Galvanising the Muselmann psychologically

The Editors of Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim have asked me to write an article based on my observations as a doctor held in the concentration camps. If you are carrying six episodes of confinement in different concentration camps in the backpack of your life story, the task and drawing up an account of it may seem simple and straightforward. You’ve plenty to choose from, after all. It’s a subject and set of materials on a monstrous scale. But the thing that practically predominated in those gruesome years was dying. Not death but dying: people no longer human, many of them deprived by the concentration camp system of the basic attributes qualifying them to be ranked as members of the genus Homo sapiens—slowly dying a death stripped of the last shreds of dignity. That was the backdrop to our work as doctors, trammelled by the systemic cruelty inherent in the regulations of the concentration camps—the backdrop to our enthusiasm impeded by the omnipresent suspicions nurtured by the politische Abteilung,¹ and to our knowledge, incapacitated by the want of the medical appliances indispensable for efficient treatment.

Fig. 1. Gas by Zygmunt Flin, Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor No. 108060, ceramic sculpture from the Auschwitz series. Source: Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim, 1968. Click the image to enlarge.

Given such a situation, the ones who could lay claim to a certain amount of success were the surgeons. Internists saved the lives of their patients mostly by giving them Schonung—“convalescence,” a spell off work in conditions which would have certainly killed them. Nor was it our fault that we lost a (thank God) unique opportunity for scientific observation and research on thousands of prisoners approaching the barrier of dying, for we were not able to conduct serious laboratory research. Today, when we read scientific papers on research on protein metabolism, especially on the role and operations of the cell membrane, our eyes are opened up to a number of issues, and on the basis of such papers we even begin to develop a new medical concept of the subject referred to as “the Muselmann.”² But today’s scientists are drawing their conclusions almost exclusively from their laboratory work, while we had our everyday, practical observations of thousands of cases, yet we had no opportunity to make use of this advantage. That is why most of the medical reports published by erstwhile prisoner doctors tend to be based on conjectures rather than on conclusions supported by scientific data.

However, maybe our experience of those times as well as an objective, retrospective look at the past authorise us to make specific statements on the psychological condition of persons exhausted to the utmost by starvation and hard labour, and on their psychological reactions and potential to control their natural responses. To a certain extent, readers of Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim have already been introduced to the subject by the papers published by the Kraków group of psychiatrists, which have thrown a lot of light on these matters.

A comparison of our observations with the results of laboratory research carried now could be interesting as regards the determination of the threshold at which humans cease to react to psychological stimuli. For there is no doubt that such a cut-off threshold does exist. We observed and monitored it, what’s more, we even developed a special sensitivity to it by watching the behaviour of thousands of fellow–prisoners as they crossed the mysterious barrier between existence and non-existence, drawn into the phase of mindless, cabbage–like subsistence before our very eyes. We tried to stop them from moving down this road and keep them from crossing the critical point. At first, it seemed we would have no chance to exert an influence on them. Or would we? Today, when we are opening reanimation wards in our hospitals and artificial cardiac pacemakers are being used on an everyday basis, when we have learned to manage and control the nervous system by stimulating it with external impulses, our thoughts go back to those times of Nazi carnage when thousands of people were being killed and we doctors fumbled around powerlessly, coming up only with gestures, not always aware that our actions could have sparked an impulse to rekindle a life about to be extinguished.

There was someone in Gross-Rosen who plugged the idea of not giving up, even in the face of an apparently inevitable process of dying. It was Professor Mieczysław Michałowicz,³ who kept reminding colleagues confined along with him in the camp of something he often used to say during his university lectures. One of his ideas was that the factors exerting a crucial influence determining a human being were not those lodged in his anatomical build, but his psychological assets and beneficial character traits, which came to the fore chiefly at times of crisis. “I had the reputation of being a gentle examiner,” he used to say, “but it was an exaggeration. I was merely applying my skills to arrive at my own, individual interpretation of natural phenomena rather than trusting to the ability to follow conventional lines of thought and action.”

Most of the prisoners held in Gross-Rosen were Polish, and the prisoners’ hospital in the camp was staffed exclusively by Polish doctors. We were able to take advantage of this exclusivity to set up a coherent and integrated system of health care which all the prisoners, including the privileged group of German inmates, had to reckon with. Professor Michałowicz inaugurated a series of lectures on pathology and psychopathology by giving the opening paper. What made the biggest impression on us were his remarks—which at the time we thought were sensational—on the role of impulses on patients suffering from depression. He asserted that for as long as a patient was still conscious, there was always a chance to bring him out of biological depression by applying the right choice of psychological impulses. But he said we should never forget that the human psyche was not the muscle tissue of the frog’s leg in Luigi Galvani’s experiment. To successfully galvanise the human psychic system one needed to carefully select and coordinate the impulses and choose a good time to apply them.

