| AUSCHWITZ THE RACIAL CURE |
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direct and pragmatic. So much so that he could chide her
for having attempted to help Jews (“How could you hope to have been
successful?”) when she told him why she had been arrested and even to tell
her that she must have been “a little schizoid” for having made these
attempts.
Dr. Magda V. also said that “you could talk to him”
and “give a more or less intelligent answer” when a medical issue
arose: “We had a working relationship up to a point.” That
relationship involved a certain degree of mutuality: on the one hand, “He
knew I would not do anything not one hundred percent correct,” and she
could count on his protection. Dr. V. was convinced that, during the last days
of Auschwitz, only Mengele’s protection prevented her from being shot for
knowing so much about the camp’s inner workings; yet also that “if he
[had been given] the order to shoot me, I think he would have done it without
thinking.” Even the control he exerted over her was within a context of
relative friendliness (“The joker knew me better than I knew
myself”), and she remained grateful to him for having treated her with a
measure of respect and for having kept her alive.
Women prisoner
doctors seemed to have observed Mengele more closely and perhaps understood him
better than did their male counterparts, but two men had what were probably the
most excruciating relationships with him. One was Dr. Nyiszli, the pathologist;
who described such moments of closeness as: “A long afternoon in deep
discussion with Dr. Mengele, trying to clear up a certain number of doubtful
points [during which] I was no longer a humble … prisoner, and I …
defended and explained my point of view as though this were a medical
conference of which I were a full-fledged member.” Friendly gestures from
Mengele came to mean a great deal to Nyiszli, as they seemed to transport the
two men out of the master-slave relationship into one of colleagues: “I
know men, and it seemed to me that my firm attitude, my measured sentences, and
even my silences were qualities by which I had succeeded in making Dr. Mengele,
before whom the SS themselves trembled, offer me a cigarette in the course of a
particularly animated discussion, proving he forgot for a moment the
circumstances of our relation ship.”51,
Also, one survivor observed Nyiszli and Mengele to have been “very close
to each other” and “very comfortable together."
But Nyiszli
was anything but comfortable in describing that relationship, along with some
of Mengele’s crimes, in his deposition of 28 January 1945 and his later
book (published in 1960). That discomfort probably contributed to certain
discrepancies between the two documents. But Nyiszli’s most powerful
suggestion of the ambiguity of his function as Mengele’s pathologist was
his later declaration that “I would begin practicing, yes, … but I
swore that as long as I lived I would never lift a scalpel again.”52 In other words, while Mengele had been good to
him in Auschwitz, Nyiszli felt that the price of that friendliness had been his
own medical integrity.
Dr. Alexander O. spoke animatedly of his first
encounters with Men- […gele] |
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