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The Meeting: An Auschwitz Survivor Confronts an SS Physician
Fifty years after WWII, Dagmar Ostermann, a former prisoner at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Hans Wilhelm Munch, a former Nazi and head of the Waffen SS Hygiene Institute, talk face to face, in an interview that grew out of a documentary film by Bernhard Frankfurter. The dramatic structure of the discussion follows events of the Nazi occupation chronologically. Frankfurter was an international Film director. Cernyak-Spatz is professor emerita of the Department of Foreign Languages at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. First published in German in 1995 as Die Begegnung: Auschwitz-Ein Opfer und ein Tater im Gesprach by Verlag fur Gesellschaftskritik.
192 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1995
About the author
Susan E. Cernyak-Spatz
6 books8 followersDr. Susan E. Cernyak-Spatz, a Holocaust survivor, is a professor emerita in the Foreign Language Department at the University of North Carolina.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 5, 2010
Another rewrite. See note at end
The book, with just two and a half pages left to be read sat on my kitchen table for months. I just couldn't finish it. I was so upset by the book I'd had enough.
I will have to think about what I want to say about it. But, for now, if you are interested in truth, history and don't mind the author challenging you, read it. The book is essentially an extended interview over three days between a woman who was a camp inmate, and a Nazi camp doctor. He was the only doctor at the Nuremberg Trials that was acquitted. She was the daughter of a Christian mother - her mother's family being strongly Nazi and a Jewish father and worked in the camp's medical offices as an inmate not an employee.
The book isn't hard to read, the writing flows, it is interesting, but is very harrowing. Unlike most Holocaust camp survivors memoirs and histories, there is no drama. It is all about the mundane everyday existence in a camp and how the inmates try to work around the terrible strictures for some semblance of a life that will keep them from death. The fact it is so low-key on a subject that is the depth of evil is part of the ease and part of the challenge of reading this book. There is an endless howl within you, "how could they?" and at times, an anguished "how could he?" wrenches you. It isn't a book that will leave you untouched.
The camp survivors who were Aryan in appearance from a church-going parent but with Jewish blood are really under-represented in the canon of Holocaust literature. This one is excellent and gives a different perspective to our understanding of the industrialised murder factories of the Nazis, and of Germany in those times.
When I was a kid in Israel attending a language school before going on to college (I had a scholarship to do a particular kind of stained glass offered by the Bezalel in Jerusalem and no where else in the world which was the only reason I was there) my landlady had a huge, not very neat tattoo of a number up her arm and a hairy patch where skin had been transplanted in one of Mengele's experiments on her back. She used to search mine and my flatmate's drawers and read our letters, but neither my flat mate nor I knew what to do. We couldn't, after her terrible experiences, go and be so petty as to complain over her lack of respecting our privacy. We just didn't know where she was coming from, how she might have been damaged, how what she did might have a different meaning in her world. In the end, we left the apartment and got another, never having the courage or the right words to say anything less than cheery and positive to her.
Well, it seems I did review the book in the end. To sum up, it is a 'did he or didn't he' book. Did he tell the truth? Is he a revisionist? It is for you to make up your own mind.
Read it. It deserves to be read.
Yet another rewritten review. For books that mean a lot to me, it seems that when I come across old reviews of them, I find it doesn't say what I wanted it to and need to rewrite. Or meddle. You'll have to make your own mind up about that too.
The book, with just two and a half pages left to be read sat on my kitchen table for months. I just couldn't finish it. I was so upset by the book I'd had enough.
I will have to think about what I want to say about it. But, for now, if you are interested in truth, history and don't mind the author challenging you, read it. The book is essentially an extended interview over three days between a woman who was a camp inmate, and a Nazi camp doctor. He was the only doctor at the Nuremberg Trials that was acquitted. She was the daughter of a Christian mother - her mother's family being strongly Nazi and a Jewish father and worked in the camp's medical offices as an inmate not an employee.
The book isn't hard to read, the writing flows, it is interesting, but is very harrowing. Unlike most Holocaust camp survivors memoirs and histories, there is no drama. It is all about the mundane everyday existence in a camp and how the inmates try to work around the terrible strictures for some semblance of a life that will keep them from death. The fact it is so low-key on a subject that is the depth of evil is part of the ease and part of the challenge of reading this book. There is an endless howl within you, "how could they?" and at times, an anguished "how could he?" wrenches you. It isn't a book that will leave you untouched.
The camp survivors who were Aryan in appearance from a church-going parent but with Jewish blood are really under-represented in the canon of Holocaust literature. This one is excellent and gives a different perspective to our understanding of the industrialised murder factories of the Nazis, and of Germany in those times.
When I was a kid in Israel attending a language school before going on to college (I had a scholarship to do a particular kind of stained glass offered by the Bezalel in Jerusalem and no where else in the world which was the only reason I was there) my landlady had a huge, not very neat tattoo of a number up her arm and a hairy patch where skin had been transplanted in one of Mengele's experiments on her back. She used to search mine and my flatmate's drawers and read our letters, but neither my flat mate nor I knew what to do. We couldn't, after her terrible experiences, go and be so petty as to complain over her lack of respecting our privacy. We just didn't know where she was coming from, how she might have been damaged, how what she did might have a different meaning in her world. In the end, we left the apartment and got another, never having the courage or the right words to say anything less than cheery and positive to her.
Well, it seems I did review the book in the end. To sum up, it is a 'did he or didn't he' book. Did he tell the truth? Is he a revisionist? It is for you to make up your own mind.
Read it. It deserves to be read.
Yet another rewritten review. For books that mean a lot to me, it seems that when I come across old reviews of them, I find it doesn't say what I wanted it to and need to rewrite. Or meddle. You'll have to make your own mind up about that too.
July 25, 2021
A very interesting discussion of Auschwitz by two people who had been there - one a prisoner and one an SS doctor. Fascinating.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews