Medicine in articulo mortis in Nazi German concentration camps and jails. Part One

How to cite: Niewiarowicz, R. Medicine in articulo mortis in Nazi German concentration camps and jails. Kapera, M., trans. Medical Review – Auschwitz. January 11, 2019. https://www.mp.pl/auschwitz/. Originally published as “Medycyna in articulo mortis w hitlerowskich więzieniach i obozach koncentracyjnych.” Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim. 1973: 179–188.

Author

Roman Niewiarowicz, 1902–1972, actor, director, writer, officer, former prisoner of Gross-Rosen and Leitmeritz, camp number 18650.

Part One

I think I must have read all the books about Nazi German camps and jails and I still cannot understand how it was possible that in spite of the utmost terror, the intended annihilation of prisoners, and the nightmarish living and working conditions, some of them managed to survive. How did they manage to withstand it? By what miracle did that happen? What determined that, against all the odds, a percentage did hold out, although the majority lost their lives there? Was it their lack of imagination or, quite the contrary, their ability to dismiss, at least temporarily, the horrible reality from their minds, to escape into daydreaming? Was it their great physical endurance, their faith? Serendipity, a coincidence, a stroke of good fortune? Or did they simply win in a diabolical game of chance? What was it that decided about the outcome: life or death? Definitely not a miracle!

I am fully convinced that the life and fate of any prisoner were absolutely unique and one cannot view any two of them as identical. There were as many individual worlds as prisoners, and that is the only approach we should adopt. Yet I have used the word “miracle.” Of course, I did not mean any supernatural phenomenon, but a concurrence of fantastically improbable events; if they were in a film script, for instance, they would be received with a shrug of the shoulders and an expression of disbelief. However, such “miraculous” events can sometimes be answers to the questions posed above.

I shall begin by narrating a story I would have never believed to be true if I had not had my own part in it. It happened that a member of our underground organisation, ZWZ [the Union of Armed Struggle], was arrested in Lwów [now Lviv, Ukraine]. He woke up in the middle of the night, startled, blinded by torchlights, under the submachine guns of the Gestapo. He had no time to reach for his own gun. Brought to the Gestapo headquarters, which were accommodated in the former board office of the local power plant on the Pełczyńska, he was tortured beyond the power of human endurance. That Behandlung [treatment] went on for several hours. Finally, he broke down and started to expose his comrades‑in‑arms, giving away names and addresses. The interrogation and the violence stopped, while the gratified Gestapo drove away to comb the city in search of the denounced men. The prisoner gained a brief respite from torment and a few free breaths. But for how long? An hour or two? Because the oppressors were bound to return, blind with fury, having found out that all the names and addresses were a sham, and such people and places never existed. Meanwhile, the two remaining interrogators in the room stuck a cigarette into his mouth to “reward” him. He took a greedy puff, but his thoughts were all frenzy and chaos. It would be impossible to get away with the same trick again. Time went by, minutes becoming quarters. The Gestapo men would be back any moment, which meant even fiercer violence. It was beginning to dawn, and the window frame was becoming clearer and more inviting. It had no grating! On the third floor it was deemed unnecessary. And behind the window, there were no more Gestapo beasts, no pain. The prisoner saw his last and only chance. Freedom waited outside.

In a sudden rush he ventured headlong through the broken glass, from the third floor room onto the street. The Germans would not be able to get him now. He was free. But his death would have been the “normal” outcome, while I mentioned some “miraculous” events. So the man did not die. Falling down, he unwittingly somersaulted, and so his head did not hit the ground. Instead, injuring his lower spine, he landed on a heap of sand that was kept there to be strewn for improved traction on the tram rails running along the street. Unconscious and half‑dead, he was dragged into the Gestapo building again.

