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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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167 |
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| Selections on the Ramp |
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the next day …. I must say I was in a …
stupor. . . . I couldn't move. I just sat and couldn’t move .... I really
didn't move at all the first few days, maybe a week or ten days
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“You cannot realize it” was the way another
prisoner doctor put it — meaning that one could not take in or absorb the
experience.
From late 1942 or early 1943, those who arrived as doctors
were not only permitted to live but were made a special category of prisoner.
They were usually singled out at the ramp, though some were admitted to the
camp (rather than being dispatched to the gas chamber) on the basis of their
relative youth and strength, and only there identified as doctors. The process
could be haphazard. Some older doctors were sent to the gas without ever having
been admitted to the camp. At the other extreme, a survivor doctor stated that,
upon arriving at Auschwitz with a transport for which he had medical
responsibility, |
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the doors were pushed open and we were told to
hurry out onto a platform. There was a high-ranking SS medical officer near us
and I told him in my best German that Nora [this survivor's fiancée] and
I were the nurse and doctor in charge of the transport. He seemed friendly and
told us where to stand, and not to let anybody move us. He treated us as
colleagues. He even told me to hold onto the books I had in my hand, to contact
him later in the camp, and added that I would be well taken care of.4 |
One suspects that even the relief at being treated so well
was accompanied by an underlying terror which this doctor partly suppressed.
Moreover, to be identified and favored as a doctor could intensify pain
and self-condemnation concerning the fate of family members. One prisoner
doctor stated simply that when the SS doctor doing the selections identified
him as a physician, “he directed me to the right and my mother to the
left.” Another doctor, who arrived in Auschwitz in September 1943 from a
transit camp in Holland, conveyed to me the primal feeling of both the strength
of his urge to survive and his guilt that he alone of all his family survived
because he was a doctor: |
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We were . . . my wife, my child, and her parents.
We came out of the train. There was a German. He said women to the one side and
men to the other side. And then I — what really happened I don’t know
exactly .... But at the moment I was standing with my father-in-law. He was
about, over seventy. He was an old man. And I was thinking, “Maybe I can
help him.” And when I was standing there, then I heard someone saying,
“Doctors [in English], austreten [‘Come out of the
ranks’].” And I went out and they put me to the other little group of
younger people . ... You see, if I should not have heard this outcry [call for
doctors], I should not have been here. Luck is such an important
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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 167 |
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