The ambiguous victim: Miklós Nyiszli's narrative of medical experimentation in Auschwitz-Birkenau
Published:
Jan 5, 2014
Keywords:
Medical experimentation Holocaust memory testimony narrative
Abstract
While recent scholarship has – for the past two decades – endeavoured to transcend initial reservations about memoirs of Holocaust survivors, the difficulty with some of these memoirs – namely their authors’ implicit complicity in unethical medical research and in the Nazi Holocaust in general – remains however problematic. To address this thorny issue, this article considers the memoirs of a Jewish inmate doctor, Miklós Nyiszli, who worked with and for SS medical officers in Auschwitz, and his Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account. His memoirs can help us understand wider truths about the “bond of complicity” that, according to Primo Levi, existed between perpetrators and victims in the Nazi concentration camp.
Article Details
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Turda, M. (2014). The ambiguous victim: Miklós Nyiszli’s narrative of medical experimentation in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Historein, 14(1), 43–58. https://doi.org/10.12681/historein.232
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Archives
The Archive of the Romanian Secret Police (Consiliul Naţional pentru Studierea Arhivelor Securităţii, CNSAS), Bucharest. Miklós Nyiszli (I 329849, 2 vols)
Burleigh, Michael and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany, 1933-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Dean, Carolyn J. Aversion and Erasure. The Fate of the Victim after the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010).
Dintenfass, Michael, “Truth’s Other: Ethics, the History of the Holocaust, and Historiographical Theory after the Linguistic Turn,” History and Theory 39 (2000): 1-20.
Friedländer, Saul, Nazi Germany and the Jews. Vol. 2: The Years of Extermination (New York: HarperCollins, 2002).
Goldberg, Amos, “The Victim’s Voice and Melodramatic Aesthetics in History,” History and Theory 48 (2009): 220-237.
Gutman, Yisrael and Michael Berenbaum, eds., Anatomy of Auschwitz Death Camp (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994).
Hautval, Adélaïde, Médicine et crimes contre l’humanité. Le refus d’un médicin, déporté à Auschwitz, de participer aux experiences médicales (Paris: Le Félin, 2006).
Hedfors, Eva, “Medical Science in the Light of the Holocaust: Departing from a Post-ward Paper of Ludwik Fleck,” Social Studies of Science 38/2 (2008): 259-283.
Heim, Susanne and Carola Sachse, Mark Walker, eds., The Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Herber, Friedrich, “Der Lebensweg des Dr Miklós Nyiszli,” in Miklós Nyiszli, In Jenseits der Menschlichkeit. Ein Gerichtsmediziner in Auschwitz, ed. by Friedrich Herber, translated by Angelika Bihari, 3nd edition (Berlin: Dietz, 2011), 187-202.
Koren Yehuda and Eilat Negev, Giants: The Dwarfs of Auschwitz. The Extraordinary Story of the Lilliput Troupe, revised edition (London: The Robson Press, 2013).
Kramer, S. Lilian, ed., Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopedia of Writers and Their Work (New York: Routledge, 2002).
Langer, Lawrence L. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).
Lengyel, Olga, Five Chimneys. The Story of Auschwitz (Chicago: Ziff Davis, 1947) and Gisella Perl, I was Doctor in Auschwitz (New York: International Universities Press, 1948).
Levi, Primo, The Drowned and the Saved, translated by Raymond Rosenthal, introduction by Paul Bailey (London: Abacus, 1989).
Levi, Primo, The Voice of Memory: Interviews, 1961-1987, edited by Marco Belpoliti and Robert Gordon (New York: Polity Press, 2001).
Ley, Astrid, “Kollaboration mit der SS zum Wohle von Patienten?” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 61 (2013): 123-139.
Lifton, Robert Jay, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986).
Lothe, Jakob and Susan Rubin Suleiman, James Phelan, eds., After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust for the Future (Columbus, OH.,: Ohio State University Press, 2012).
Massin, Benoît, “Mengele, die Zwillingsforschung und die ‘Auschwitz-Dahlem Connection’,” in Carola Sachse, ed., Die Verbindung nach Auschwitz. Biowissenschaften und Menschenversuche an Kaiser-Wilhelm-Instituten (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003), 201–254.
Müller, Filip, Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers, Literary collaboration Helmut Freitag, Edited and translated by Susanne Flatauer (Chicago: Ivan D. Ree, 1999 (first edition Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979).
Müller-Hill, Benno, Murderous Science: Elimination of Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies and Others in Germany, 1933-1945, translated by George R. Fraser, afterword by James D. Watson (New York: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 1998).
Nyiszli, Miklós, Dr Mengele boncolóorvosa voltam az Auschwitz-i (sic!) krematóriumban (Nagyvárad: n. p., 1946).
Nyiszli, Miklós, “SS Obersturmführer Doktor Mengele,” Merlin 3 (1952-1953): 158-171.
Nyiszli, Miklós, Médecin à Auschwitz: Souvenier d’un médecin déporté, trad. et adapté du hongrois par Tibère Kremer (Paris: Julliard, 1961).
Nyiszli, Miklós, Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account, translated by Tibère Kremer and Richard Seaver, with a foreword by Bruno Bettelheim (New York: Frederick Fell, 1960).- Orvos voltam Auschwitzban, introduction by József Méliusz (Bucharest: Iroda kiadó, 1964).
Nyiszli, Miklós, Auschwitz: An Eyewitness Account of Mengele’s Infamous Death Camp, translated by Tibère Kremer and Richard Seaver, with a foreword by Bruno Bettelheim (New York: Seaver Books, 1986).-. Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account, translated by Tibère Kremer and Richard Seaver, Introduction by Richard J. Evans (London: Penguin Books, 2012).
Posner, Gerald L. and John Ware, Mengele: The Complete Story, with a new introduction by Michale Berenbaum (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000).
Schmuhl, Hans-Walter, The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, 1927-1945: Crossing Boundaries (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008).
Skinner, Quentin, Visions of Politics, vol. 1. Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Sontag, Susan, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003).
Stone, Dan, ed., The Holocaust and Historical Methodology (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012).
Stone, Dan, Histories of the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Strassmann, W. Paul, Die Strassmanns. Schicksale einer deutsch-jüdischen Familie über zwei Jahrhunderte (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag 2006).
Tozzi, Verónica, “The Epistemic and Moral Role of Testimony,” History and Theory 51 (2012): 1-17.
Waxman, Zoë Vania, Writing the Holocaust: Identity, Testimony, Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Weindling, Paul J. Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Weiss, Sheila Faith, “The Loyal Genetic Doctor, Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, and the Institut für Erbbiologie und Rassenhygiene: Origins, Controversy, and Racial Political Practice,” Central European History 45 (2012): 631-668.
White, Hayden, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
White, Hayden, “Figural Realism in Witness Literature,” Parallax 10, 1 (2010): 113-124.
Wieviorka, Annete, The Era of the Witness, translated from the French by Jared Stark (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).
Young, James E. “Interpreting Literary Testimony: A Preface to Rereading Holocaust Diaries and Memoirs,” New Literary History 18, 2 (1987): 403-423.
Archives
The Archive of the Romanian Secret Police (Consiliul Naţional pentru Studierea Arhivelor Securităţii, CNSAS), Bucharest. Miklós Nyiszli (I 329849, 2 vols)
