| Prisoner Doctors: Struggles to
Heal |
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[Men…] gele so that her number could be taken to be
included among those very few who were to be permitted to survive. Her
insistence that she would not consider “staying alive alone” was
interpreted to Mengele by another prisoner doctor present as meaning that she
had a mother in the camp who was still young and strong and could work; and
Mengele, after first protesting, gave in and took the mother’s number as
well. And, at the second and liquidating selection of the Czech family camp
soon afterward, König not only arranged for mother and daughter to survive
once more but, when the prisoners were forced to march naked before the SS
doctors, much to Eva C.’s humiliation (all the more so because she knew
them): “I [could] catch a glimpse of [König’s] eyes looking
straight in my eyes and no place else, and I was very grateful for that.”
She sensed that he was reassuring her that “things would be all right,
that he was a friend”: “I felt he cared.”
But her
evaluation of König’s attitude was: “He made me a kind of pet,
... and when there was a kind of skit when the lower SS people had a special
party with the higher SS people — there were amusing skits — I heard
about it — in which he was teased because of always bringing presents
— cigarettes, food, and so on, to the ‘beautiful artist.’”
Her persistent ambivalence concerning the relationship emerged in what is for a
survivor an ultimate question “He saved me. But I sometimes wonder, if I
had the chance to save his life, whether I would.”
In these
relationships, women prisoner doctors could uncover pockets of humanity in Nazi
doctors and thereby, save lives. At times they could do so by means of a
calculated psychological attitude. Dr. Lottie M., for example, who had studied
with the early psychoanalyst August Eichhorn, tried to apply to SS men, and
even Nazi doctors, what Eichhorn had emphasized as the best attitudes with
which to approach juvenile delinquents: |
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Either say something very, severe in content, and
friendly in the way of saying it — or the opposite, you say [something]
friendly but in a strict way.... So [Eichhorn] said, “If you have this
little boy, you say, ‘Well, Franky [in a stern tone], it's the last time
that I'll help you out of this mess.’ Or, you say [in a soft tone],
‘Frank, you know that I like you — I think you are a nice and clever
boy — but what you have now done is impossible and I have to punish
you’” .... And I thought — well all of the SS people are like
that, so the best way would be to treat them like that. |
| She combined those approaches with occasional surprise,
candor, and even humor. (When an SS doctor overheard her referring to him in a
derogatory way in French, which she had not thought he understood, and said
threateningly to her, “Have you finished complaining about me?” she
replied, “No, I have not finished but, if you wish, I will interrupt
myself and stop,” causing him to look astounded and to slam the door
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