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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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169 |
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| Selections on the Ramp |
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dead, and “at the time of the liberation, fourteen of
us [fewer than 2 percent] were still alive.”
Twins, too, were
separated out, since Mengele was collecting twins for study. At selections
there were shouted orders: “Zwillinge raus!” (“Twins,
out!”) and “Zwillinge heraustreteb!” (“Twins, step
forward!”). One woman who arrived in her teens with her twin sister and
their mother heard that call, to which her mother responded; indeed the next
day an experienced prisoner told them, “It's because you’re a twin
that you have a chance to stay alive.”
There were tragic efforts
to protect family members that had the reverse effect and left surviving
inmates with especially painful feelings of guilt. A woman who arrived at the
age of seventeen told how she was placed in a group with her little sister,
four years younger than she. Seeing that the child was confused, “I
practically pushed her” toward the line with their mother and grandmother,
telling the SS people, “Her mother is over there.” Unknown to her,
that line was going to the gas chamber: “This is what I have to live
with.”
A similarly painful story was told by Dr. Abraham C., a
radiologist, who arrived with his wife on a cold night and gave her his parka
to wear and his scarf to put over her head. Because, he recalled, “she
looked like a little old lady,” she was ordered to the line that went to
the gas chamber. “So in a way it was because of the precautions I took for
her that she was put on the wrong side because otherwise — she was young,
active, and should have been among the thirty or forty young women who went to
the camp alive.” |
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| The Sequence of Killing
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| These incidents stemmed directly from manipulations and
deceptions promulgated by Nazi doctors. The truth they were concealing was to
be found in the gas chambers and crematoria and has been described by a Polish
Jew who spent most of his ten months in Auschwitz from March 1944 working as a
member of the Sonderkommando. Such direct testimony is rare because
members of that Kommando were usually killed after a certain time in
order to eliminate witnesses, a fate this man escaped from only because of the
liberation of the camp by the Russian army.* He tells how camp policy shifted
from early brutality to “another method that made their work easier by
telling the new arrivals that they had to take a shower to be clean after the
long trip.” Now it became the task of the Jews in the
Sonderkommando to “calm the people [arrivals headed for the gas
chamber].” These Jews engaged in this deception because they “were
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* Members of the
Sonderkommando could be permitted to survive because of their technical
skills, or because of the general confusion during the last months of the camp.
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THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of
Genocide
Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
©
1986 |
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Page 169 |
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