| Prisoner Doctors: The Agony of
Selections |
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[vehe…] mently, then and later, against any
cooperation with SS doctors tended to have made their own adaptation, their own
quid pro quo which had to include a measure of such cooperation.
The
ultimate healing-killing paradox within which prisoner doctors lived was their
recognition, at some level of consciousness, that as their capacity for healing
increased (with the general improvement of medical and living conditions in
Auschwitz), the gas chambers and crematoria were achieving their maximum
function. Dr. Jacob R. had that paradox in mind when he contrasted (in the
epigraph to this chapter) his own relatively favorable treatment (“nearly
like a human being”) with “the reality of the camp.” Although he
himself, according to later testimony, helped many fellow inmates medically and
spiritually, he nonetheless expressed the moral dilemma of prisoner doctors. At
one point, he said, “We could keep our values — basic values —
our medical values,” but another time: “The whole set of
values [for prisoner doctors] was completely changed. One really didn’t
know what was right or wrong.” To different degrees and in varying ways,
both of his observations were true.
Dr. Ernst B. gave the SS
doctor’s point of view on how the latter needed help from the prisoner
doctor even to perform “good” selections (that is, kill the weak and
retain the relatively strong for working): “He [the SS doctor] personally
treated absolutely no one .... How should he know on his own that he is
selecting correctly? He can’t. So he is dependent upon the chief of the
prisoner physicians.”
An SS doctor who “wanted to do it the
easy way," Dr. B. further explained, would say to that ranking prisoner
physician, "I need a list of one hundred people tomorrow." A reluctant prisoner
physician would be encouraged by the SS doctor to pass along the requirement to
a prisoner colleague, or the SS doctor might himself approach a different
prisoner doctor he knew to be more compliant. "If he thought he had received a
‘good list’ so that ... he could say, . . . when they were marching
past, ‘Those are really the worst,’ he would continue to go about
things that way. But if he considered himself to have received a ‘bad
list,’ he would either turn to a different prisoner doctor or take the
attitude, ‘Next time I'll do it myself.’”
Another kind
of SS doctor — whom Dr. B. described as “the self-confident,
responsible, ideologically absolute SS-firm type” — would check the
patients’ records, have them appear before him, and take over the entire
process himself. But even that kind of SS doctor was likely to draw prisoner
doctors into the process in some degree by asking them about the physical
status of patients. In practice, SS doctors might go about matters a little
more indirectly, seeking as much cooperation as possible from prisoner doctors
in locating the weaker patients and making decisions. Prisoner doctors could
find indirect ways of resisting some of these pressures, and avoid the
dangerous position of becoming a specific target for an SS doctor’s anger.
A man with a sensitive conscience, Dr. Jacob R. |
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