Miklós Nyiszli

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The native form of this personal name is Nyiszli Miklós. This article uses Western name order when mentioning individuals.
Miklós Nyiszli
Born(1901-06-17)17 June 1901
Auschwitz

Miklós Nyiszli (17 June 1901 – 5 May 1956) was a Hungarian prisoner of Jewish heritage at Auschwitz concentration camp. Nyiszli, his wife, and young daughter, were transported to Auschwitz in June 1944. Upon his arrival, Nyiszli volunteered as a doctor and was sent to work at No. 12 barracks where he operated on and tried to help the ill with only the most basic medical supplies and tools. He was under the supervision of Josef Mengele, a Schutzstaffel officer and physician.

Mengele decided after observing Nyiszli's skills to move him to a specially built autopsy and operating theatre. The room had been built inside Crematorium II, and Nyiszli, along with members of the 12th Sonderkommando, was housed there.

Early life

Nyiszli was born 17 June 1901 in Transylvania, Kingdom of Hungary (then the Hungarian-half of Austria-Hungary). He completed his medical degree in 1929. Following this, he specialized in forensic pathology in Germany. He returned to Transylvania with his wife and daughter in 1937 before migrating to Hungary in 1940. In 1942, he and his family were sent to a work camp in Desești before being transferred to Auschwitz concentration camp in 29 May 1944.[1][2]

Authorship

During Nyiszli's period in the camp, he witnessed many atrocities to which he refers in his book, Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account,[3] also published under the name Auschwitz: An Eyewitness Account of Mengele's Infamous Death Camp.[4] Historian Gideon Greif characterized Nyiszli's assertion that "soap and towels were handed out to the victims" as they entered the gas chambers and that "toxic gas was released from the showerheads" as among the “myths and other wrong and defamatory accounts” of the Sonderkommando that flourished in the absence of first-hand testimony by surviving Sonderkommando members.[5]

Accounts of camp life

While imprisoned, Josef Mengele forced him to engage in human experimentation, including dissecting the bodies of recently executed inmates, due to his scientific background.[3] At one point Nyiszli was forced to carry out physical exams on a father-son pair and, after their deaths, to prepare their skeletons for study at the Anthropological Museum in Berlin.[citation needed]

[I] had to examine them with exact clinical methods before they died, and then perform the dissection on their still warm bodies.

— Miklós Nyiszli

One day, following the

gas chambers who had found a girl alive under a mass of bodies in a chamber. Nyiszli and his fellow prisoners did their best to help and care for the girl, but she was eventually discovered and shot.[6] This incident was dramatized in the films The Grey Zone and Son of Saul.[citation needed
]

Nyiszli was appalled by the disregard for human life and lack of empathy for human suffering shown by the guards and officers. However, his actions were dictated by his tormentors, and he was forced to perform what he considered immoral acts. As he said:

An event never before experienced in the history of medicine worldwide is realized here: Twins die at the same time, and there is the possibility of subjecting their corpses to an autopsy. Where in normal life is there the case, bordering on a miracle, that twins die at the same place at the same time? [...] A comparative autopsy is thus absolutely impossible under normal conditions. But in Auschwitz camp there are several hundred pairs of twins, and their deaths, in turn, present several hundred opportunities!"[7]

— Miklós Nyiszli

During his roughly eight months in Auschwitz, Nyiszli observed the murders of tens of thousands of people, including the slaughter of whole sub-camps at once. These sub-camps held different ethnic, religious, national, and gender groups, including a

Czech camp. Each sub-camp housed between 5,000–10,000 prisoners or more. Nyiszli was often told which camps were next to be exterminated, signaling that an increased workload was imminent.[citation needed
]

When Nyiszli discovered that the women's camp in which his wife and daughter were kept prisoner, Camp C, was to be liquidated, he

concentration camps in Germany.[citation needed
]

Despite this, he generally kept silent about the atrocities and often concealed the true causes of death of certain prisoners. He feared that he would be executed himself if he exposed the truth.[3]

Nyiszli narrated his testimony of camp life in an objective tone, favoring an analytical approach over a more emotive description. He writes that he tells his story "not as a reporter but as a doctor". This style has been referred to by some as documentary realism.[1]

After Auschwitz

Nyiszli's first major stop after the forced march out of Auschwitz was the

Melk an der Donau concentration camp, about three hours away by train.[citation needed
]

After 12 months of imprisonment, Nyiszli and his fellow prisoners were liberated on 5 May 1945, when

Bergen Belsen. He never again worked with a scalpel after the war.[8]

He wrote the book Dr. Mengele boncolóorvosa voltam az auschwitzi krematóriumban.[1]

Death

Nyiszli died of a

heart attack on 5 May 1956 in Oradea, Romania.[1]
His widow, Margareta, died on 5 September 1985.

Dramatization

  • Auschwitz Lullaby, a 1998 play by James C. Wall, printed: 2000
    ISBN 1-889889-02-4
  • The Grey Zone, a 2001 film by Tim Blake Nelson
  • Son of Saul, a 2015 film by László Nemes

See also

References

  1. ^
    PMID 25821395
    .
  2. ^ Posner & Ware 1986a, pp. 33–34.
  3. ^ a b c Nyiszli, Miklos (2011). Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account. New York: Arcade Publishing.
  4. ^ Nyiszli, Miklós, Auschwitz: An Eyewitness Account of Mengele's Infamous Death Camp (1986 ed.).
  5. ^ Greif, Gideon and Andreas Kilian, “Significance, responsibility, challenge: Interviewing the Sonderkommando survivors”, Sonderkommando-Studien, 7 April 2004.
  6. ^ "Mengele and Miklos Nyiszli". Mengele.dk. Archived from the original on 12 March 2020. Retrieved 9 January 2015.
  7. ^ Hans-Walter Schmuhl, "The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, 1927-1945", Springer, 2003, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 259, pg. 368
  8. PMC 4374105
    . "I would begin practicing again, yes… But I swore that as long as I live I would never lift a scalpel again…"

Bibliography

External links
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Miklós_Nyiszli&oldid=1220291328"