A surgeon’s account of Auschwitz

How to cite: Orzeszko, T. A surgeon’s account of Auschwitz. Bałuk-Ulewiczowa, T., trans. Medical Review – Auschwitz. October 14, 2019. https://www.mp.pl/auschwitz. Originally published as “Relacja chirurga z obozu oświęcimskiego.” Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim 1971: 43–48.

Author

Tadeusz Orzeszko, MD, born 1907, surgeon and member of the Polish underground resistance movement during World War 2, prisoner doctor in Auschwitz (prisoner number 131527) and Mauthausen-Gusen.

The Krankenbau (prisoners’ hospital) comprised Blocks 19, 20, 21, and 28.1 The surgical ward was in Block 21. Part of the block’s ground floor accommodated dentistry. The opposite block, No. 28, housed the surgical dispensary and next to it, on the right of the entrance, was a large room accommodating general medicine admissions. This was where dressings were applied, and prisoners were admitted to the hospital. Minor surgery was performed and plaster casts were applied in a small room to the left of the entrance.

These facilities were administered by the block senior of No. 28 and Dr Franciszek Gralla, who was the head of admissions. Records of all the operations and treatments were made in the register of operations kept by Block 21. In 1943, the block senior of No. 21 was Stanisław Oszacki, the son of a well-known Cracovian professor, and after he left Auschwitz on a transport for another camp, a prisoner from Silesia held the position. Paweł Rajnke, a Pole from the Poznań region, was the clerk of Block 21. All three were patriotic Poles working hard to keep the hospital supplied, as best as possible, by “organising” extra food and medications. They presented a friendly and outgoing attitude and treated other prisoners well. Dr Władysław Dering was the medical head of the ward, and after his dismissal, Dr Grabczyński was appointed to the position but was dismissed as well (in 1944). Following Dr Grabczyński’s dismissal, Dr Władysław Fejkiel, Lagerälteste (senior physician) of the prisoners’ hospital, transferred me from the dispensary in Block 28, where I had been working since mid-1943, to a surgeon’s job in Block 21 and subsequently appointed me as the medical head of No. 21. I stayed in this position until the camp’s evacuation.

The dressings and treatment room in Block 28 was large and full of light. Along its walls there were small tables with dressing materials and stools for patients. Admissions were done in the morning, usually in the presence of an SS doctor, who decided on the spot which patients were to be admitted to the various wards. Patients presented themselves naked, and most of them received some outpatient treatment, such as receiving a medication or having a dressing applied. There were very small amounts of medications available, and great care had to be taken to make the limited provisions last. Hundreds of dressings were applied every day. Hydrogen peroxide, Dakin’s solution, zinc ointment, ichthyol (ichthammol, ammonium bituminosulphate) ointment, sulphur ointment for the treatment of scabies, mercurochrome, Sepso (an imitation iodine), 10–20 cellulose sheets, and about the same amount of gauze pads and paper bandages—were all we had to set out on each of the tables. There were several prisoners working as orderlies under the supervision of an SS physician and the SDG (Sanitätsdienstgrade, the SS medical orderly for the block).

Most of our patients had purulent conditions such as boils and furuncles, whitlows, and phlegmons—sometimes very big ones. There were also a lot of patients with cuts, bruises, dislocated joints, broken bones, wounds and haematomas, which represented the effects of the violence used against them. The overwhelming majority of patients were debilitated and had swollen legs. Any cuts they received, even minor ones, were likely to become infected and develop into phlegmons. Wounds took a very long time to heal. Haematomas became purulent. Phlegmons spread out along the fasciae, separating off large areas of skin and subcutaneous tissue, resulting in necrotizing fasciitis. The usual treatment they required was an extensive incision to drain the pus, which was conducted after the patient was sedated with ethyl chloride (chloroethane) or chloroform, of which we had a fairly good supply. We also used ethyl chloride or larocaine (dimethocaine) as local anaesthetics. Scores of operations of this kind would be performed every day in the small room adjoining the operating theatre, which was very meagrely equipped with the basic surgical instruments.