Watching innumerable, very different cases convinced us he was right. What we saw were individuals starvation and inanition brought to the point when their psychological and mental faculties broke down; what followed was a spell of utter passiveness and indifference to the outside world as well as to the things going on inside them. The Muselmann was on the verge of crossing the threshold of dying. At this stage, an extra slice of bread would not have been able to wrest him out of his apathy, but Professor Michałowicz said that a slice of bread in addition to the right impulse could work miracles in the sense of providing psychological regeneration.

We set up an experiment. Most of the Muselmänner in Block 7 (the “convalescence” block) no longer left their bunks or took any food. One day, we made an arrangement with their block elder to send in our errand boy, who burst into Block 7 and shouted at the top of his voice, “Alert! The Allies are approaching Gross-Rosen!” Paul, the block elder, who was a member of the secret resistance movement in the camp, got the prisoners up on their feet and told the room functionaries to distribute bread “in case there was an evacuation.” And that’s just when the Professor’s recommendations proved to be really successful. Many of the Muselmänner who had been waiting for death by staying put in their beds, jumped to their feet with an extraordinary amount of energy and queued up for the bread. The block functionary managed to keep them disciplined in the atmosphere of the fake alarm, which in any case soon turned out to be quite in line with what really happened. For the next few days, the doctors sent in to Block 7 looked after the Muselmänner we were galvanising, and over a dozen of them came back to life, returning from the bank of the Styx.⁴

So it was a psychological stimulus, a beneficial impulse—that was what the prisoners wanted to survive. That extra to go with the slice of bread—it was the something we prisoner doctors (especially the doctors) had to see that they got. We had better conditions for survival than other categories of prisoners. We also had a smartly managed influence on activities in the rest of the camp’s sections. And without any false modesty, I have to say that most of us were able to put this advantage to good use, not only for ourselves.

There were thousands of highly talented persons—actors, musicians, painters, writers, composers—vegetating in concentration camps... Vast crowds of individuals whose profession rendered them useless for the growth and potential of the Third Reich doomed them to prompt and inexorable death. We took inmates of this type out of their work commandos, looked after them until their physical faculties were restored to a minimum level of efficiency, and then sent them to blocks managed by trusted block and room functionaries. There they could lead a quieter life, while we tried to give them the chance to continue their cultural work at least to a certain extent. That was where Fiszer⁵ drafted a magnificent set of architectural designs for the future city of Warsaw; it was also where Maria Colonna–Walewska⁶ penned probably the finest lines in her poetry; where Morcinek⁷ and Rusinek⁸ wrote some of their works; where some of Ksawery Dunikowski’s⁹ expressive sculptures and drawings saw the light of day; where Nowacki¹⁰ and Chaponeur composed their music; where writers like Wydrzyński,¹¹ Dzieduszycki,¹² and Svatek created their works; the virtuoso Stanisław Włodarski, concertmaster of the Warsaw philharmonic orchestra before the War; and the operetta soloist Dembowski (now performing in the Komedia theatre in Warsaw) continued to give musical performances; where there was a plethora of greater and lesser stars. We needed them to serve as emissaries of beauty, words of wisdom, and elegant verse. They were our embodiment of the omnipresent spirit that neutralises the taste of shame; they were a hand of kindness stretched out to the feeble and faltering. In their interpretation the Requiem sounded like a fanfare of victory.

