Auschwitz (A Doctor's Eyewitness Account)

"Önümüz karanlık, arkamız karanlık, her yer karanlıktı..."

Hunger had reduced the prisoners to raving, moaning maniacs. Within a few days their already weakened organisms had disintegrated entirely. Diarrhea, dysentery and typhus had begun
their deadly work. Fifty or sixty deaths a day was normal. Their last days were spent in indescribable suffering, till at last death came and set them free.

... by some miraculous whim of fate, I should escape.

If all men are good, there can be no Auschwitz.

Everybody here had a past which he looked back on with sorrow, and a future he contemplated with despair.

The bodies were not lying here and there throughout the room, but piled in a mass to the ceiling. The reason for this was that the gas first inundated the lower layers of air and rose but slowly towards the ceiling. This forced the victims to trample one another in a frantic effort to escape the gas. Yet a few feet higher up the gas reached them. What a struggle for life there must have been! Nevertheless it was merely a matter of two or three minutes’ respite. If they had been able to think about what they were doing, they would have realized they were trampling their own children, their wives, their relatives. But they couldn’t think.
Their gestures were no more than the reflexes of the instinct of selfpreservation. I noticed that the bodies of the women, the children, and the aged were at the bottom of the pile...

Civilians who faced facts and rebelled, invited death.