction and seen it completed. I had watched them install the springs and cover them with elegant tapestries. Two French electricians had installed a bed lamp and arranged a niche for a radio. After it had been varnished it was quite handsome. In a small bourgeois home in Mannheim it would look even better than it did up in the uninviting crematorium loft. For the recamier was to be sent, at the end of the week, to Mussfeld’s home at Mannheim. There it would wait till the victorious Ober, back from the trying wars, could use it to rest his weary bones.

  One day, the week prior to its shipment, I was in my room and saw a half dozen silk pajamas—a natural supplement for the recamier—waiting to join the package. They were of fine imported silk and would certainly have been unobtainable on the outside, where ration tickets were needed for even the most essential items. The KZ also had its ration system, a much better one than that in force throughout Germany, for it furnished those who used it with any item they desired. In the undressing room the goods were there waiting to be taken. It only took one point per item, a point of flame from the Ober’s gun, sending a bullet into the back of the owner’s neck.

  In exchange for these “points” the SS officials received jewelry, leather goods, fur coats, silks and fine shoes. Not a week went by without their sending some packages home.

  In the packages that had been sent one found, besides the luxury items already mentioned, tea, coffee, chocolate, and canned goods by the hundreds, all of which were also obtainable in the undressing room. Thus the Ober had conceived the idea of having a recamier constructed and sent home.

  As I watched, day by day, the final phases of its construction, an idea began to take shape in my mind. Little by little the idea transformed itself into a project. In a few weeks the Sonderkommando would be a thing of the past. We would all perish here, and we were well aware of it. We had even grown used to the idea, for we knew there was no way out. One thing upset me however. Eleven Sonderkommando squads had already perished and taken with them the terrible secret of the crematoriums and their butchers. Even though we did not survive, it was our bounden duty to make certain that the world learned of the unimaginable cruelty and sordidness of a people who pretended to be superior. It was imperative that a message addressed to the world leave this place. Whether it was discovered soon afterwards, or years later, it would still be a terrible manifesto of accusation. This message would be signed by all the members of number one crematorium’s Sonderkommando, fully conscious of their impending death. Carried beyond the barbed wires of KZ in the recamier, it would remain for the time being at Oberschaarführer Mussfeld’s home at Mannheim.

  The message was drafted in time. It described in sufficient detail the horrors perpetrated at Auschwitz from the time of its founding until the present. The names of the camp’s torturers were included, as well as our estimate of the number of people exterminated, with a description of the methods and instruments utilized for extermination.

  The message was drawn up on three large sheets of parchment. The Sonderkommando’s editor, a painter from Paris, copied it in beautifully written letters, as was the custom with ancient manuscripts, using India ink so that the writing would not fade. The fourth sheet contained the signatures of the Sonderkommando’s 200 men. The sheets were fastened together with a silk thread, then rolled up, enclosed in a specially constructed cylindrical tube made of zinc by one of our tinsmiths, and finally sealed and soldered so as to protect the manuscript from air and humidity. Our joiners placed the tube in the recamier’s springs, among the wool floss of the upholstering.

  Another message, exactly the same, was buried in the courtyard of number two crematorium.

  XXI

  I HAD BECOME USED TO SEEING A TRUCK enter the crematorium gate every evening about seven o’clock, carrying 70 to 80 men and women on their way to be liquidated. Coming from the barracks hospital, they represented the KZ’s daily selection. Prisoners for several years, or at least for several months, they were fully aware of the fate awaiting them. When the truck entered the courtyard the walls resounded with the screams and cries of the damned. They knew that at the foot of the crematory ovens all hope of escape dissolved.

  Not wanting to witness that daily scene, I generally withdrew to the most remote corner of the crematorium courtyard, where I sat down under an arbor of pines. The crackling of the revolvers and the screams were deadened by the time they reached me.

  One evening, however, my luck ran out. From five o’clock on I was working in the dissecting room. I had to examine the suicide case of an SS Oberschaarführer whose body had been sent me from Gleiwitz. An SS captain—one of the court-martial judges—and a clerk sat in on the dissection.

  About seven o’clock, while I was dictating the affidavit to the SS clerk, the heavy truck loaded with prisoners entered the courtyard. Two windows, barred and covered with metal mosquito netting, looked out on the crematorium’s rear courtyard. All the occupants were extremely calm. From this I deduced that they had been selected not out of the barracks, but from the hospitals. They were all seriously ill, too weak to scream or even to climb down from the raised platform of the truck.

  The SS guards became excited and began to shout, urging them to get down. No one moved. The driver also began to lose patience. He climbed back in the truck and started the motor. Little by little the truck’s immense dump began to rise, till suddenly it spilled the occupants to the ground, a writhing, slipping, frantically grasping mass. As they fell they bumped against each other, striking their heads, their faces, their knees against the concrete. Then at last a horrible, collective cry of pain burst forth and echoed throughout the courtyard.

