Book Review: "Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eye-Witness Account" by Miklós Nyiszli

I'm not going to lie when I say that this book was something I read some weeks ago and then, unusually, spread across a few days of reading time. I couldn't bring myself to read the whole thing in one sitting even though it was a pretty short book. It was just too graphic and too uneasy to sit there and take in all at once. I spread it out over a few days in order to pace myself. Don't worry, I did the same thing with a number of other graphic war books as well. Some books go into some detail, but when you're reading a book by someone who was actually there and it goes into the details like the smell of dead bodies and children who suffer horribly, you have to put it down if you want to eat or sleep that day.

Nyiszli was made to work for a man that we know now as "The Angel of Death" or "Doctor Death" in some cases. Josef Mengele was, and still is, one of the most sickening human beings I have ever heard of and Nyiszli was forced to work for him (though it is very clear in the book that Nyiszli is mostly horrified at the stuff that Mengele was doing). As a Hungarian Jew arriving in Auschwitz Birkenau in 1944, Nyiszli was forced to work or die. For the good of his family (wife and child), who were also taken, he did his job and wrote this diary-like autobiography of what he saw.

Mengele experimented on children and I'm going to say this very clearly: never have I ever read a book so intensely upsetting about the topic of children suffering. Knowing what this man did and what he was doing at the time, I think that Nyiszli must have had a strong stomach because of what he saw. He talks about this man as a monster, transforming what was once known about medical care into a Dr. Frankenstein like experience. No, he wasn't a doctor after all, he was a man who wanted to experiment his cruel designs on small children with no care in the world for the good of their health, keeping them only alive enough to experiment on them some more.

We don't only get the terrifying images of Mengele though, we also get the atmosphere of Auschwitz Birkenau. There was a school trip there when I was in school and I did not go because it really upset me. I don't think I could take it even today. Just reading about the 'singed hair' smell and the rotting corpses being thrown atop each other like garbage was more than enough. But to see that some of those were small children, to hear that many were young kids, I will admit it made me cry.

Nyiszli talks about everything from when he arrived there to when the camp was liberated by the Red Army in 1945 and well, I can honestly say that he did what he did to keep his wife and child alive (and thank God, they lived) but he also acknowledges the argument about the liberation. For many years afterwards, Jewish people all over the world would still face animosity. Whether it be the Jewish Jewellers of New York City, the Hasidic Jews who keep themselves to themselves and don’t want trouble with anyone, or whether it is just a child being bullied at school - there was still a long way to go until Jews were truly liberated. Also, Nyiszli makes the argument that keeps coming back about how many people have already died from the gassings, the violence and the terrors that came with being forced to live in Auschwitz.

All in all, the book is as graphic as is it brilliantly written. We don’t only get the physical side of the camps but we also get the emotional baggage that Nyiszli was carrying around. He was Jewish but he wasn’t allowed to physically help anyone. He was supposed to do what he was told and it would keep him alive and so, underneath this book is a crying tone of guilt and that in the end, he could do absolutely nothing about it.