We had a field operating table, a large electric steriliser and sterile boxes. We sterilised equipment in a large electric autoclave kept in the operating theatre in Block 21. We made all manner of plaster casts. There was a shortage of gauze, so we used old paper sacks to make plaster casts and used gauze or old linen only for the surface layer touching the skin. Prisoner Weber administered the anaesthetic through an ordinary gas mask. Chloroform, our usual anaesthetic, was good for short-term sedation; the patient fell asleep and woke up almost as quickly as when ethyl chloride was used for sedation. Weber was an expert anaesthetist; I never observed any complications due to chloroform, which we sometimes used for major surgery, such as limb amputation.

We were constantly under the SDG’s supervision, so we could not slack off and had to keep ourselves busy all the time. Whenever there were no operations or treatments to be done, we cleaned our instruments or tidied up the room. We were not allowed to read. We had no professional literature available, and the best we could do if we were in doubt about something was to seek advice from our colleagues. We worked the entire day with a short lunch break.

Next to our operating theatre there was an X-ray room with a small portable device. Dr Suchomel and Stanisław Zelle worked there. Male and even female prisoners were brought in from many sub-camps to have X-rays done. The X-ray waiting room, which was always crowded, served as a venue for illicit rendezvous, even though there was an SS-man on duty there. It was a place where secret messages were passed on, and it was also a meeting place for family members who had been split up, friends, and members of the underground resistance movement. Anyone who wanted to avail himself of this service would put on a white coat, come into the waiting room dressed up as a medical orderly, and quietly settle his business. Or, alternatively, he could make use of the dark in the X-ray room. It was a big risk, as prisoners who were caught were severely punished, especially if a secret message was found on them. Most of these illicit meetings were arranged by Zelle, who had an inexhaustible supply of ideas on how to hoodwink the SS-men.

Scores of X-rays were taken every day and it was only thanks to the fact that the staff using the X-ray machine looked after it and did maintenance jobs on a running basis that it continued to work right until the end without breaking down. Dr Suchomel was extremely dedicated to his work and did not take care of his own health. The number of X-rays he took was well over the safety limit, and he paid for this with his life. He died soon after liberation of complications due to radiation sickness.

Prisoner Dr Wasilewski ran a laryngological and ophthalmic surgery next to the admissions room in Block 28 and performed a lot of operations in the surgeons’ treatment room. I always assisted him. In general, he used local anaesthetics. The staff of Block 28 had living quarters on the first floor. Food was brought in from the camp’s main kitchen; it was the same as what all the prisoners received. There was a special kitchen in Block 28 which prepared “dietary” soup for the severely ill, which was distributed to all the hospital blocks. It was a very low-calorie soup.

We did not go out into the camp’s main yard for roll-call, we just lined up in the corridor. In the evening everyone had to be in bed after lights-out. That’s when all the story-telling and anecdotes started, usually on subjects which had nothing to do with the war and the concentration camp. We wanted a moment’s respite; we wanted to forget about the nightmarish reality we were in. Dr Franciszek Gralla was a first-rate raconteur. He told us stories in Silesian dialect about the adventures of Frącek the Silesian. Dr Gralla was an extremely brave and noble individual; he was influential with the German doctors and saved many lives thanks to his fluent German. He was ready to help whenever he could, always risking his own life.

Therapeutic massage was administered by a Czech prisoner with an athletic build who previously held a senior academic post in physical education before the war. In the camp he wrote a book on medical massage, which was published in the camp’s printing shop on the commandant’s orders. The masseur pinned high hopes on this, he was even expecting to be released. And indeed, the commandant called him to his office, congratulated him and offered him a reward—a packet of cigarettes or a piece of sausage. When the disappointed prisoner turned down this “generous offer,” saying that he was getting food parcels from home, the magnanimous commandant gave him two free tickets to the brothel. This incident shows what the camp’s authorities thought of prisoners and how they treated them.

In late 1943, the Political Department was experimenting with hypnosis to compel prisoners to divulge information. A prisoner doctor who said he held a senior academic appointment in psychiatry in Vienna was called in and forced to conduct these experiments. During a social visit in Block 28, I saw him demonstrating a hypnotic séance on volunteer prisoners. It was a series of typical experiments—successful and rather impressive experiments—putting volunteers to sleep and getting them to carry out a variety of orders while hypnotised. He told us that the experiments conducted in the Political Department had failed, because he was unable to put the prisoner to sleep against his will. Later I heard that the camp’s Gestapo unit had him killed.

