Ross W. Halpin - Jewish Doctors and the Holocaust: The Anatomy of Survival in Auschwitz

Ross W. Halpin

Jewish Doctors and the Holocaust

ISBN 978-3-11-059604-5

e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-059821-6

e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-059375-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018955640

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston & Hebrew University Magnes Press, Jerusalem Editing: Marie-Louise Bethune

Cover image: The Syringe: An execution by needle Sketch by David Olere. Courtesy of Mr Serge Klarsfeld.

www.degruyter.com

There are places that will scream forever

Stanislaw Ryniak (First prisoner of Auschwitz No. 31)

If it be but a world of agony.

Whence camest thou? and whither goest thou?

How did thy course begin? I said, and why?

Mine eyes are sick of this perpetual flow

Of people, and my heart sick of one sad thought

Speak! Whence I am, I partly seem to know,

And how and by what paths I have been brought

To this dread pass, methinks even thou mays guess;

Why this should be, my mind can compass not;

The Triumph of Life

Percy Bysshe Shelley

In Memory

Dr Sima Vaisman

Dr Gisella Perl

Dr Louis Micheels

and

all Jewish doctors who survived Auschwitz
and those who paid the ultimate price

Harm befalls a wicked messenger

A faithful courier brings healing

Proverbs 13:17

To Rosie

This book is an unusual work among Holocaust scholarship. It asks an unusual research question How do people survive Auschwitz? It uses unusual sources mostly memoirs of survivors, quite often and justly considered as problematic by historians. It builds an unusual tool to answer its question a bio-psychosocial model for survival assessment. While it focuses on the fate of a few Jewish doctors who survived Auschwitz, it results in broader openings able to meet the quest of every one.

How to describe what the Jewish doctors went through when there are almost no sources remaining? How can one rely on what has been written after the war, when we know how much emotions were involved in that writing? These are some of the issues every researcher about the Holocaust has to cope with, notwithstanding his own feelings. Ross Halpin in this beautifully written book goes through them in a wonderful manner, not hesitating from time to time to share with us part of his own personal journey through research. And still he tells us a story well grounded into current scholarship on the Holocaust.

In this sense, the authors description of Auschwitz medical world is an illuminating and brilliant synthesis and his final chapter, Anatomy of survival, a masterpiece, where one can see his own contribution to research at its best. However, what I found much impressive is the way Halpin knew how to listen to his sources memoirs written immediately after the war or later on, not only to read them but to make them speak to him and tell an almost unutterable story. As well, he knew how to meet survivors family and again listen to them, this time to hear their quest for life illuminating his own quest: I suddenly realized that I was not researching death. Instead I was examining the quest for life.

Etienne Lepicard (MD, PhD), Bet Hagat and the Israeli National Council for Bioethics, Jerusalem

I did not die, and I was not alive ;

think for yourself, if you have any wit ,

what I became, deprived of life and death .

Dante Alighieri (1995)

It is 7 am, in early December 2010 and the Polish winter is bitterly cold. Every morning for the past 10 days Danuta, the owner of the B&B where I am staying, has driven me to Auschwitz Concentration Camp. We drive in silence because she does not speak or understand English and I know few words in Polish. The streets of Owicim are mostly deserted. The intense silence helps me to absorb my surroundings as we approach the camp. Very fine snowflakes touch the windscreen and disappear while a layer of mist hangs softly over the grounds of the camp. Although daylight has come, there is a terrible darkness about the camp, and I always feel the same sense of foreboding. My fear is that on this occasion I will not be able to go inside.

Dziku, I say in thanks to Danuta and she replies Do zobaczonia o czwartej, indicating she will return at four oclock to pick me up as usual after yet another day of research. I walk towards the gates and pass under the infamous sign, Arbeit Macht Frei. On the left is the SS guard room. Entering the camp, I pass the area to the right where the prisoner band played as inmates, most half dead, left for and returned from hard labour. The footsteps of a staff member walking on the cobblestones break the silence. I arrive outside block 14 and turn right into a street that is lined with poplars and occupied by rows and rows of blocks. Blocks 4, 5, 6 and 7 on my left and 16, 17 and 18 on my right are now exhibition centers, but I cannot forget that they were living quarters and death chambers for prisoners. The specter of death is they omnipresent.

I am desperately cold and alone yet I can sense the ghostly shadows of the dead around me. Skeletal filthy bodies with grotesque frozen faces are heaped outside the entrance to the blocks. Others have been loaded into barrows pushed or drawn by emaciated fellow prisoners. I cannot imagine another place like it on earth. It is literally a graveyard on which ashes from the chimneys have been spread. Visitors are walking on the dead.

Each block had its own history, but death had been common to them all. The prisoners had been penned in like animals waiting for slaughter. Before death had come suffering, pain, fear, and most certainly the loss of hope. What do they say? Hope is the last to die. I continued until I reached the hospital blocks, 19, 20 and 21 on the right and, finally, on the left: Block 10, my destination. The doors were locked and the windows shuttered. This block was unique. It personified evil. It was here that grotesque human medical experiments had been performed on young Jewish women. Most of the women had died; those who did survive were rendered sterile.

It was during my visits to Block 10 to conduct research on the Holocaust and Nazi medicine (Halpin 2011) that I discovered two startling facts which germinated into the idea of writing this book: firstly, that Jewish doctors worked, most against their will, with the Nazi doctors; secondly, that Jewish doctors treated prisoner patients in the hospitals and infirmaries. It didnt make sense to me that an extermination camp should have its own medical system, with hospitals, infirmaries and clinics, supposedly for treating and caring for prisoners. On closer investigation I discovered that following heavy losses to the Russians in early 1942, Germany needed a workforce; while they were still alive and able to work, prisoners in the concentration camps could supply this labor. Thus, the hospitals and infirmaries in the death camp and the Jewish doctors who worked in them played an important role in the life of the camp and involuntarily and unknowingly contributed to Germanys war effort.