For a long while the SS doctors had been trying to revive him and examine him, and at last, he regained consciousness. It turned out that his lower vertebrae were damaged, leaving him paralysed. The Germans had no idea if or when he would get better, nor what kind of improvement could be expected. However, since the man was a potential source of important information for the case, he was not shot dead. Instead, he was put in strict custody in the prison on Łącki Street. His cell, if I remember correctly, was number 160. The person in charge was Natan Lilienfeld, the prison doctor, who had lived in Stanisławów [now Ivano‑Frankivsk, Ukraine] and specialised in gynaecology before he was made to move to the Lwów ghetto and work for the Germans. The Gestapo hoped that after a while they would be able to make the paralysed man testify. For the time being he was left in peace.

At the same time in Warsaw, in the Pawiak jail, four other men were incarcerated in isolation cells of the second ward, which was on the ground floor. The charges were serious and the investigation was under way, so waiting for more evidence, the Germans did not haul the prisoners onto the street to kill them in one of the mass executions that were common acts of retaliation against the inhabitants of Poland’s capital. Several connections were discovered between the Lwów case and the Warsaw case, so the decision was made to investigate both of them more comprehensively in Lwów. Both cases had resulted from a denouncement of many underground soldiers by their former comrade‑in‑arms, who was later tried and executed by the resistance movement. Therefore, overnight, the said four men were driven from Warsaw to the jail on Łącki in Lwów and put up in separate cells so that no communication between them was possible.

And then more “miracles” started to happen. Thanks to help from Dr Lilienfeld, who acted on orders received from resistance fighters, the four men were able to go to cell 160 to see the man who had been paralysed after his third‑floor jump. I do not think I need to explain what risk Lilienfeld incurred by taking such a step. Owing to the pileup of cases and the soaring numbers of prisoners, his intervention was never made known, and the Gestapo in Pełczyńska remained unaware of what was going on in the prison in Łącki, right under their nose. At the same time the jail guards were not much interested in the progress of the investigation as such. Their task was to preserve peace and order in the institution and bring prisoners in for questioning.

Now we are reaching the climax of my story. The men who had been deported from the Pawiak jail were Tadeusz Gumowski and Gustaw Jonscher, both engineers, Roman Niewiarowicz, a theatre director, and Professor Aleksander Domaszewicz, a neurosurgeon. Not an ophthalmologist, not an internist, but in point of fact a neurosurgeon! The sole branch and the particular medical specialisation that could have appeared in the circumstances simply in the injured man’s wildest dreams. In the greatest secrecy, with neither an operating table, X‑ray equipment, nor any assistant staff available, the neurosurgeon’s miracle‑working hands operated on the prisoner in his cell. They saved him. That medical intervention occurred, as a matter of fact, in articulo mortis. I observed the phenomenon much more frequently later, in the concentration camp, where any surgical procedure and any medical help provided by imprisoned Polish doctors was invariably accompanied by the risk of death for prisoners, the physician, and the patient.

Warsaw, aleja Niepodległości, Number 145, is the address of Janusz Pratkowski. He and I returned home from the camp together. It was Janusz who ventured out of the window from the Gestapo building in Lwów, and survived against all the logical odds.

His “treatment” in jail lasted several months. It is hard to say now whether it was thanks to Dr Domaszewicz’s surgery or to the strength of the patient’s system, but the weeks of setting his vertebrae, massage and suchlike resulted in Janusz starting to move around more and more efficiently, of course hiding the fact from the SS men, so whenever he exercised, one of his cellmates had to stand up with his back against the spyhole. When the Lwów jails became inundated with subsequent waves of prisoners, evacuated from the east while the Germans were retreating before the Soviet offensive, the inmates detained in the prison on Łącki were suddenly dispatched to the Gross‑Rosen concentration camp. The files of our case, now dropped, were packed and sent to Berlin so that the investigation might continue and end up in a sentence. A new game began, in which our lives were at stake. We wondered if the Red Army would manage to march across the entire Polish territory and reach Gross‑Rosen, near Breslau [now Wrocław, Poland], before the Gestapo found the time to open up the box holding the critical files, kept in the German capital, which was under constant Allied bombing. As it turned out, the Gestapo failed to do that, but we were detained in the camp.

