Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

by Miklos Nyiszli

  In the few minutes we spent together my wife assured me that everything had worked out as planned. Both she and our daughter had been accepted for the convoy, without having had to solicit the Oberschaarführer’s help. I was also happy to learn that many of the other women in the camp had taken my wife’s advice and volunteered for the convoy.

  XXVI

  THREE DAYS LATER I RETURNED TO C Camp to check and make certain my wife and daughter had indeed departed. They were gone all right, with one of the two convoys consisting of 3,000 prisoners. I did not know what the future might hold in store for them, but I was nevertheless relieved, for here they were headed towards certain death. Now, with a little luck, they might escape with their lives. Indications that the war was drawing to a close were becoming increasingly evident. The Third Reich’s grave was already being dug. I had a feeling that, at this point in the game, a prisoner’s chances of survival were roughly proportional to his distance from camps such as Auschwitz. Which meant that my own chances were growing slimmer every day.

  Whatever my fate, however, at least I could end my days knowing that my family was now far from the paths leading to the funeral pyres. It was neither fear nor despair that kept the thought of death uppermost in my mind, but rather the memory of the eleventh Sonderkommando’s bloody end, presaging our own, plus a coldly objective attitude, untainted by any sentimentality.

  As I left C Camp, I let my gaze linger in farewell upon the rows of dilapidated barracks. It was with a mixture of sadness and compassion that I looked once more upon the grotesque spectacle of our women and girls: they who had once been so attractive, so meticulous in their toilet and dress, were now shaven and emaciated, dressed like scarecrows, stripped of all human dignity, ghosts of their former selves.

  As I returned to the crematoriums I found myself shivering, and suddenly realized that autumn was here: it was already the end of September. The north wind, sweeping down from the already whitened summits of the mountains, sang through the barbed wires and made the shutters creak ominously. The only bird that inhabited this god-forsaken region, the crow, flashed against the leaden sky. From the crematoriums, built to endure forever, the wind bore clouds of smoke, and with them the characteristic, familiar odor of burning hair and flesh.

  My days were spent in idleness, my nights were sleepless. I was terribly depressed; all desire had left me. Since my family’s departure, I had been filled with loneliness and haunted by my own inactivity. For the past several days silence and boredom had weighed heavily on Auschwitz. A bad sign—and my intuition was just about infallible—merely the herald of more bloody deeds to come. The twelfth Sonderkommando had almost lived out its four months. The sands of our allotted time were fast running out. We had only a few days left—at most a week or two—to live.

  Dr. Mengele’s decision to liquidate C Camp had been carried out. Every evening fifty trucks brought the victims, 4,000 at a time, to the crematoriums. A horrible sight, this caravan of trucks, their headlights stabbing the darkness, each bearing a human cargo of eighty women who either filled the air with their screams or sat mute, paralyzed with fear. In slow succession the trucks rolled up and dumped the women, who had already been stripped of their clothes, at the top of the stairway leading down into the gas chamber. From there they were quickly pushed below. They all knew where they were going, but the rigors of their four months captivity, the corporal punishment they had been made to endure, and the disintegration of their nervous systems, had reduced them to such a point that they were no longer capable of putting up any resistance, or even of feeling pain. They were herded passively into the gas chambers. Weary of being hunted and persecuted, of living in constant fear, they dumbly awaited the hand of the sure physician, Death. For them life had lost all meaning and purpose. To prolong it would merely have prolonged their suffering.

  And what a long road they had traveled in coming here! How filled with unimaginable sorrow each lap of that journey! First, their warm, comfortable homes had been invaded and pillaged. Then, together with their husbands, children, and parents, they had been taken to the brick-kilns on the far edge of town, where for weeks they had been made to live and sleep in the swamps born of the spring rains. These were the “ghettos,” from which, in small groups, they had been taken every day to the specially designed torture chambers, outfitted with all the latest instruments conducive to making people “talk.” There they had been questioned, until, half dead with pain, they had confessed either the hiding place of their valuables, or the name of the person to whom they had confided them. Many had died from these interrogations. Those who survived had been almost relieved to find themselves being loaded into boxcars, eighty or ninety to a car, for it had meant they were leaving the torture chambers far behind.

  Or so they had thought. For four or five days they had lived in these cars, watching the dead pile up around them, till at last they had reached the Jewish ramp of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

  We already know what happened to them here. Heartbroken at being separated from their husbands and children, frantic with fear, sent, at “selection time,” into the right-hand column, they at last reached C Camp. But before entering the foul, disease-ridden barracks, they were made to submit to another humiliation, designed to divest them of any lingering vestiges of human dignity: the baths.

  Ungentle hands cut their hair and stripped them of their clothes. After the bath they were given rags that no self-respecting beggar would ever have touched. In these clothes they received their first dividend under the Third Reich: lice.

  After this reception, they began their life of confinement behind the KZ barbed wire, their life of the living dead. The food they received, more like dirty dishwater than anything else, was sufficient to keep them from dying, insufficient to keep them really alive. Albumin was completely lacking in their systems, causing their legs to become as heavy as lead. The absence of fats made their bodies swell. Their menstruations ceased. As a result, they became irritable and increasingly nervous, had migraines and nosebleeds. The lack of Vitamin B caused perpetual drowsiness and partial amnesia: often they could no longer remember the names of the streets where they had once lived, or their house numbers. Only their eyes were still alive, but even they no longer sparkled with intelligence.