When the German front was stopped at Stalingrad and the SS men in the camp toned down their arrogance, although they still went into bouts of hysterical rage, we had more leeway to do a lot of things, knowing that the Nazi Germans were in trouble and hoping they would be having even more problems that would take their minds off what the prisoners in their concentration camps were up to. We could afford to be more daring than we were in the first years of the War, serving up optimistic news from the underground press to the prisoners locked up in the camp. Inmates were slowly recovering their psychological balance. We had to garnish their slice of bread, adding colour with a smile, the tart taste of satire, the saucy spice of eroticism, the sweetness of music. We battled against apathy on all fronts. The brokers of word and song got down to business at the double. Not a week passed without a clandestine revue of music and poetry held somewhere in the secret nooks and crannies. Alas, all too often these entertainments took the form of doggerel ballads of the type performed by wandering musicians, with poignant tunes and words reminiscent of backstreet melodrama. The people imprisoned in concentration camps came from different social backgrounds and had different tastes, and we had to adjust our artistic creativity to suit their preferences. Yet I have to admit that the doggerel ballads enjoyed a lot of popularity, not only with the low-brow prisoners. But that’s beside the point. What mattered was that we could see a response to the magic conjured up by words. We did not try to explain how it all worked, we only saw that it definitely had a beneficial therapeutic effect.

Our shots which always hit bang on target were the lyrical poems. Emotional tears were not something to be ashamed of. Lyrical verse went hand in hand with lyricism. Some jealously hid their emotions away from the prying eyes and inquisitive tongues of other inmates, while others wore their heart on their sleeve, but lyricism hit the bull’s eye with both the shy guys and the flaunters.

... A flashing swarm of bygone recollections
the memory casts upon the sleepy eyelid-screen.
But how many dreams now lie beyond projection,
unlocked no longer by some magic master key?...

Some listened with eyes closed, others had their eyes open but seemed unaware of their surroundings. They were faraway and lost in thought.

If I could still sit by your piano and watch
your fingers as they flutter across the keys,
maybe I’d escape this deadening hotchpotch,
released from the slumberous disease.

But to wax lyrical, first you had to be more or less properly fed. Food was all a hungry prisoner had on his mind. And it was for him that “The Prayer for Bread”¹³ was composed:

It’s a disgusting lie from those who’ve known no hunger,
a parody of truth—that falsity which says
our bread’s what we were told when we were younger,
and people still call it that in their daily prayers.

Whoever dared to make up such a fabled story
that seems so fine, so pure and pleasing?
Yet if there’s no answer to the famished crowd’s imploring,
Thy Kingdom cometh not, Thou art not drawing near, O Jesus!

Oh no, no longer may we tolerate this life,
Lord, hear the prayers of those whose cries assail Thee!
With mercy look upon this world submerged in strife,
give us our bread this day, and make it daily!

If they were not given their daily bread, if they had no more strength to rise up and live, we had to stand over them in the silence of the Leichenhalle¹⁴ andface up to, and reckon with defeat:

A ray of light falls through a chink in the board,
there’s a fresh body waiting on the bench in the morgue,
eyes shut tight, and lips that never again for awhile
will utter a word or flash a fleeting smile.
Death has glazed the whites of his eyes,
made his mouth gape in a shriek of pain,
darkness cloaks all the coils of his brain,
and the blood in his heart has been drained
in the freeze of death.
Before me lie the ruins of a man
whose time of troubles has passed by,
yet his lips in rigor mortis cry,
we shall all die, shall all die, all die...

And I know not who he was, nor who bred him,
which mother’s birth-pangs sent him
out into the world. Nor whose heart
wept for him at the time of grief,
nor the thoughts he harboured in his head,
nor what’s hidden in the furrows on his face—no,
nothing do I know.

We were certainly a ray of hope for those who were looking forward to a brighter tomorrow. They expected us to help. When there were no more medications, all that we were left with in the struggle to save their lives was the Samaritan’s gesture and the magic of suggestive words, and sometimes they turned out to be assets better than could be hoped for.

When ill-fortune batters people’s heads,
when wolves do howl and prowl, and things look glum,
a squad of white-coat men arrives with meds,
with meds and hope they come.

When finally pain wrests you free of doldrums,
we nameless doctors by your side will stand,
and uplift the bloodstained, human shreds and crumbs,
saved by a Samaritan’s hand.

And when you’re blinded by the evil light,
the Samaritan will keep you plodding on your way,
at eventide he’ll lead and lend his sight,
and help at break of day.

Diverse were the dreams prisoners had. Young ones dreamed of a girl. It was a slippery subject in a society of sex-starved men. Easily turned into vulgar crudity. We had to stop that from happening and counter it with erotic verse unblemished by triviality. And we managed: one of the poems prisoners liked best was “The Moonlight Ballad,” in which the Moon, an expert in matters of love, relates her report to the Sun on what she saw on night watch. The love scenes she describes mimic and personify Nature:

Tonight mists settled on the shadows of ripples
spreading out in rings to join two banks up in ecstasy,
join up in ecstasy, and yes—it’s just impossible to see
exactly what that deep water’s doing there to those shadows,
and what the consequence will be...