  The SS court-martial judge, drawn by the moans and shouts, interrupted his investigations to ask me: “What’s going on in the courtyard?” He came over to the window, where I explained to him just what was happening. Apparently he was not used to such scenes, for he turned his head away and said disapprovingly, “Nevertheless, they shouldn’t do that!”

  The Sonderkommando stripped them of their clothes and piled the discarded rags in the courtyard. The victims were led into the incineration rooms and put in front of the Oberschaarführer’s revolver barrel. Mussfeld was today’s killer on duty. Standing near the ovens, wearing rubber gloves, he held his weapon with a steady hand. One by one the bodies fell, each yielding his place to the next in line. Within a few minutes he had “tumbled” —that was the term in general usage—the eighty men. Half an hour later they had all been cremated.

  Later Mussfeld paid me a visit and asked me to give him a physical check up. He suffered from heart trouble and severe headaches. I checked his blood pressure, took his pulse, listened to his heart with a stethoscope. His pulse rate was slightly high. I gave him my opinion: his condition was no doubt the result of the little job he had just performed in the furnace room. I had wanted to reassure him, but the result wa
s just the opposite. He became indignant, got up and said:

  “Your diagnosis is incorrect. It doesn’t bother me any more to kill 100 men than it does to kill 5. If I’m upset, it’s merely because I drink too much.”

  And so saying he turned and walked away, greatly displeased.

  XXII

  I WAS IN THE HABIT OF READING FOR awhile in bed each night before I went to sleep. One night, while I was doing just that, the lights suddenly went out and the KZ alarm siren began its dismal wail. Whenever there was an alert we were taken, convoyed by well-armed SS guards, to the Sonderkommando shelter, that is, to the gas chamber.

  We crossed the threshold of the gas chamber with heavy hearts. The whole kommando was present, 200 strong. It was a terrible feeling to remain in this room, knowing that hundreds of thousands of people had met a frightful end here. Besides, we knew that the life of the Sonderkommando was drawing to a close. This being the case, the SS could very easily have closed the gas chamber doors and dumped four cases of cyclon gas down the chimneys to liquidate us all.

  As a matter of fact, such action would not have been without precedent. A part of the eleventh Sonderkommando had been transferred from the D quarter to Barracks 13, a restricted area, and informed that, upon orders from above, the group would no longer live in the crematoriums, but henceforth in this barracks. They would continue to work at the ovens, however, going in two separate groups from the barracks to the crematorium. That same evening they had been taken to the D quarter for a bath and a change of clothing. After the bath they had been pushed into a neighboring room to get disinfected clothes. This room was a real disinfecting chamber, and as such could be hermetically sealed. Normally, that was where the lice-filled clothes collected in the camp were disinfected. Four hundred men from the Sonderkommando were liquidated in this manner. From there, trucks took their bodies to the funeral pyre.

  Thus our anxiety while waiting for the alert to be over was not unfounded. This one lasted for three hours. Then we came up out of darkness to see the long kilometers of barbed wire once again lighted by the searchlights, and returned to bed. I tried to fall asleep, but sleep was slow in coming.

  The following day, while making my rounds in number two crematorium, the chief of the Sonderkommando there informed me confidentially that during the alert the previous night a group of partisans had slipped into the camp. In an out-of-the-way spot they had cut the barbed wire surrounding the courtyard and slipped three machine guns and twenty hand grenades through the opening. The Sonderkommando men had discovered them early that morning and hidden them in a safe place.

  This news gave us some slight hope for the future. We knew that the hands that had smuggled us these weapons could not be far off. From a series of observations I was inclined to believe that the local underground was operating about 25 to 30 kilometers from the camp. We hoped that, under cover of the next alert, they would manage to slip us some more weapons. Recently there had been alerts every day. But for us the only ones that really counted were those that occurred at night and lasted a relatively long time, for only then could our anonymous and devoted friends get close to the camp. After three or four such alerts, we would perhaps have enough arms to try and force our way past the guards.

  The organization for this future operation was coordinated by number three crematorium, and had contacts in all the others. The whole affair was being conducted with the utmost care and circumspection. Death stalked our every move, in the form of the lethal machine guns manned by our guards. We wanted to live. We wanted to get out of here. But even if most of us failed to make it, even if only one or two escaped, we would still have won out, for there would then be someone to tell the world about the dark mysteries of these death factories.

  As for those destined to pay with their lives, at least they would not have died like worms, crushed by their butchers’ unclean hands. On the contrary, they would be the first in the history of the KZ who, despite overwhelming odds in both numbers and material, would have sowed death and destruction among their torturers before dying proudly like men.

  XXIII

  ANNIHILATION TIME HAD COME FOR the 4,500 inhabitants of the Gypsy Camp. The measures taken were the same as those taken for the liquidation of the Czech Camp. All the barracks were quarantined. SS guards, leading their police dogs, invaded the Gypsy quarters and chased the inhabitants outside, where they were made to line up. Rations of bread and salami were distributed. The gypsies were made to believe that they were being shipped to another camp, and they swallowed the story. A very easy and efficacious way of calming their fears. No one thought of the crematoriums, for then why would rations of food have been distributed?

