| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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she invoked a long-standing leg wound, which she said
prevented her from participating in the research. But, not without fear, she
was particularly afraid of making a quick second refusal, and so agreed to
perform anesthesia for Dr. Samuel in an experimental operation (removal of an
ovary) he did for Schumann. After that single experience, however, she refused
to do any more of them.
When confronted by Wirths, Dr. L. and he had an
exchange that has taken on legendary reverberations. She explained that such
activities were “contrary to my conception as a doctor.” He then
asked, “‘Can you not see that these people are different from
you?’ And I answered him that there were several other people different
from me, starting with him!”
She also expressed resistance to
Wirths’s brother Helmut, who participated in his brother’s research;
and when Eduard Wirths subsequently asked her opinion about sterilization:
“I answered that I was absolutely opposed that it was a right we did not
have to dispose in that way of people’s lives and to sterilize them.”
She was transferred from Block 10, back to Birkenau without being otherwise
punished, and was advised by knowledgeable inmates that in her precarious
situation she should make herself more or less invisible She also rebuffed two
additional approaches: one from Dr. Samuel advising her to take part in
experiments because “there are executions” to which she replied,
“If I did them I would commit suicide afterward.” The second approach
was from Mengele: “Of course I told him I did not want to do it afterward,
he told others that he could not ask me to do what I did not want to do.”
Her resistance to experiments had been unusually firm; buttressed by
her religious convictions, she was willing to die rather than violate her
ethical code. While she undoubtedly had more leeway than a Jewish doctor in
expressing these principles, her courage was no less impressive. An important
element in the equation was the willingness of both Wirths and Mengele to give
way rather than punish or kill her. SS doctors were committed from late 1942 to
keeping prisoner doctors alive and functional and in any case preferred to
enlist for their dirty work those who were more malleable. Yet she too had to
struggle with anxiety, and even she could not escape a brief involvement in
experiments before succeeding in withdrawing from them completely. |
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| Genuine Research |
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| Prisoner physicians could themselves sometimes initiate
genuine research, like the program in electroshock therapy developed by a
Polish neurologist. Another prisoner physician who had been close to the
situation, Frédéric E., told me that this man had been a renowned
neurologist before the war, and that part of his motivation was the general
knowledge that “German doctors liked to have extraordinary things happen
in their |
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