Tonight the wind was combing through the boughs of trees,
o’er leaves tingle–touched by the brash masseur,
and the trees, surprised by the sudden shower of delight,
gently trembled, shaking left and right,
whispered that they liked it and wanted more...

Tonight . . ., etc.

The Moon retires for a rest, but imparts her idée fixe to the Sun:

I’m going now
upon the stars to lay my head down,
it’ll be hard to fall asleep
knowing that in some town
whose name I cannot now recall
there’s a girl lying by an open window,
the girl’s as naked as truth,
as dazzling as the tempest,
her eyes with starlight spangle-strewn,
her lips like roses resplendent,
she lies there silently at nightfall,
waiting for someone,
listening for no footsteps, no voices that call
either along the dim or brilliant road.
Out into darkness, silence and empty space, slowly the Moon sails away,
the Sun’s up, and as he crosses the sky his golden heart can swing and sway,
peeping in all the windows, staring in every pair of eyes,
but the girl’s window opens northward—that he can’t realise.

The performances given by Wojciech Dzieduszycki, the camp’s bard, offered an antidote to the vulgar little songs. We all remember his “piquant Top C”:

The narcotic that for me’s the sweetest drug and balm
Is the magic charm and touch of your lips, Madame...

Just as popular were the musical recitals. Usually the music for them was composed by Zdzisław Nowacki and played by Stanisław Włodarski:

Though time flies fast hour by hour,
there’s a touching moment always in my memory,
when in your soft, intimate boudoir
you played that Chopin prelude just for me.

Now only the wind understands
the dire straits I’m in today,
Oh, if only the wind had hands,
he’d play, he’d play, he’d play!

Our nostalgia was hardest to bear in the autumn:

In autumn it’s more doleful,
the sorrow gets more sombre,
conifers creak shaken misty, dank
along the Baltic’s coastal bound.¹⁵
Against the cots that line the Vistula bank
you’ll hear the downpour sound.

Today the news is lonesome,
sleet’s falling slanted, coming down steep,
its hue unwholesome.
November’s sense is
in the wafts of wet straw which sweep
from mulched trees¹⁶ that line the wooden fences.

We could go on giving more examples and quoting more poems. Many were lost irretrievably in the turmoil during transports or else they slipped our memories. But do we need to? I’ve gone well over what’s the proper style for a serious medical journal, anyway. You could even call this article a miniature anthology of concentration camp poetry. And you’d be right. But we doctors encouraged inmates to compose poetry, and even joined in and made a considerable contribution ourselves, seeing that the results of this work provided us with an incentive to continue what turned out to be quite a substantial input into the task of keeping prisoners’ spirits up. The grateful memories cherished by people whom we helped recover their self-confidence are facts that prove how useful this project was; another thing that we proved was what the Professor had said, that a moribund person may be revived by the impulse of an idea perfectly matched to the personality of the individual being galvanised.

The poetry composed in concentration camps deserves to be recorded and published in an anthology. From the point of view of the criteria applied in literary reviews nowadays, many of these works could meet with the charge of keeping to a now outmoded poetic convention. Nonetheless, years ago in the pandemonium of the concentration camps, they offered a fresh breeze to invigorate our vegetative existence in the camp, kept our hopes and spirits up, and their psychological role was what made them invaluable.

Years went by in the camp and our moods changed. The day was coming when history would give us a clear signal to believe in our final victory. Now the poetry disseminated in the secret circles in the camp were verses of victory, enkindling not only our determination to survive, but also our readiness to fight.

Out of the myriad graves pitting fields swamped and blood-soaked,
lifting arms once fallen like yellowed leaves of oak,
you’ll rise and walk out onto the roads,
O, Mother Country, out of thickets tousled tough and twistedly,
like streaks of blood tangled into a torrent now released,
you’re starting out on a new, great era, a royal age of victory,
a Time of Gold, a Glorious Age of Peace!

***

Translated from original article: Jagielski, Stanisław, “Psychiczne „galwanizowanie muzułmana”.” Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim, 1968.

