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Summary: Visions Coming Alive
Review: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account is one of the best books I have ever read. Having read many Holocaust and World War II memoirs this one rates near the top. Reading about the holocaust many survivors talk about the Chimney's and the Crematoriums from a distance since most of them weren't in a sonderkommando unit. This book allowed me to put my imagination and vision of inner Auschwitz to a reality. To actually be a eyewitness to the gas chambers is beyond belief. I have loaned this book out many times to readers who don't even have a interest in the subject and all came back with a 5 star rating approval.
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Summary: Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account
Review: An incredibly written book, provides thorough information on life in Auschwitz, very personal. Upon finishing it you will want to read more eyewitness accounts on Holocaust. My recomendations include "From Ashes to Life" and "Rumkowski and the Orphans of Lodz" by Lucille Eichengreen and "Night" by Elie Wiesel. The following books are going to greatly influence you.
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Summary: A True Nightmare
Review: Auschwitz, A Doctor's Eyewitness Account, is the horrific story of what life, if one could call it that, was like inside of the crematoriums at Auschwitz as told by an inmate doctor who performed gruesome operations "under the supervision of the Angel of Death, Dr. Josef Mengele." Even though this doctor was working under the constant threat of death, and even though we cannot come close to imaging what it was like to have been thrust into this world against ones choice, one cannot help but wonder how he managed to do the things that he did. In my opinion, he certainly did not make himself a sympathetic figure in the same manner as the main subjects of other holocaust books have. However, the strength of this book is the in depth detail it goes into when describing one's horrific existence in the crematoriums and that is why this is a book that must be read.
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Summary: Overwhelmingly Horrific Account of Inhumanity
Review: Auschwitz-A Doctor's Eyewitness Account provides a first person narrative of the unimaginable horrors of life in the notorius death camp. The author's simple, matter of fact prose provides a distressing counterpoint to the atrocities he is describing. The callous, daily cruelty, both physical and mental, begins with a description of the "selection" process whereby new arrivals were separated into those that would live a few more tortured months and those who would be immediately murdered and cremated. It moves to the barbaric selection and murder of human beings simply for the purpose of so-called medical research, to the systematic, scheduled destruction of the "sonderkommando" (prisoner squads forced to work in the crematoriums) to insure that no one would live to tell the truth of Auschwitz.The sorrow and horror one simultaneously feels when reading this account is further amplified by the thought that this is not a work of fiction. In fact, the reader must at times force himself to confront the reality that what he is imagining in his mind's eye actually occurred in his or his parent's lifetime and is not the musings of a demented fictionalizer. I now understand why we can never allow this terribly unimaginable low point in history to be forgotten.
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Summary: Auschwitz Recounted by the Living Dead
Review: Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account is the memoir of Auschwitz camp inmate Dr Miklos Nyiszli, a Hungarian Jewish pathologist and unwitting volunteer as assistant to the infamous Dr Mengele in the camp's Sonderkommando. These "living dead," as they were labeled within the camp, were charged to perform the horrific, day-to-day labors of the camp's crematoria in exchange for improved (albeit temporary) living conditions. Members of the Sonderkommando were summarily executed themselves after 4 months' service (if they did not commit suicide beforehand)-at which time, mental and physical exhaustion precluded any further practical functioning. Nyiszli's chore was to perform and record numerous autopsies on murdered twins and deformed inmates to advance the demented, ethnic pseudoscience of Mengele. In the deadened tone of one numbed by appalling scenes and impossible duties, Nyiszli conveys within his chronology his chief concern during internment (other than the fate of his wife and daughter): The purpose and function of the Auschwitz crematoria would never be recorded in history. All those who witnessed the succession of mass murder after mass murder-whether by gas, bullet, fire, or needle-were either members of the SS or those already condemned to death. Nyiszli recounts his own attempts to salvage life as a physician among the damned-actions that come off as pathetically futile or even arguably cruel. His association with his fellow Sonderkommando placed him in a distinctive position to know their plans for undermining the work of the local SS and confounding the operations of the crematoria. Although many times himself paralyzed with passive duty, Nyiszli's personal revolt included using his unique relationship to the ignorant Mengele to avert immediate camp extinctions. Ironically Nyiszli's connection with the criminal doctor of death secured Nyiszli's survival for the necessary telling of this unimaginable, compromised existence in one of the worst hells on earth.
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Summary: WARNING:Graphic Descriptions of Gruesome Horror - BEWARE!