At this time, I was called into Block 11 to examine one of the prisoners, a German who turned out to be a political prisoner, the ex-chief of the camp’s Arbeitsdienst (labour service), who had escaped a few months earlier in an SS uniform. Two Poles had escaped with him. They got into an empty military vehicle, probably the commandant’s car, and simply drove out of the camp. They reached Warsaw, where this prisoner was caught. He was suffering from a disease which the Germans should not learn of and needed very discreet treatment. I visited him several times and brought him secret messages and parcels along with medications. He was popular with the prisoners and they were all interested in his fate. Contrary to the general rule, he was not hanged but, as I heard, sent on a penal transport to another camp.

One evening I was summoned to an emergency case to the operating theatre, where I encountered a civilian who had been shot in the shoulder. A group of SS men had brought him in. One of the party was Boger, a butcher from the Political Department. The patient’s shoulder had been torn to pieces by a series of bullets, the nerves and tissue were in shreds, so I had to amputate his arm. Boger was present during the entire operation, holding a revolver and threatening to kill us then and there if the patient died. Luckily the patient survived the operation, but Boger fainted and had to be brought round. Afterwards he was embarrassed and said he was very sensitive and could not stand the sight of blood. We knew that he had personally shot hundreds of prisoners in the yard of Block 11. I conducted several similar operations on civilians with bullet wounds. Presumably they were underground resistance men, but unfortunately, they would not tell us their names when we asked very discreetly.

It was strictly prohibited for prisoner orderlies to take dressings and medications out of the hospital. Nonetheless, we had to do it. Sick prisoners were generally reluctant to report to the dispensary because they were afraid they could be detained there—they knew about the frequent selections for the gas chamber which were made there. Also block seniors tended to refuse permission for a sick prisoner to see a doctor and sent him out to work. So, we treated patients clandestinely on the premises of the camp. Many a time we had to instruct them how to behave to obtain a leave of absence from work or to get to the hospital, if a prisoner was in desperate need of treatment or had to vanish for a period from his block or work commando.

Apart from the dispensary, Block 28 also had premises for patients from the internal medicine ward, and the pharmacy serving the entire hospital as well as the hospital’s central storage facility were in the loft. The pharmacy was run by Marian Toliński and Professor Jan Olbrycht, and the storage room was managed by Czesław Sowul. As I have said, after I had been working in the dispensary for a few months, Dr Fejkiel sent me to work as a surgeon in Block 21. This was in early 1944. On the right-hand side of the entrance to Block 21 there was a small office used by the SS doctor, and the Schreibstube (clerk’s office) was on the left. Further down on the right was a large pre-operative room leading to the operating theatre. On the left-hand side, next to the general office, there was a washroom and toilet. Then there was a staircase which led up to the first floor, and behind the staircase there was a room for the severely ill, who were looked after by fellow-prisoner Jan Wolny. Opposite, on the right-hand side of the corridor, was the post-operative patients’ room. Further down on the left was the medical staff room. The rest of the ground floor was separated off with a wall. It accommodated a dental surgery which had its own entrance on the side of the building facing Block 11. The block senior’s room was on the first floor, opposite the staircase. Two large patients’ rooms occupied the entire floor space on either side of the stairwell. The windows looking out onto Blocks 10 and 11 were bricked up. In the right-hand corner there was a small, screened off room where dressings were applied. The patients’ rooms had multi-storey bunks arranged in rows with passages along the centre and along the walls. There were also a few wooden beds with leg slings for post-operative patients after major surgery.

Dozens of prisoner orderlies worked in the block, each had 20–30 patients in his care. Some, who had been trained on the job, had been working in the ward for a few years and were doing their duties admirably. One of them was Jan Wolny, who looked after the patients on the ground floor. He was always ready to help his fellow-prisoners and was dedicated to his patients. The majority of the prisoner orderlies were in fact physicians of various nationalities, including numerous Jews and Poles, as well as Czechs, Frenchmen, and Greeks. Sometimes it was difficult to communicate with them. German was of course the official language used for patients’ record cards.

Dr Jakub Gordon was especially committed to caring for his patients. The doctors in charge of a particular room made some of their patients with a relatively mild condition their assistants. Many were involved in the underground resistance movement operating in the camp. Overall, they worked very conscientiously and professionally, dedicated to carrying out their duties. They “organised”2 extra food and medications for the patients in their care. Most lived in the patients’ room next to their charges.

There were straw mattresses on the bunks, sheets riddled with holes made by fleas, straw pillows, and old blankets. In the last year there were no more fleas, we managed to get rid of them with an insecticide spray called Lauzetol3 but the vestiges they left stayed with us to the end. There were not many heating stoves, yet due to the congestion, it was always quite warm, even in winter.

The prisoner orderlies working in the diverse rooms kept patients’ temperature charts and medical record cards, often double ones—the official ones for the SS doctors to see, and ones with the real data for the prisoner doctor. The duties of the nursing staff included taking patients’ temperatures, applying dressings, distributing medications, looking after patients’ hygiene, and serving the meals. The food was delivered from the camp’s kitchen in wooden tubs. Seriously ill patients and those recovering after an operation had dietary meals—watery soup with semolina or vermicelli thickened with a little milk. Sometimes they received an extra portion of milk. The rest of the patients got the normal camp ration without the working prisoners’ allowance. In terms of caloric content, it was an insufficient amount, certainly less than a thousand calories. Occasionally there was a more nourishing soup, made of bread or pastry products requisitioned from new prisoners arriving in Auschwitz. Sometimes you could find various items of jewellery, coins, or even small watches in this kind of soup. The ordinary soup was made of diverse weeds which were collected in the fields by special commandos, turnips and grated potatoes with a little bit of flour for thickening. Often there’d be snails added to the soup. On holidays you could find little bits of meat in the soup, and you would get a second course consisting of a few small potatoes boiled in their skins. Breakfast consisted of unsweetened ersatz coffee or herb tea and a piece of bread; and all you got for the evening meal was just a cup of coffee.

We often recalled the commandant’s words, that a prisoner kept on this diet could live for a maximum of three months, but many people survived for much longer. The block senior did all he could to provide more food. He used his contacts with the staff of the kitchen and food warehouse to procure an extra tub of soup and a few loaves of bread or some margarine. He also claimed rations for inmates who had died but their deaths were not reported to the central records office for a day or two, so their ration of food could still be delivered. Fellow-inmates brought extra food into the hospital from the camp. When I was ill straight after arriving in the camp, a friend working in the food warehouse supplied me with horse beans (fava beans) and cereals. When parcels started to come, prisoners who received them gave their soup to other patients, but it was still not enough.

During the conditions of starvation, wounds—especially the purulent ones—healed very slowly, which usually ended in disaster. A small boil or a minor cut could turn into a huge phlegmon. Wounds would not heal on incision, the granulated tissue was pale and atonic, and the abundant and long-lasting exudates issuing from them gave rise to a considerable loss of protein and progressive damage. On the other hand, sterile post-operative wounds healed at a surprisingly fast rate and rarely became purulent. Dressings were applied in the treatment room under the care of Dr Kruczek, who worked with Dr Czesław Kozłowski. Dressings soon became soggy with pus and had to be changed every day. We had no petrolatum gauze, so we used hydrogen peroxide solution or Dakin’s solution to clean wounds. Often, we would give the patient a shower, which had a good effect on the healing process, maybe because the water was heavily chlorinated. The operating theatre in which I worked with Dr Zbigniew Sobieszczański was quite small and its equipment was modest, nonetheless we were able to perform major surgery.

We had an old operating table and a scialytic surgical light. In the somewhat bigger pre-operative room there was a large electric autoclave, a chest of drawers to hold instruments, a large cabinet for surgical linen, and a washbasin with running water. We boiled our silk sutures; catgut sutures came in sterile patented jars.4 We washed our hands with soap and water, followed by Zefirol (a topical antiseptic), and alcohol denatured with petroleum oil. The only type of gloves we had were made of cotton. In the last phase [of the camp’s operations] we used liquid gloves, a patented product probably consisting of a resinous solution which quickly dried on your hands, leaving a thin, elastic sheath which you could only remove by washing your hands with soap. At this point we stopped using cotton gloves. Patients were given a bath prior to their operation. We had no iodine, so we smeared the operating field with Mercurochrome. Zenon Ławski, who had been working for years in the operating theatre and was excellent at applying the anaesthetic, administered the ether using an Ombredan mask. Often, he would assist during a surgery. Whenever possible we used larocaine as a local anaesthetic. Oftentimes, we performed spinal anaesthesia. We had only small amounts of ether but had a large supply of good quality larocaine produced by Roche.

The pharmacy in Block 29 made jars of sterile solutions. Fellow-prisoner Górecki, assisted by Józef Panasiewicz, ran the pre-operative room. Their sterilisation was impeccable, and it is chiefly due to them that we owe our good post-operative results.

The operating theatre was fairly well equipped thanks to the SS physicians’ interest in surgery. Those of them who wanted to specialise in surgery often operated or assisted in operations. But they did not feel any commitment to their patients at all. There were plenty of patients, but they never bothered to find out what happened to their patients after they had finished operating on them. Earlier, in Dr Dering’s times, SS doctors performed numerous experimental operations in this theatre on prisoners, as well as gynaecological operations on Block 10 women, who were their guinea pigs. This made the SS surgeons keep the operating theatre well stocked with surgical instruments and dressings.

During the time I worked in Block 21, SS doctors performed surgeries using local or spinal anaesthesia to sterilise or castrate German pink triangle prisoners (“sexual offenders”)5 and psychiatrically disadvantaged prisoners. Prisoners who underwent these operations had to sign a declaration of consent to the surgery, and after the operation they were released from the concentration camp. They were operated on by SS Dr Fischer and assisted by a physician in a Luftwaffe uniform. Fischer often came to the operating theatre to assist in operations, and sometimes performed minor operations such as removing an appendix or repairing a hernia. When the women’s commando was set up, women would often be brought in and operated on, after which they would be taken back on a stretcher to their block. Dr Tetmajerowa used to come with them and looked after them, and often assisted in the operations.

All the surgical operations were recorded in German in the register of operations and on the patients’ medical record cards, which were kept by the ward doctors. The SS physician reviewed the records and had patients presented to him. He would discharge any patient he considered recovered. To keep a patient in the hospital until he recovered fully, or for any other important reason, we had to produce fabricated records and present another patient to the SS physician, or resort to such methods as the administration of an injection of milk to induce a fever. We had only a few medications, which we got in very small quantities. For about 500 patients in the block, we received a few dozen tablets of Prontosil, aspirin, or salol (phenyl salicylate). Sometimes we had to administer drugs we were not familiar with and did not know their names or who produced them, for instance a red substance which was to be administered intravenously to patients with presumed sepsis, and we were told to keep an exact record of the effects of the treatment. Later our notes were collected by an SS physician. Of course, we did not apply such treatment, and handed in bogus records. We supplemented essential medications, which were always in short supply, by “organising” an additional supply from a variety of sources, such as “Canada”,6 the SS pharmacy, or consignments smuggled into the camp. Many of our drugs went to prisoners who came from diverse sub-camps, where the situation was even worse.

Every few weeks one of the SS doctors (e.g. Rhode, Fischer, and Klein), assisted by the SDG, conducted a review of all the patients in the room next to the dressing room. Patients were presented naked and with no dressings. The prisoner doctor in charge of the ward described each patient’s condition, trying to make his prospects of recovery as optimistic as possible. The SS doctor issued a verdict on each patient, merely based on looking at him, and he either handed back the patient’s medical record card, which meant the treatment was to be continued and the patient could survive, or he passed the medical record to the SDG, which meant that the patient would be sent to the gas chamber. The SDG then locked these medical cards in the SS doctor’s office. Sometimes we managed to remove some of the cards or swap them for the records of deceased prisoners.

Usually victims selected for the gas chamber were taken away after a few days, so there was still a chance to make a few changes, unfortunately it was a very slim chance. But we managed to save a few individuals from each transport. On orders from the SS doctor, a natural cause of death had to be entered in the medical records of these people. Many of the hospital’s staff were in the underground resistance movement operating in the camp, and they did their duty with absolute dedication.

