| “A Human Being in an SS
Uniform”: Ernst B. |
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that the impression was strong enough for B. to embark upon
a real search. We can say that the illusion (as it probably was) and the dream
were insistent assertions of Ernst B.’s humanity, and of his discomfort
and guilt at being part of the Auschwitz machinery. In their questioning of his
personal camp reality (“It can't be possible that you stand here ….
How can you belong to those people? That can’t be you”), they
expressed his resistance to succumbing, or at least to succumbing completely,
to the very “Auschwitz mentality” he was in the process of
discovering. At the same time, they charted his transition from ordinary man to
Auschwitz doctor.
His second lesson was the direct confrontation with
the way in which SS doctors functioned, or what he called the Auschwitz
“system of treatment”: |
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The SS doctors … supervised the work of the
prisoner doctors, … mainly … seeing that the work was done
economically. In other words, the person … who cannot be expected to work
any longer will be selected for the crematorium. It was a terrible shock to me
to see this procedure …. Each day, whenever one went through the camp, one
saw … groups that had been sorted out [selected] … [and] were waiting
for the truck to depart [for the crematorium]. |
Dr. B. made clear to me that these two sets of images (of a
victimized Simon Cohen swallowed up by the death factory and of groups. of
inmates who had been selected by his own colleagues and subjected to the same
fate) were part of a profound psychological shift. The nature of that shift, of
the Auschwitz transition period, was reflected in his analogy of the
slaughterhouse (in which one first experiences horror but after a time adapts
sufficiently to enjoy one’s steaks [page 197]). For him as for others,
heavy drinking was a central element in the process of numbing and usually took
place at the Officers’ Club, to which Weber regularly accompanied him,
introducing him to other officers “and above all the … doctors with
whom [he] had to work.” Under alcohol, Dr. B. could express doubts about
Auschwitz to which his drinking partners responded with statements of
nonresponsibility and resignation (see page 196). The doubts themselves, as he
explained further, were “romantically [melodramatically] overplayed”
(mit Romantik überspielt) — fantasies of escape rather than
serious moral questioning. When drinking heavily, for instance, “I could
think of nothing other than, ‘How did I come to be here? … How can I
… go to Switzerland with my wife and four children?’” Then
“one drank even more” toward a state beyond any thought: “And
the next day one was very sober and kind of realized that what one had thought
about the previous night was in a practical sense impossible.”
His
transition was aided by his strong desire to cease being an
“outsider” and to become, as soon as possible, an Auschwitz
“insider” — a goal |
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