Miklós Nyiszli
Miklós Nyiszli (17 June 1901 – 5 May 1956) was a Hungarian prisoner of Jewish heritage at Auschwitz concentration camp. Nyiszli, his wife, and young daughter, were transported to Auschwitz in June 1944. Upon his arrival, Nyiszli volunteered as a doctor and was sent to work at No. 12 barracks where he operated on and tried to help the ill with only the most basic medical supplies and tools. He was under the supervision of Josef Mengele, a Schutzstaffel officer and physician.
Miklós Nyiszli | |
|---|---|
| Born | 17 June 1901 Szilágysomlyó, Austria-Hungary |
| Died | 5 May 1956 (aged 54) |
| Known for | Forced medical labor at Auschwitz |
Mengele decided after observing Nyiszli's skills to move him to a specially built autopsy and operating theatre. The room had been built inside Crematorium II, and Nyiszli, along with members of the 12th Sonderkommando, was housed there.
Early life
Nyiszli was born 17 June 1901 in Transylvania, Kingdom of Hungary (then the Hungarian-half of Austria-Hungary). He completed his medical degree in 1929. Following this, he specialized in forensic pathology in Germany. He returned to Transylvania with his wife and daughter in 1937 before migrating to Hungary in 1940. In 1942, he and his family were sent to a work camp in Desze before being transferred to Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944.[1]
Authorship
During Nyiszli's period in the camp, he witnessed many atrocities to which he refers in his book, Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account.[2] Historian Gideon Greif characterized Nyiszli's writings as among the “myths and other wrong and defamatory accounts” of the Sonderkommando that flourished in the absence of first-hand testimony by surviving Sonderkommando members.[3]
Accounts of camp life
While imprisoned, Nyiszli was forced to carry out medical experiments and perform autopsies on dozens of bodies, particularly on dwarfs and twins. Mengele had researched the causes of dwarfism and twinning, and used Nyiszli to gather more information. Nyiszli autopsied murdered prisoners, specifically those suspected to have died from infectious diseases. Mengele was searching for evidence supporting the "inferiority of the Jewish race". At one point Nyiszli was forced to carry out physical exams on a father-son pair and, after their deaths, to prepare their skeletons for study at the Anthropological Museum in Berlin.
[I] had to examine them with exact clinical methods before they died, and then perform the dissection on their still warm bodies.
— Miklós Nyiszli
One day, following the gassing of a transport load of prisoners, Nyiszli was summoned by Sonderkommando working in the gas chambers who had found a girl alive under a mass of bodies in a chamber. Nyiszli and his fellow prisoners did their best to help and care for the girl, but she was eventually discovered and shot.[4] This incident was dramatized in the films The Grey Zone and Son of Saul.
Nyiszli was appalled by the disregard for human life and lack of empathy for human suffering shown by the guards and officers. However, his actions were dictated by his tormentors, and he was forced to perform what he considered immoral acts. As he said:
An event never before experienced in the history of medicine worldwide is realized here: Twins die at the same time, and there is the possibility of subjecting their corpses to an autopsy. Where in normal life is there the case, bordering on a miracle, that twins die at the same place at the same time? [...] A comparative autopsy is thus absolutely impossible under normal conditions. But in Auschwitz camp there are several hundred pairs of twins, and their deaths, in turn, present several hundred opportunities!"[5]
— Miklós Nyiszli
During his roughly eight months in Auschwitz, Nyiszli observed the murders of tens of thousands of people, including the slaughter of whole sub-camps at once. These sub-camps held different ethnic, religious, national, and gender groups, including a Romani camp, several women's camps, and a Czech camp. Each sub-camp housed between 5,000–10,000 prisoners or more. Nyiszli was often told which camps were next to be exterminated, signaling that an increased workload was imminent.
When Nyiszli discovered that the women's camp in which his wife and daughter were kept prisoner, Camp C, was to be liquidated, he bribed an SS officer to transfer them to a women's work camp. Nyiszli remained in Auschwitz until shortly before its liberation by the Soviet army on 27 January 1945. On 18 January, Nyiszli, along with an estimated 66,000 other prisoners, was forced on a death march through various Nazi territories and further into various smaller concentration camps in Germany.
Nyiszli narrated his testimony of camp life in an objective tone, favoring an analytical approach over a more emotive description. He writes that he tells his story "not as a reporter but as a doctor". This style has been referred to by some as documentary realism.[6]
After Auschwitz
Nyiszli's first major stop after the forced march out of Auschwitz was the Mauthausen concentration camp in northern Austria, near the city of Linz. After a three-day stay in a quarantine barracks at Mauthausen, he spent two months in the Melk an der Donau concentration camp, about three hours away by train.
After 12 months of imprisonment, Nyiszli and his fellow prisoners were liberated on 5 May 1945, when U.S. troops reached the camp. Nyiszli's wife and daughter also survived Auschwitz and were liberated from Bergen Belsen. He never again worked with a scalpel after the war.[7]
He wrote the book Dr Mengele boncoló orvosa voltam az auschwitz-i krematóriumban.
Death
Nyiszli died of a heart attack on 5 May 1956 in Oradea, Romania, at the age of 54. His widow, Margareta, died on 5 September 1985.
Dramatization
- Auschwitz Lullaby, a 1998 play by James C. Wall, printed: 2000 ISBN 0-87129-826-0; audiocassette & CD: 2000, ISBN 1-889889-02-4
- The Grey Zone, a 2001 film by Tim Blake Nelson
- Son of Saul, a 2015 film by László Nemes
See also
References
- Turda, Marius (2014). "The ambiguous victim: Miklós Nyiszli's narrative of medical experimentation in Auschwitz-Birkenau". Historein : A Review of the Past and Other Stories. Europe PMC Funders Group. 14 (1): 43–58. PMC 4374105. PMID 25821395.
- Nyiszli, Miklos (2011). Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account. New York: Arcade Publishing.
- Greif, Gideon and Andreas Kilian, “Significance, responsibility, challenge: Interviewing the Sonderkommando survivors”, Sonderkommando-Studien, 7 April 2004.
- "Mengele and Miklos Nyiszli". Mengele.dk. Retrieved 9 January 2015.
- Hans-Walter Schmuhl, "The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, 1927-1945", Springer, 2003, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 259, pg. 368
- Turda, Marius (2014). "The ambiguous victim: Miklós Nyiszli's narrative of medical experimentation in Auschwitz-Birkenau". Historein : A Review of the Past and Other Stories / An ... Publication of the Cultural and Intellectual History Society. Europe PMC Funders Group. 14 (1): 43–58. PMC 4374105. PMID 25821395.
- Nyiszli, Miklos (1946). Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account (2012 ed.). Penguin UK. p. 162. ISBN 978-0141392219. PMC 4374105.
“I would begin practicing again, yes… But I swore that as long as I live I would never lift a scalpel again…”
Bibliography
- Nyiszli, Miklós (2011). Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account. New York: Arcade Publishing.
- Nyiszli, Miklós (2010). I was doctor Mengele's assistant. Oswiecim.