In the second half of 1944, the Gestapo brought a civilian with an abdominal and a thigh wound and told me to attend to him immediately. I was discreetly warned that it was an important person. I gave orders for him to be put in Jan Wolny’s room after the operation, as I suspected that Wolny was in the resistance movement and would look after this patient in the right way. The Political Department was constantly inquiring about the patient’s condition, so I knew they would interrogate him. I instructed my staff to keep giving him sedatives, even morphine, in order to postpone the time when they would come to collect him. We managed to continue doing this for a few days, in which time Wolny made contact with the resistance movement and we passed on the secret information to our patient on what he was to say under interrogation. He was called for several times, and after one of these interrogations we never saw him again. Later I learned that he was a cichociemny (a “silent unseen man”)7 named Jasiński, nom-de-guerre Urban, with orders to establish contact with the concentration camp.

There was another prisoner sent in for treatment, and I was notified that he was a Polish government delegate8 who had arrived from Hungary. He was suffering from urinary retention due to an injury to the urethra in the perineal area. When his condition started to improve following the operation, an ambulance arrived to collect him, presumably to take him to his execution. I intervened with the Lagerarzt, who had assisted during the operation, trying to keep the patient in the hospital until his operation wound healed and the catheter could be removed, but my attempt was unsuccessful. He was taken away on a stretcher. I learned that he had been executed by the firing squad. There were quite a few similar cases.

Following the big air raid on Auschwitz in 1944 there were many casualties, both of prisoners and SS staff. Bombs fell on the shoemaker’s and tailor’s workshops, which were just outside the perimeter fence and had a lot of prisoners working in them. The SS officers’ mess hall was hit, too. We operated on both the prisoners as well as on the SS men. The more serious casualties were left in Block 21, but the Germans were taken away. The camp’s authorities took special care of the casualties. The Commandant visited them, bringing flowers and chocolate along with get-well-soon wishes. A few days later lorries arrived and all of the serious casualties, even those with broken limbs on slings, were loaded up and taken straight to the gas chamber.

We also had a Soviet POW who arrived in the hospital with several bullet wounds in his head following an abortive attempt to escape. We managed to keep him alive and kept him in the ward right up to the evacuation. He recovered his sight, but he had substantial, residual visual field narrowing (i.e. tunnel vision).

On 18 January 1945, the day the camp was evacuated, all the medical records and the documents from the office of Block 21 were burned in a bonfire in front of the block, under the personal supervision of SS Dr Fischer and the SDG, who were there all the time keeping an eye on us. The prisoners managed to save just two of the registers of operations, which are now preserved in the archives of the State Museum at Oświęcim. The first register covers the period from 10 September 1942 to 22 February 1943, with entry numbers 11051 to 14138; and the second is for the next period, with entry numbers 14139 to 22297. The former contained the records of 3,087 surgeries performed over a period of about 6 months; and the latter holds the records of 8,159 surgeries carried out over about twelve months. The records were made very thoroughly in German, and the diagnoses (though not all of them) were written in Latin. Entries included the date, the patient’s surname and camp number, the diagnosis and the type of surgery, as well as the names of the operating team and anaesthetist.

Records were kept on both the operations carried out in the operating theatre and in the dispensary room in Block 21, as well as those performed in the small surgery in Block 28. The terminology used in these registers is correct on the whole; it must have been dictated to the clerk by the surgeon. The handwriting shows that two people made the entries, and neither of them were the surgeon performing the operation. The custom of the surgeon dictating entries into the register continued through the period when I was working in Block 21. The only questionable point is that 90% of the entries in the first register name an SS physician (giving his military rank as well) as the operator. Only on the last few pages of the first register, and more and more frequently as you go through the second register, do you see the names of the prisoner doctors involved. An SS doctor’s name only appears in 170 entries in the latter book. It’s hardly imaginable that an SS physician would have bothered to conduct minor surgeries or apply casts. They didn’t like to touch patients who were prisoners. Most probably they told the clerk to put their names down as the operating surgeon to enhance their professional experience in surgery, for purposes known only to themselves.