  These were the circumstances in which they submitted to the daily roll calls and musters, which lasted several hours. When they fainted and were rudely revived with a bucket of cold water, their eyes invariably turned towards the clouds of smoke that covered the KZ, or towards the flames belching from the crematorium stacks. These two signs, smoke and flames, reminded them, day and night, that they were living at the gate to the other world.

  The C Camp inmates had lived for four months in the shadow of the crematorium gate: it took ten days for all of them to pass through it. Forty-five thousand tormented bodies rendered up their souls there. Upon C Camp, whose wire stands had enclosed as many poignant tragedies, a dismal silence descended.

  XXVII

  THE SONDERKOMMANDO WAS AWAITING the final blow. Day after day, week after week, month after month, terror had hovered over our heads, suspended by the thinnest of threads. And now, in a day or two, it would descend bringing with it instantaneous death, leaving in its wake only a pile of silvery ashes. We were ready for it. Hourly we awaited the arrival of our SS executioners.

  Early in the morning of October 6th, 1944, a shot rang out from one of the watch towers, killing a KZ prisoner who had strayed outside the neutral zone into the area between the first and second lines of guards that surrounded the camp. The prisoner, an ex-Russian officer, had been sent here for trying to escape from a prisoner-of-war camp. In all probability he had been trying to escape again when the guard had fired on him.

  A political commission headed by Dr. Mengele proceeded to the spot to make the customary investigation. If the victim had been Jewish his body would have been shipped directly to the morgue and thence to the crematoriums, and that would have been t
he end of the matter. But since this was a Russian officer, whose name and personal data were duly inscribed in the camp records, the same procedure could not be followed. An autopsy report would be required to explain his death. Following his on-the-spot investigation, Dr. Mengele had the body taken to the crematorium, with orders that an autopsy be made. The report was to be ready by 2:30 P.M. Dr. Mengele would pick it up and check the findings by personally examining the body.

  It was 9:00 A.M. when Dr. Mengele left the dissecting room. I had the body placed on the table, and would have completed the autopsy in thirty or forty minutes if the date had not been October 6th, the last day but one of the Sonderkommando’s allotted life span. We were not certain of anything, but I felt the imminence of death.

  Since I was unable to work, I left the dissecting room and went to my room, planning to take a healthy dose of sleeping tablets. I smoked cigarette after cigarette, my nerves completely shot. Unable to stay put, I crossed into the incineration room, where I found the Sonderkommando crew working half-heartedly, despite the fact that several hundred bodies were stacked up in front of the ovens. Small groups had formed and the men were talking in whispers. I went upstairs to the kommando’s living quarters and immediately noticed that something was amiss. Normally, after morning muster and breakfast, the night shift turned in. Now, however, at 10 o’clock, everyone was still up. I also noticed that they were dressed in sport clothes, with sweaters and boots, although the room was bright with a warm October sun. Here too many of the men were huddled, talking in whispers, while others moved about feverishly, arranging and packing their clothes in suitcases. It was obvious that some sort of plot was being hatched. But what? I entered the small room that housed the kommando chief and found the various leaders of the night shift seated around the table: the engineer, the mechanic, the head chauffeur and the chief of the gas kommando. No sooner had I taken my seat when the kommando chief took an almost empty bottle from the table and poured me a large glass of brandy. It was a strong Polish eau-de-vie, the famous cumin brandy. I downed my glass in one gulp. Now, in the waning hours of the Sonderkommando’s fourth month, it might not be a life-prolonging elixir, but it was none the less an excellent remedy for dulling the fear of death. My comrades presented me with a detailed account of our situation. All evidence seemed to indicate that the Sonderkommando’s liquidation would not take place before the following day, and perhaps even the day after. But careful plans had been made for the 860 members of the kommando to try and force their way out of the camp. The break was scheduled for that night.

  Once out, we would head for the loop of the Vistula two kilometers away. At this time of year the river was very low and could easily be forded. Eight kilometers from the Vistula there were vast forests, extending to the Polish border, in which we should be able to live for weeks, even months if necessary, in relative safety. Or perhaps we would run into some partisans along the way. Our supply of weapons was adequate. During the preceding few days a shipment of about a hundred boxes of high explosives had reached the camp, sent from the Unio factories of Auschwitz, a munitions plant that employed Polish Jews as workers. The Germans used it for blowing up railroad lines. Besides this stock, we had five machine guns and twenty hand grenades.

  “This should suffice,” said one of the group. “With the element of surprise on our side, we can disarm the guards using only our revolvers. Then we’ll take the SS by surprise in their dormitories and force them to come with us until we have no further use for them.”

  The signal to attack would be given by flashlight signals from number one crematorium. Number two would immediately transmit the signal to number three, which would in turn alert number four. The plans seemed all the more feasible to me for the simple reason that the only crematorium working was number one. And even it would knock off work at 6:00 P.M., which meant that the Sonderkommando night shift would not go on duty that evening. Whenever this happened, the SS guards tended to relax their vigil. There were three SS guards in each crematorium.

