Auschwitz Quotes

“If all men are good, there can be no Auschwitz.”
― Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

“What was money when one’s life was at stake? We had learned that nothing lasts and that no value is absolute. The only exception to that rule: freedom.”
― Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

“Those who seek to protect the body at all cost die many times over. Those who risk the body to survive as men have a good chance to live on.”
― Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

“There are things which must cause one to lose one’s reason, or one has none to lose.”
― Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

“The bodies were cremated in twenty minutes. Each crematorium worked with fifteen ovens, and there were four crematoriums. This meant that several thousand people could be cremated in a single day. Thus for weeks and months—even years—several thousand people passed each day through the gas chambers and from there to the incineration ovens. Nothing but a pile of ashes remained in the crematory ovens. Trucks took the ashes to the Vistula, a mile away, and dumped them into the raging waters of the river. After so much suffering and horror there was still no peace, even for the dead.”
― Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

“When I thought of the past, it often seemed to me that all this was merely a horrible dream. My only desire was to forget everything, to think of nothing.”
― Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

“They were herded passively into the gas chambers. Weary of being hunted and persecuted, of living in constant fear, they dumbly awaited the hand of the sure physician, Death. For them life had lost all meaning and purpose. To prolong it would merely have prolonged their suffering.”
― Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

“that city, wherever it was, they had managed to create for themselves a pleasant, cultured way of life. And that was the cardinal sin for which they were now paying so dearly.”
― Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

“I have met many Jews, as well as gentile anti-Nazis, who survived in Germany and in the occupied countries. But they were all people who realized that when a world goes to pieces, when inhumanity reigns supreme, man cannot go on with business-as-usual.”
― Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

“Twenty thousand men, fully capable of working and in the full flush of their youth, died in the gas chambers and were incinerated in the crematory ovens. It took 48 hours to exterminate them all.”
― Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

“By a conservative estimate, twelve million people perished in the Nazi concentration camps. Most were murdered in cold blood, but countless others died by starvation, illness, and suicide.”
― Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

“We had learned that nothing lasts and that no value is absolute. The only exception to that rule: freedom.”
― Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

“While they sorted us out for transportation I had a chance to look around. In the light of the dying sun the image glimpsed earlier through the crack in the box car seemed to have changed, grown more eery and menacing. One object immediately caught my eye: an immense square chimney, built of red bricks, tapering towards the summit. It towered above a two-story building and looked like a strange factory chimney. I was especially struck by the enormous tongues of flame rising between the lightning rods, which were set at angles on the square tops of the chimney. I tried to imagine what hellish cooking would require such a tremendous fire. Suddenly I realized that we were in Germany, the land of the crematory ovens. I had spent ten years in this country, first as a student, later as a doctor, and knew that even the smallest city had its crematorium.”
― Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

“The pyre was a ditch 50 yards long, six yards wide and three yards deep, a welter of burning bodies. SS soldiers, stationed at five-yard intervals along the pathway side of the ditch, awaited their victims. They were holding small caliber arms—six millimeters—used in the KZ for administering a bullet in the back of the neck. At the end of the pathway two Sonderkommando men seized the victims by the arms and dragged them for 15 or 20 yards into position before the SS. Their cries of terror covered the sound of the shots. A shot, then, immediately afterwards, even before he was dead, the victim was hurled into the flames.”
― Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

“The uncompromising pride of the Third Reich had been broken by the world-wide collaboration of people not avid of conquest, but of freedom.”
― Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

“Their cynicism was complete and terrible: details, like the lying signs outside the underground chambers of the crematoriums that announced in seven languages, “BATHS,” whereas in reality they were gas chambers; the boxes of cyclon gas,5 which were labeled, “POISON: FOR THE DESTRUCTION OF PARASITES,” the parasites being, of course, the untold thousands of innocent Jews murdered in the space of a few minutes. Who knows just how far the lie went?”
― Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

“The cold concrete steps descended and dissolved into darkness. These same steps where four million people, guilty of no crime, had bade life good-bye and descended to their death, knowing that even in death their tormented bodies would not be granted the sanctuary of a grave.”
― Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