1. German for “political department,” i.e. the special Gestapo and criminal police unit in the concentration camp. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politische_Abteilung^a
2. Muselmann was the term in German concentration camps for the extreme stage of starvation disease, when all the victim’s defence mechanisms degenerated into a state of atrophy, his sense of hunger and pain disappeared, and his body teetered on the edge between life and death.^a
3. MIeczysław Michałowicz arrived in Gross-Rosen on 6 April 1944 on an evacuation transport from Majdanek and was registered as No. 29007. He stayed in Gross-Rosen until its evacuation on 9 February 1945, when he was put on another evacuation transport bound for Flossenbürg. See “Two memorials of Professor Mieczysław Michałowicz,” the English version of the original Polish article, which has been published on this website.^{b, a}
4. In Greek mythology, the Styx was the river marking the boundary between the Earth and the Underworld. “To cross the Styx” was a figurative expression for “to die.”^a
5. Probably Stanisław Fiszer Senior (1898-1944), Polish architect and designer of several acclaimed residential estates in Warsaw. Died in a German POW camp. His better known son Stanisław followed in his father’s footsteps as an architect and later emigrated to France. https://web.archive.org/web/20180117011924/; http://www.pamiecmiasta.pl/pokaz_arch.php?id=213&preview=1^a
6. In pre-war Poland there were at least three women writers who used “Colonna-Walewska” as their pen-name. So Jagielski could have had in mind either Maria Jehanne Wielopolska née Colonna-Walewska (1885-1940?), a Polish writer, controversialist, and literary critic; or possibly Józefina Colonna-Walewska (after her third husband, née Rogosz: 1884-1968), a Polish actress and poet; or perhaps Janina Colonna-Walewska (1883-1956), a Polish novelist and translator. Słownik pseudonimów pisarzy polskich. Vol. IV. Edmund Janowski et al. (Eds.). Ossolineum: 1996. https://rcin.org.pl/Content/61629/PDF/WA248_80318_III-19-967_slownik-pseud-4_o.pdf^a
7. Gustaw Morcinek (1891-1963), Polish writer, journalist and politician associated with Silesia; spent nearly 6 years in German concentration camps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustaw_Morcinek^a
8. Michał Rusinek (1904-2001), Polish writer, playwright, and poet. Fought in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 and thereafter held in German concentration camps incl. Ebensee. https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micha%C5%82_Rusinek_(pisarz)^a
9. Franciszek Xawery Dunikowski (1875-1964), Polish sculptor, arrested in 1940 and sent to Auschwitz. Held for most of the War In German concentration camps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xawery_Dunikowski^a
10. Probably Zdzisław Nowacki (1922-1966), Polish composer and author of song books.^a
11. Andrzej Wydrzyński (1921-1992), Polish writer, journalist, and theatre director. (https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrzej_Wydrzy%C5%84ski^a
12. Wojciech Dzieduszycki (1912-2008), an artist of many talents (acting and stagecraft, vocal performance in opera productions, composing lyrics for cabaret songs etc.). Sentenced to death while in Gross Rosen, but his life was saved, apparently when the Germans discovered he was an opera singer. https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wojciech_Dzieduszycki_(artysta)^a
13. This poem is an allusion to the Lord’s Prayer in the Gospel (Matthew 6: 9-13 and Luke 11: 2-4), which include the requests “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” and “give us this day our daily bread.”^a
14. Leichenhalle, German word for “mortuary.”^a
15. An allusion to Stefan Żeromski’s 1922 novel Wiatr od morza (The Wind from the Sea) on the Polish Pomeranian coast, which is reputed to have been why Żeromski missed getting the Nobel Prize for Literature because of its “anti-German” content. https://culture.pl/en/article/running-through-the-waves-polish-prose-about-the-sea-sea-adventures.^a
16. Another allusion to Poland’s literary heritage, this time to Stanisław Wyspiański 1901 play Wesele (The Wedding; see its English translation by Noel Clark, 1998), the main theme of which are the aspirations of the people of Poland for the restoration of their country’s independence. One of the play’s main characters is Chochoł, “the Straw Man,” a rose tree covered with a mulching mantle to protect it against the winter weather (the play takes place in November). The Straw Man personifies these dormant aspirations as well as the inertia preventing their fulfillment. https://culture.pl/en/work/the-wedding-stanislaw-wyspianski^a

a—notes by Teresa Bałuk-Ulewiczowa, Head Translator for the Medical Review Auschwitz project; b—notes by Dorota Sula, Expert Consultant for the Medical Review Auschwitz project.

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The contents of this site reflect the views held by the authors and do not constitute the official position of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.