  We adjourned the meeting until the evening, the order being that, until the moment the signal was given, everyone should accomplish his task as usual, scrupulously avoiding any act liable to arouse suspicion.

  Returning to my room, I again passed through the oven room. The men seemed to be working even more slowly than before. I informed my two colleagues of the plan, but refrained from mentioning it to the lab assistant. He would inevitably be drawn into it once it began, but I saw no need to inform him of it for the present.

  Time moved forward on leaden feet. Lunch time arrived. We ate slowly, then went into the crematorium courtyard to warm ourselves in the slanting rays of the autumn sun. I noticed that the SS guards were nowhere to be seen. But there was probably nothing unusual about that; it had happened more than once before. They were no doubt in their rooms. The gates were closed. Outside, the camp SS on duty were at their posts. So I accorded no importance to the absence of guards inside. I smoked my cigarette in peace. To know that within a few hours we would be outside these barbed wires and free again lifted a dark cloud from my mind, a cloud that had hovered there since my first day in the KZ. Even if the attempt failed, I would have lost nothing.

  I looked at my watch. Half past one. I got up and asked my colleagues to join me for the autopsy, so we could be ready with the report when Dr. Mengele arrived to pick it up. They followed me silently into the dissecting room, and we began the autopsy immediately. Today one of my associates was performing the dissection, while I recorded his findings on my typewriter.

  We had been working for about 20 minutes when a tremendous explosion rocked the walls. In the echoing silence, the steady staccato of machine gun fire reached our ears. Peering through the green mosquito netting that covered the main window, I saw the red-tiled roof and supporting beams of number three crematorium blow off, followed by an immense spiral of flame and black smoke. No more than a minute later, machine gun fire broke out just in front of the dissecting room door. We had no idea what had happened. Our plans called for tonight. Two possibilities occurred to me: either someone had betrayed us, thus enabling the SS to step in and break up the planned escape, or else a considerable force of partisans had attacked the camp. The dismal wail of sirens began in both Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II. The explosions grew louder and louder, and the rattle of submachine guns more and more persistent. Then we could hear the harsher staccato of field machine guns. I had already made up my mind what to do. Whether it was a question of treason or of a partisan attack, it seemed best for the moment to remain in the dissecting room and see how the situation evolved. From the window I saw 80 to 100 trucks arriving. The first one pulled up in front of our crematorium. Half a company jumped out and formed up in battle formation in front of the barbed wire fences.

  I began to see what had happened. The Sonderkommando men had taken possession of number one crematorium and, from every window and door, were spraying the SS troops with bullets and grenades. Their defense seemed effective, for I saw several soldiers drop, either dead or wounded. Seeing this, the besiegers decided to resort to more drastic methods. They brought up 50 well-trained police dogs and unleashed them on the Sonderkommando entrenched behind the walls of number one. But for some strange reason these dogs, usually so ferocious and obedient, refused to budge: ears back, tails between their legs, they took shelter behind their SS masters. Perhaps it was because the dogs had been trained to deal with prisoners wearing striped burlap, whereas the Sonderkommando never wore this “uniform.” Or perhaps, too long used to dealing with weakened, unarmed prisoners, they were momentarily frightened by the smell of powder and scorched flesh, the noise and confusion of a pitched battle. In any case, the SS soon realized their mistake and, without letting up on their fire, began to haul some howitzers into position.

  It was impossible for the Sonderkommando to hold out against such numerical and material odds. Shouting exultantly, they erupted through the back gates of the crematorium. Firing as they we
nt, they poured through the electrified barbed wires that had been cut ahead of time, and headed for the loop of the Vistula.

  For about ten minutes the fighting was heavy on both sides. Loud machine gun fire from the watch towers mingled with the lesser blasts of the sub-machine guns, and interspersed could be heard the explosion of hand grenades and dynamite. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, everything became quiet.

  Then the SS stationed in front of the crematorium advanced, leaving behind the two howitzers, which they had not used. With fixed bayonets, they attacked the building from all sides, and scattered through the rooms in the basement and ground floor. A group of SS entered the dissecting room. Guns leveled, they surrounded us and drove us, under a rain of blows, into the courtyard. There they made us lie down on our bellies, our faces hard against the ground. The order rang out: “Anyone who makes a move, or raises his head, will get a bullet in the back of the neck!” A few minutes later I could tell from the sound of footsteps that another SS group had rounded up and brought back a considerable number of Sonderkommando men. They too were made to lie down beside us. How many of them could there be? With my head pressed against the ground it was impossible to tell for sure. Three or four minutes later another group arrived and was made to lie down behind us.

  While we were lying there inert on the ground, a hail of kicks and blows from the guards’ clubs fell on our heads, shoulders and backs. I could feel the warm blood trickling down my face, till its salty taste reached my tongue. But only the first blows really hurt me. My head was spinning, my ears were ringing, my mind was a blank. I could no longer feel anything. I had the impression I was slipping into the indifference that precedes death.