Yet I remember one more scene from the jail in Lwów, an unforgettable memory. One day we were being escorted to the washroom, a place where illicit messages were secretly received and handed over. As usual, we formed a single file, keeping a distance of three metres from the man in front, with the SS men watching us closely. We had to cross the inner yard and go down the corridors of Building Two, as it was called. Every corner was guarded by an SS man with a machine gun. I was preceded by Professor Domaszewicz and followed by Tadek Gumowski and other prisoners. All at once, an SS man keeping guard in an alcove in front of us gave Professor Domaszewicz a deranged look, went down on his knees, and began to kiss his hands. This scene, with an SS man kneeling in front of a Polish prisoner and kissing his hands, came to us as a complete shock. To Professor Domaszewicz too. Before another SS man appeared from around the corner, however, the genuflecting guard was standing at attention.

We were unable to comprehend what we had witnessed. An unexpected sign of madness, was the German demented? It was beyond our grasp. We understood the situation only a few days later, when the SS man arrived at our cell, summoned Professor Domaszewicz, and promised to furnish him with any goods he might need. Apparently, the German was an ex‑patient, one of the settlers who had lived in the vicinity of Lwów. Before the war, he was diagnosed with a brain tumour. In practice, the man was doomed to die and suffered terrible pain. When brought to the neurosurgical ward, he was operated on by Domaszewicz, and his life was saved. So the SS man, seeing his benefactor and saviour, simply forgot himself and, ignoring the circumstances, greeted him in the way his simple mind dictated. For many weeks, until he was relocated, he used to bring letters from Domaszewicz’s wife and the medicines the doctor needed. Professor Domaszewicz survived the war and died later, in Poland.

Also, Dr Lilienfeld’s story can be ranked among the most wondrous coincidences. The Germans found him in the Jewish ghetto and appointed him jail doctor, so he was responsible for the wellbeing of the prisoners. To describe his duties as such was ludicrous and ironic, but nevertheless, it was all absolutely pursuant to Nazi German regulations and laws. Dr Lilienfeld’s wife went into hiding before the Jews were forced to move into the ghetto, and Lilienfeld proved to be a real Polish patriot.

Having established contact with him, our underground organisation gained an invaluable agent in the Lwów jail. Although his leeway was narrow, Lilienfeld was a devoted and kind carer of the prisoners, who were brutally tortured during interrogations. He kept his position thanks to the fact that he treated SS men who had contracted venereal diseases. Such an “offence” was frequently punished by relocation to the eastern front, as soon as the treatment was over. Therefore, Dr Lilienfeld’s treatments were protracted and thanks to them he was not shot by his German patients when the Lwów jail was being evacuated; instead, the SS men virtually smuggled him to Kraków, having their best interests at heart.

Lilienfeld was the person who delivered our typhus vaccines from Professor Rudolf Weigl’s institute. It must be said that it was the vaccine of triple strength, used to immunise Weigl’s collaborators who handled infected lice. As we were vaccinated too, many of us managed to survive typhus epidemics in the camp, although the living conditions were dramatic. Lilienfeld had to immunise us in the greatest secrecy, which was not a simple task, as he had to give us injections after the evening roll call, when the lights were out, having presented a good pretext to enter the cells. Additionally, the fortified vaccine also had strong side effects, such as high temperature, while it was always necessary to be on the lookout and have a ready excuse for any action under the vigilant eye of the SS men guarding the cells and patrolling the corridors.

I remember that period also because of the commendable attitude of Bronisława Marszałkowa, a woman officer in the German‑supervised Polish police (called the Blue Police). My underground organisation commissioned her to work for the Germans as a guard in the women’s jail ward on Łącki. Constantly risking her life, she smuggled the majority of our illicit messages in and out of the jail, including the communications between the prisoners and the Polish underground government. She managed to win the trust of her German supervisors and was one of the Polish resistance’s best contacts in that jail. She knew perfectly well that SS men loved to drink, so whenever they ceased to be fully alert in the night hours, she brought letters and medicines also to the men’s ward, collecting our messages and reports on the interrogations and proceedings. She performed extremely dangerous tasks and was utterly reliable. Of course, from time to time, as stipulated by the German authorities, she was subjected to a routine body search when entering or leaving the jail. Interestingly, it never occurred to the Germans that all the illicit messages travelled in the cartridges of her service gun, which she had previously emptied and then resealed. Bronisława Marszałkowa was a very brave and patriotically‑minded woman. Luckily, she survived the war. I met her after my return to Kraków. She and Dr Lilienfeld were an ideal team.