Review: Aushwitz - A Doctor's Eyewitness Account is not for the faint of heart. It is the memoirs of a doctor / prisoner of the infamous Nazi 'Death Camp'. I have personally read (at the time I write this) about a dozen memoirs on the Holocaust. Dr. Nyiszli's experiences cannot even be imagined. I am truly at a loss for words to articulate the feeling in my heart left by this accounting of evil. Under the direct supervision of the infamous 'Doctor' Mengele, Nyiszli performs, without question, some of the most horrific and scientifically useless 'experiments' on human beings. Truly, who among us could ever imagine trying to survive in a Death Camp such as Aushwitz? And yet the disturbing point over all in Nyiszli's book, is the fact that he VOLUNTEERED his services ! I will not judge anyone personally, however, was this author truly a victim or a conspirator with a 'better them than me' attitude? If you have the intellect and stomach for descriptions of horror, then I do acknowledge the importance of this 'Self-Damming' memoir, since it does offer a rare glimpse into the levels of mindset that was the sinister and the sadistic butchers that were the Nazi's...and their conspirators. Perhaps it is a confession of a repentant mind tortured with his actions of the past.
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Summary: An important book that raises questions
Review: Dr. Miklos Nyiszli has written an important book: not only for the unique first-hand account of a "privileged" inmate in Auschwitz but also for the questions that it raises about Man and humanity. As a German-trained pathologist Dr. Nyiszli became pathologist under Mengele, performing both antemortem and postmortem examinations of Mengele's experiments. In so doing he lived relatively well: had sufficient food, clothing, and equipment. The question here is this: can we damn a man for taking advantage of an opportunity for better survival through the aid of the captors? Certainly one is quick to condemn the Jewish Kapos that assisted in the management of the other prisoners. Some have said that Nyiszli aided in the experiments, yet he only performed the post-experiment examinations. Is he then as guilty as Mengele? This is not an easy book to read: the content is disturbing and the implications of it are hard to grasp. It provides a unique insight into the operation of Auschwitz that is rarely written about in first-hand accounts: the Sonderkommando were regularly gassed, Mengele disappeared. As a memoire this is excellent. I would like more cross-references to documented events to substantiate the claims. It is not that I disbelieve him, but adding such documentation would improve the historical usefulness.
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Summary: A SURVIVOR
Review: Dr. N had two chioces in the matter of assisting sadistic Mengel. The first one was to assist him and the second one was to go to the gas chamber and up the smoke stack. He made a wise decision. What bewilders me how he could keep doing the disections. Mostly on twin childern. Dr. N must have been good as he did an atopsay on a murdered SS man. Why would the nazis let a "OTHER THAN" do that work on a SS man? Dr. N must have been an excellant doctor. The ending also is very interesting. Like a good movie the book has a very interesting ending. A must read for all....
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Summary: A novel, not a memoir
Review: Having just read the account by Nyszli on the gas chambers of Auschwitz, I cannot be but astounded and disturbed. The 200 yard long gas chamber, the claim that the sonderkommando resided in a large room above the crematoria, the four huge elevators that carried the corpses, the flames belching from the chimneys, the number of furnaces, and many other details about the gassings that can be checked with the currently accepted version of the tale are indeed incredible. That is, not credible. This work was first published as a serial in a Budapest newspaper in 1947. In that version, Nyszli even claimed that chlorine was used for the gassing. In this translation, interestingly, any mention of chlorine is omitted. My take: this is a novel! Not a memoir! A novel--based partly on truth, partly on imagination. A novel is not history, and unlike the latter, the former can often be improved by a little extra work by a judicious translator. And indeed, anyone who has a reasonable amount of common sense, who perhaps can go so far as to deny alien abductions, ghosts, and the predictive powers of astrology, will easily see through this pornographic bit of imaginative literature. That none of the reviewers here did not, is no surprise. The world is full of true believers. It is only fitting that the preface to this humbug was written by Jewish survivor Bruno Bettleheim, the psychoanalyst, heir to Fraud, who became famous for the fabrications about his past, shoddy research, and especially his claim that he had discovered the cause of autism--"refrigerator" mothers. This theory did tremendous damage to thousands of parents who had to deal with the disease in their children, while being told that they were the cause of it. Pure flimflam. As one of the previous reviewers unwittingly declared, the book is a "testament to the power of the human mind to deceive itself". But more than that, the book is a testament to the weakness of the human mind to be fascinated by stories of serial killers, severed penises, flesh eating microbes, and Michael Jackson. And, as many of my fellow reviewers have noted, and I can confirm, it is an easy, quick read.
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Summary: the more IMPORTANT and EXPLAINING book about nazis'cruelty
Review: I am an italian - JEW - doctor M.D.,I am born in 1932, Iescaped from nazis' persecution first hidden, after escaped inSwitzerland: I had a grandmother and two uncles died in Auschwitz and Mauthausen. I THINK as M.D. (and also psychanalist) systematically studying Nazism with a great interest - professional and personal and historical - THAT THIS NYISZLI'S BOOK IS THE MOST IMPORTANT AND EXPLAINING ABOUT THE ABSOLUTE PARTICULARITY OF NAZIS' QUALITY OF CRUELTY: NOTHING TO COMPARE WITH WHICHEVER OTHER SLAUGHTERS OF THE WHOLE HUMAN HISTORY. I was bewildered on reading another reviewer writing: "interesting but nothing new". I apologize but I don't agree at all.
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