“Dr. Mengele was highly pleased. He had brought several fellow officers with him. They pompously examined certain parts of the skeletons and launched into high-sounding, scientific terms, talking as if the two victims represented an extremely rare medical phenomenon. They abandoned themselves completely to their pseudo-science. And yet, far from being an extraordinary abnormality, it is common to hundreds of thousands of men of all races and climates. Even a doctor whose practice is limited has often come across it. But these two cases could, by their very nature, be exploited as useful propaganda. Nazi propaganda never hesitated to clothe its monstrous lies in scientific apparel. The method often worked too, since those towards whom these lies were directed usually had little or no critical faculty, and accepted as fact everything which bore the regime’s stamp of approval.”
― Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

“I had dared criticize the one place, the one environment where my soft-brained superior really felt at home: the blazing glow of the pyres and the spiraling smoke of the crematorium stacks; the air heavy with the odor of burning bodies; the walls resounding with the screams of the damned and the metallic rattle of machine guns fired pointblank; it was to this that the demented doctor came for rest and relaxation after each selection, after each display of “fireworks.” This was where he spent all his free time; here, in this man-made hell, the fiendish physician of Auschwitz made me cut open the bodies of hundreds of freshly murdered people, whose flesh was also used for the cultivation of bacteria in an electric incubator. Obsessed with the belief that he had been chosen to discover the cause of multiple births, here, within these bloodstained walls, Dr. Mengele sat hunched for hours at a time over his microscopes.”
― Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

“he noticed a faint spot of grease on the bright blue cover of one of the files. I often handled the records in the course of my dissections, and had probably spotted it with a bit of grease. Dr. Mengele shot a withering glance at me and said, very seriously: “How can you be so careless with these files, which I have compiled with so much love!” The word “love” had just crossed Dr. Mengele’s lips. I was so taken aback that I sat there dumbfounded, unable to think of anything to say in reply.”
― Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

“According to Dr. Wolff, at least 150 bodies would be needed for the chapter of his study devoted to the pathological aspect of the question. Dr. Mengele interrupted the conversation. “By performing seven autopsies a day,” he said, “you should be able to finish the required number in approximately three weeks.” I did not agree. “I’m sorry, gentlemen,” I said, “but if you want the job to be accurate and well done—of which I have no doubt—then I can perform only three autopsies a day.” After some discussion we finally agreed on this point and, with a cursory nod, I was dismissed.”
― Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

“the crematorium personnel were known as the Sonderkommando, which means, merely, kommandos assigned to special work. They were well fed and given civilian clothes. They were never permitted to leave the grounds of the crematorium, and every four months, when they had learned too much about the place for their own good, they were liquidated. Till now such had been the fate of every Sonderkommando since the founding of the KZ; this explains why no one had ever escaped to tell the world what had been taking place inside these grim walls for the past several years.”
― Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

“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 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 self-preservation. I noticed that the bodies of the women, the children, and the aged were at the bottom of the pile; at the top, the strongest. Their bodies, which were covered with scratches and bruises from the struggle against each other, were often interlaced. Blood oozed from their noses and mouths; their faces, bloated and blue, were so deformed as to be almost unrecognizable. Nevertheless some of the Sonderkommando often did recognize their kin.The encounter was not easy, and I dreaded it myself. I had no reason to be there, and yet I had come down to be among the dead. I felt it my duty to my people and to the entire world to be able to give an accurate account of what I had seen if ever, by some miraculous whim of fate, I should escape.”
― Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

“These bodies must not be cremated,” he said. “They must be prepared and their skeletons sent to the Anthropological Museum in Berlin. What systems do you know for the preparation of skeletons?” “There are two methods,” I said. “The first consists of immersing the bodies in lime chloride, which consumes all the soft parts in about two weeks’ time. Then the bodies are immersed in a gasoline bath, which dissolves all the fat and makes the skeletons dry, odorless and white. Then there’s a second method: by cooking. What you do there is boil the bodies in water until the flesh can easily be stripped from the bones. Then the same gasoline bath is applied.” Dr. Mengele ordered me to use the quickest method: by cooking.”
― Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

“Those who risk the body to survive as men have a good chance to live on.”
― Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

“Those who seek to protect the body at all cost die many times over.”
― Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

“Freud insisted that human life is one long struggle against what he called the death instinct,”
― Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

“On May 5th a white flag flew from the Ebensee watch tower. It was finished. They had laid down their arms. The sun was shining brightly when, at nine o’clock, an American light tank, with three soldiers aboard, arrived and took possession of the camp. We were free.”
― Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

“Mauthausen”
― Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

“Exhausted, they had been unable to walk any farther; when they had strayed from the ranks, an SS had dispatched them with a bullet in the back of the head.”
― Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account