| Prisoner Doctors: Collaboration with Nazi
Doctors |
| |
transferred from Dachau where they had been associated
with Wirths, an effective contact they were able to maintain in Auschwitz. The
struggle could become violent, including arrangements in medical areas (as Dr.
Tadeusz S. described) “to send … to their deaths” criminal
capos who killed and beat inmates. Over time, SS doctors tended to
support the political prisoners, as they helped maintain better medical
arrangements and better organization in general.
Jewish doctors had
conflicts with one another: for example, more experienced women doctors
resented Dr. V., who was given considerable authority upon her early arrival in
Auschwitz despite having only recently completed her medical studies. Others
understood (as Dr. Lottie M. explained) that “this is no normal medical
performance … and she’s a good organizer and [handled things] in a
very clever way” useful to other prisoner doctors. There were other
antagonisms between Jewish doctors of different nationalities, including
feelings on the part of French doctors that they as a group should be in charge
of a medical block, and resentment when a doctor from one group thought that a
doctor from another was “threatening me with Mengele” — that is,
attempting to use a relatively close relationship with an SS doctor to enhance
his or her own position.
Doctors were susceptible to sudden
humiliations concerning their Jewishness: Michael Z. was assigned to the Gypsy
camp but “stayed [only] a very short while because a decree was issued
stating that Jews did not have the right to take care of Gypsies.”
Furthermore, under certain circumstances (on particular blocks and during a
relatively early Auschwitz phase), Jewish doctors could be in considerable
danger from their own “élite” patients, Polish and German
capos for whom they had to serve as orderlies. “They would
sometimes give us our daily round of blows [as]... their way to acknowledge our
care,” Dr. Z. observed; and he wondered, “How many [Jewish]
university professors, physicians did we see killed by their patients?”
Jewish doctors also faced resentment from ordinary Jewish prisoners,
who complained about the superior or “faceless” attitude on the part
of some Jewish doctors and their inclination to give curt orders rather than be
considerate or even offer a smile (“They don’t shoot people normally
for a smile”). And one Jewish survivor told me how her infant, a twin,
became ill. Hearing of a “famous professor” from Eastern Europe, she
carried the sick infant across the camp but could not get the doctor to make an
examination, and the child died (“I don't say he could have saved him, but
he didn’t even try …. He neglected his responsibility as a
doctor”).
Although privileged compared with other Jewish
prisoners, Jewish doctors could share with them the sense of being in
overwhelming danger at all times — and from virtually everyone. One
prisoner doctor recognized that “there were good people” among the
Poles, but his more general feeling was that “the Poles were anti-Semitic,
all the Poles,” and |
|
