| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE
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| [Ger…] man. Because he would seek her out and
“liked to talk with me,” there were also rumors among inmates of an
affair between them. Actually Dr. Lingens-Reiner felt that she had to be
careful to placate him. But she was sufficiently comfortable with him (as Dr.
B. pointed out) to be able to raise the question that led to his
“gangrenous appendix” remark: |
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Klein was there at a time when they were gassing
... very much. ... Then you saw the crematorium. You saw the black smoke and
the fire — even the fire coming out of the huge chimneys. And I was
standing there and looking at it and Klein next to me. And then I said, “I
wonder, Dr. Klein, that you can carry out this business. Are you never reminded
of your Hippocratic oath?” And he said, “My Hippocratic oath tells me
to cut a gangrenous appendix out of the human body. The Jews are the gangrenous
appendix of mankind. That's why I cut them out.”* |
Actually Klein’s romantic interest was focused on an
attractive young Polish doctor, with whom five women prisoner doctors shared a
room While (in Dr. Lottie M.’s view) there was no physical relationship
here either, Klein got into the habit of appearing in the room early on Sunday
morning, while the women were still in bed, in order to “flirt” with
the attractive Polish doctor, mostly by describing his political views at some
length (“His . . . idea was that the Poles should unite with the Germans
and go against the Russians”). And Dr. M. went on to explain in a way that
said something about the basic nature of these relationships: “We didn't
want to die, you see, so we stayed in bed until he had finished his flirt with
this lady.” Klein was transferred from the women’s camp when an SDG
noncommissioned officer happened to walk in on one of his Sunday-morning visits
and, as Dr. M. put it, “made mention to the head of the ... camp that this
Dr. Klein is on too good terms with prisoners.”
Eva C., an artist
who was in her late teens in Auschwitz and also very attractive, tells of a
relationship with another SS doctor, Hans Wilhelm König, that saved not
only her own life but her mother’s as well. She described, not without
affection, her first impression of König as “a nebisha
[Yiddish for ‘unimpressive’ or ‘nonentity’] SS man, looking
like Don Quixote, with his sleeves too short,” and told how he began to
appear every day at the little office where she did her medical drawings, and
chat with her pleasantly about everything except “subjects concerning the
camp — that was a no-no.”
In early 1944, she heard (through a
relationship she had with a male prisoner who was the block senior) of the plan
to gas the entire Czech-Jewish family camp of which they were a part, and told
the news to König when he next appeared after a couple of weeks of
absence. Shortly afterward, almost certainly at König’s instigation,
she was called before Men- […gele] |
__________
* This was her remembered
version of the conversation also quoted in her book (see pages
15-16). |
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