Miklós Nyiszli

Miklós Nyiszli (June 17, 1901 in Nagyvárad, Hungary (now Oradea, Romania) – May 5, 1956) was a Jewish prisoner doctor at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Nyiszli, along with his wife and young daughter, was transported to Auschwitz in June 1944. On arrival, Nyiszli volunteered himself as a doctor and was sent to work at number 12 barracks where he operated on and tried to help ill patients with the barest of medical supplies and tools. He was under the supervision of Josef Mengele, an SS Officer and Physician, who decided after observing Nyiszli’s skills, to move him to a specially built room whose construction had been facilitated to cater for the carrying out of autopsies, primarily, but also any other required operations. The room had been built inside Crematorium 3, and Nyiszli, along with members of the 12th Sonderkommando, was housed here.

General life in the camp
During Nyiszli’s time in the camp he witnessed many atrocities to which he refers in his book Auschwitz—A doctor’s eyewitness account. While imprisoned, Nyiszli was also forced to carry out medical tests and perform autopsies on dozens of bodies, particularly on dwarfs and twins. Mengele had done research into the causes of dwarfism and the birth of twins, and used Nyiszli to gather more information for him. Nyiszli also carried out the autopsies of prisoners who it was suspected had died of diseases which were prevalent in the camp. Mengele was also searching for evidence to indicate the inferiority of the Jewish race, and at one point Nyiszli had to carry out medical tests on a father and son and then, after their murder, had to prepare their skeletons to be sent to the Anthropological Museum in Berlin.

"[I] had to examine them with exact clinical methods before they died, and then perform the dissection on their still warm bodies."¹

One day, after the gassing of a new shipment of prisoners, Nyiszli was summoned by prisoners working in the gas chambers who had found a girl alive under a mass of bodies in the gas chamber of one of the camp crematoriums. Nyiszli and his fellow prisoners did their best to help and care for the girl but she was eventually discovered by SS guards and shot. This incident was dramatized in the film The Grey Zone.

Nyiszli was appalled by the disregard for human life and lack of sympathy for human suffering shown by the SS guards and officers, but like all in the camp his actions were dictated by his tormenters, and so he was forced to perform what for him were morally conflicting acts.

During his eight or so months in Auschwitz Nyiszli observed the murders of tens-of-thousands of people including the slaughter of whole sub-camps at a time. These sub-camps held different ethnic, religious, national, and gender groups. For example there were a Gypsy camp, several women’s camps, a Czech camp, and so on. Each sub-camp usually housed between 5,000 and 10,000 prisoners, and some had even higher populations. Nyiszli was often told or was given prior notification when camps were to be exterminated, as it would signal that an increased workload was imminent.

When Nyiszli discovered that the women’s camp his wife and daughter were living in, Camp C, was to be exterminated, he was able to bribe an SS officer into putting his wife and daughter on a train to a women’s work camp. Nyiszli remained in Auschwitz until shortly before its liberation by the Soviet army on January 27, 1945. On January 18 Nyiszli, along with an estimated 66,000 other prisoners, was forced on a death march that took the prisoners into various parts of the Third Reich’s territories including Germany proper, Poland (which was part of Greater Germany) present-day Austria and Czechoslovakia, and further into various smaller concentration camps.

After Auschwitz
Nyiszli’s first major stop after the forced march out of Auschwitz was the Mauthausen concentration camp in northern Austria, near the city of Linz. After a three-day-stay in a quarantine barracks at Mauthausen, he was sent to the Melk und der Donau concentration camp, about three hours away by train. After a total of 12 months of imprisonment, including two months in the Melk und der Donau camp, Nyiszli and his fellow prisoners were liberated on May 5, 1945, when U.S. troops reached the camp.

Map of Auschwitz death marches and info: Figure 1.1