The diagnoses are most certainly true, as records were made even of the experimental operations. The following entries were made: cas. explorativus (experimental case) for 168 cases of the removal of a testicle, and 12 cases of the removal of an ovary; vita sex. anormale (abnormal sex life) for 10 cases of the removal of both testicles; and debilitas (mental infirmity) for another patient who had both testicles removed. A total of 179 individuals.9 Another indication that these were experimental surgeries is the fact that they occurred serially, for instance 20 were conducted on 1 November, and another 23 on 2 November. In one case the right testicle was removed, and the left testicle in another case. Apart from these sexual operations, the registers contain records of 502 hernia repairs; 147 appendectomies; 44 hydrocoelae testis operations; 55 varicose vein operations; 11 haemorrhoid operations; 26 orthopaedic surgeries of various kinds on the limbs; 40 urological (kidney, prostate gland, and phimosis) operations; 36 rib resections due to pleural empyema; 2 thoracoplasties; 41 stomach resections for ulcer treatment (9 cases were repairs of a perforated ulcer); 10 gynaecological operations; 19 thyroid operations; 8 gall bladder operations; 41 laparotomies to stop an internal haemorrhage, or treat an ileus or peritonitis; 28 operations to treat osteomyelitis; 156 limb amputations including 35 major amputations (mostly for traumatic and septic conditions); and 2 phrenectomies. 15 prisoners had vascular surgery and 7 had surgery for gunshot wounds. There were 43 trepanations and wound repairs and 7 blood transfusions. A total of 1,549 surgeries were carried out in the operating theatre of Block 21 in this period; the rest were done in Block 28 and were usually minor or for the application of plaster.

The register of operations also has entries for the treatment of civilians detained by the Gestapo. These patients have no camp number, and sometimes no name is recorded in the entry, e.g. “10 August 1943, N.N., gunshot wound in the abdomen”; “18 September 1943, N.N., gunshot wound in the shoulder”; “21 September 1943, N.N., broken thigh bone”; “8 January 1944, Karol Goryl, gunshot wound in the abdomen”; “17 January 1944, Jan Kapuściński with a gunshot wound in the chest”; and “5 February 1944, Stanisław Matysiak with a gunshot wound in the neck.” The Gestapo collected such patients when they had not yet fully recovered, sometimes straight from the operating theatre. There can be no doubt as to what happened to them next. Like the rest of the prisoners’ hospital, the surgical ward could not carry out its duties properly, even though it was fairly well organised and its staff were professionals and worked with absolute dedication. The starvation rations and shortage of medications turned most of our efforts to naught. Few of our patients recovered fully. There was a high mortality rate. So, every life we managed to save was even more invaluable.

Translated from original article: Tadeusz Orzeszko, “Relacja chirurga z obozu oświęcimskiego.” Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim, 1971.

Notes
1. “In the final form assumed by the hospital in the Auschwitz I main camp, it was made up of block 19, the Schonungsblock for convalescent prisoners; block 20, the contagious diseases block; block 21, the surgical block; and block 28, the internal medicine block.” See http://auschwitz.org/en/history/camp-hospitals/the-opening-and-growth-of-the-hospitals/a
2. In concentration camp jargon, when prisoners “organised” something, they “procured” it by illicit means, e.g. by taking it from a camp warehouse without permission (I am deliberately avoiding the word “steal”).a
3. Actuallly Lausetol, an anti-lice solution of unknown composition.b
4. Cf. https://www.warstuff.com/WW2-GERMAN-GLASS-JAR-FOR-SURGICAL-CATGUT-THREAD-B-i1547577.htma
5.I.e. homosexualsc
6. “Canada”—the inmates’ nickname for the warehouse used to store goods confiscated from new prisoners arriving in the camp.c
7. Cichociemny—A Polish special operations agent trained by the Polish forces abroad and dropped as a paratrooper in occupied Poland.c
8. A Polish government delegate—during the war the Polish government continued to operate in exile and had a secret domestic network (“the Underground Polish State”), communicating by means of a system of delegates.c
9.Apparently a printing error, as the number of sterilisation procedures recorded in the camp documents was 180d
a—notes courtesy of Prof. Susan Miller; b—notes courtesy of Dr Maria Ciesielska; c—Translator’s notes; d—note courtesy of Teresa Wontor-Cichy.

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