  This strategy on the part of the SS was dictated neither by pity nor a regard for those condemned to death, but merely by their desire to expedite a large group of people, without any unnecessary incidents or delays, to the gas chambers, guarded by a relatively small patrol. The strategy worked to perfection. Everything went off as planned. Throughout the night the chimneys of numbers one and two crematoriums sent flames roaring skyward, so that the entire camp was lighted with a sinister glow.

  Next day the Gypsy Camp, once so noisy, lay silent and deserted. The only sound was the monotonous chant of the barbed wires rubbing together, while the doors and windows left open banged and squeaked endlessly under the powerful wind of the Volhynian steppes.

  Once again Europe’s pyromaniacs had organized a gigantic display of fireworks. Once again the setting was the Auschwitz concentration camp. This time, however, the victims thrown to the flames were not Jews, but Christians: Catholic gypsies from Germany and Austria. By morning their bodies had been transformed into a pile of silvery ashes rising in the crematorium courtyard. The bodies of twelve sets of twins had not been consigned to the flames. Even before sending them to the gas chamber, Dr. Mengele had marked a Z.S. on their chests with his special chalk.

  In this collection of bodies there were twins of all ages, ranging from newborn infants to sixteen-year-olds. For the moment, the twelve pairs of corpses were stretched out on the concrete floor of the “morgue.” Bodies of black-haired, dark-skinned children. The job of classifying them by pairs was a tiring one. I was careful not to mix them up, for I knew that if I should render these rare and precious specimens unusable for his research, Dr. Mengele would make me pay for it with my life.

  Only a few days before I had been sitting with him in the work room, near the table, looking through the records already set up on twins, when he noticed a faint spot of grease on the bright blue cover of one of the files. I often handled the records in the course of my dissections, and had probably spotted it with a bit of grease. Dr. Mengele shot a withering glance at me and said, very seriously:

  “How can you be so careless with these files, which I have compiled with so much love!”

  The word “love” had just crossed Dr. Mengele’s lips. I was so taken aback that I sat there dumbfounded, unable to think of anything to say in reply.

  XXIV

  I CONDUCTED THE PATHOLOGICAL STUDY of the twelve pairs of twins with the greatest possible care. As everyone knows, there are two kinds of twins, one-egg and two-egg. Twins born of the same egg are always identical, both in their internal and external manifestations, and of the same sex. They are variously known as identical, uniovular or monozygotic. Twins born from two separate eggs resemble one another in both their internal and external characteristics, but rather as brothers and sisters do. They are not perfectly identical and, in about half the cases, are of different sexes. They are known as fraternal, biovular or dizygotic.

  These remarks constitute, medically speaking, one of the basic laws of heredity concerning twins. This law has been used extensively by those who claim that environmental factors, such as education, nutrition, the illnesses a person may have suffered, etc., influence only slightly his physical, mental and temperamental makeup, whereas heredity plays a much more important role. If the traits a person has received fr
om his forebears occur again and again throughout several generations, they are known as dominant hereditary characteristics.

  These dominant hereditary characteristics can either be to the advantage or disadvantage of the individual. For example, a good healthy set of teeth, a thick head of hair that does not thin with the years, or hypertension and, in some families, diabetes. Among the mental illnesses, nervous depression.

  These hereditary phenomena, whether they are advantageous or disadvantageous, often appear at birth: a child born with too many fingers or toes would be an example. Other phenomena develop later on and become chronic illnesses, such as epilepsy, asthma, gout, certain forms of hypertension, a few cases of cancer, and the senile cataract of the ocular lens, this last occurring only in people sixty or older.

  Among these hereditary phenomena one sometimes finds this peculiarity, that they occur more often in one sex than in the other. Daltonism, or congenital colorblindness, and anemia are two of the most frequent manifestations of these hereditary phenomena defined by sex. Both of these illnesses appear only in males, never in females. Anemia is the most obvious example: the most common hereditary form of anemia is that which has passed from an anemic grandfather through a healthy daughter to half the male grandchildren. Male children never inherit it directly from an anemic father. Each male child and all of his descendents will remain healthy, whether they be male or female. But the female children of an anemic father will, though in themselves healthy, carry the seeds of anemia, and each of their daughters will transmit the seeds to their male offspring.

  I had the bodies of a pair of fifteen-year-old twins before me on the dissection table. I began a parallel and comparative dissection of the two bodies. Nothing particularly noteworthy about the heads. The next phase was the removal of the sternum. Here an extremely interesting phenomenon appeared: a persistent thymus, that is, a thymus gland that continued to subsist. Normally the thymus is found only in children. It extends from the upper edge of the sternum to the heart, thus covering a fairly large area. With puberty it begins to wither rapidly and soon disappears completely. Once sexual maturity has been attained, all that is left of it is a small pocket of fat, plus the remains of the fibrous tissues of the former gland.