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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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306 |
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| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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Cohens, that in any case prisoners were registered not by
name but only by number, and that there was simply no possibility of finding
the man. When B. persisted, he encountered an evasiveness that seemed
Kafkaesque and sinister: the SS man responsible for the building Dr. B. had
seen the group of prisoners enter passed the question “Do we have a Simon
Cohen?” to the capo, who in turn spoke to another prisoner, who more or
less did the same, until the query was itself bureaucratically dissolved.
Dr. B. began to realize that everyone considered his question strange,
highly inappropriate, and possibly dangerous; prisoners feared that an SS
officer seeking out one of their number “couldn’t mean anything good
for that person.” But for a few days he was obsessed with finding Cohen
and “making some human contact.” He did not succeed but in the course
of his quest did make such contact with a different Jew. A former prisoner
physician, Michael Z., who had worked in the Hygienic Institute, told me how
taken aback he was when Ernst B. burst into the laboratory “look[-ing] for
a Jewish friend. He asked me, speaking quite loud… : ‘Do you know
Cohen?’ I told him ‘[Please] be quiet you do not have the right to
speak like that.’” Dr. Z. explained why he felt it necessary to
protect Dr. B. by quieting him down and by implication to protect himself as
well. He told B. that “tens thousands of Jews … come through,”
that “many of them were named Cohen,” and that it would be impossible
to find any such person. But at the same time Z. was deeply moved by SS
doctor’s quest: “I understood that he was indeed a man who had a
different kind of mind, ... that he was capable of human feelings … Yes,
it did impress me … because it was unheard of to see an SS pronounce the
name of a Jewish friend.”
The incident made Dr. B. realize that in
Auschwitz “it was a completely different existence” and that he had
to “comprehend the whole mentality of the place.” Immediately after
the unsuccessful search, he began to have recurrent dreams about Simon Cohen
— at first frequent, then less so during his stay in Auschwitz and still
occurring occasionally up to the time of our interviews: |
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He was always a very attractive young man. And
now [in the dream] he had really deteriorated And he looked at me with a
reproachful, beseeching expression [vonwürfsvollen, bittenden
Blick] … sort of [saying] “It can’t be possible that you
stand there and I am [like this] …” or more like a disappointed
expression: “How can you belong to those people? That can't be you [Wie
kannst du zu denen gehören? Du bist doch der garnicht].”
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| Dr. B went on to tell me, “The older I get, the less
I think it was really Simon Cohen and the more I believe it to have been a
mirage, … an invention … of the imagination.” He even wondered
whether he “only dreamed it” — though we know from what the
prisoner doctor recalled |
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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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