Dr Lilienfeld lived on to see the liberation, too. After the war, he was reunited with his wife abroad, and spent the rest of his life there. His later wartime experience could form an entire chapter describing the “miracles” in our lives. Lilienfeld was cursed with an unmistakeably Semitic appearance, so he could neither escape from the ghetto nor live incognito. As I have said, when the Lwów jail was evacuated, he accompanied his SS patients to Kraków. For some time he was detained in the Montelupich jail, from where, in the chaos of further evacuation as the Soviets were approaching, he was put in the transport of prisoners who were deported, of all places, to Gross‑Rosen. That was another improbable occurrence, for I had last seen him in jail in Lwów, bidding him a fond farewell almost a year earlier. Unexpectedly, I met him again as a Gross‑Rosen prisoner, when I was well acquainted with the life of the camp. One day, after the roll call, a message was delivered to my block: Dr Lilienfeld was in the crowd of Kraków arrivals who had been sent to the roll call square and were being kept out there. He asked me to come to his rescue after some Polish orderlies informed him I was alive and in the camp.

Right then I was helpless because after the roll call no one was allowed to leave his block. However, I knew that the prisoners from the new transport were to be kept out in the square until the morning, and for a while the risk was not so immediate. What was bound to be really risky was the registration process of the arrivals, during which the prisoners had to strip before they were given their camp gear. For a long time they stood naked in front of the SS men. And at the time there was not a single Jewish prisoner in the main camp of Gross‑Rosen. There were some in the far‑off sub‑camps and Kommandos, but none in the main camp. And then there was Lilienfeld’s appearance. The discovery of his ethnicity was sure to provoke an outburst of extreme violence and, most likely, to bring about a terrible death. So promptly after the morning roll call, I went with my best friend Janusz Pratkowski, who had been saved after his suicidal jump in Lwów, to the camp’s administrative office to talk to the Polish staff and Polish doctors, who were always present when a new transport arrived, telling them about Lilienfeld and his achievements, as favourably as he deserved. Anyway, they had already heard about his work in the Lwów jail both from us and many other prisoners from Lwów.

The Polish resistance movement in the camp, especially the doctors, accomplished their mission with flying colours. Drs Jan Nowak, Antoni Mianowski, Ludwik Fischer, and others (for instance the orderly Roman Stasiak), took advantage of the turmoil that accompanied the appearance of any new transport, and managed to carry Lilienfeld into the camp on a stretcher under a pile of clothes, thus preventing him from undergoing registration. They wanted to save him as their fellow‑prisoner, a colleague, and a Pole. They succeeded. Lilienfeld stayed in hiding in the hospital blocks, and we were able to meet. Some events in the camp were neither discussed nor commented upon. They simply happened, and this was such a case.

Soon after that evacuation transports were being dispatched westwards. Lilienfeld was secretly put on one of them, and for a long time we did not know what became of him. After the war he wrote to me that he arrived in Bergen‑Belsen, where he caught typhus. The Swedish Red Cross took him out of the camp half‑dead. When the war was over, he recuperated and discovered his wife’s whereabouts; she was not living in Poland anymore. As requested, I sent him some Polish books, and he had asked specifically for “Prus, Sienkiewicz, and Żeromski.” He wrote later “they were bringing him Poland.” Dear Natan, with red and some grey hair, “of blessed memory,” as we used to say. Doubly blessed! Dr Lilienfeld died some time ago in Tel Aviv, where he had worked as a social security doctor.

His story was by no means exceptional. What was unique was the role doctors played in the German jails and camps. Imprisonment sometimes activated the lowest, even the most predatory human instincts. Perhaps that struggle to survive and live on may justify the fact that some people departed from the generally binding ethical standards and showed no such integrity, or whatever we call the attitude that we normally expect in interpersonal relations. There were such people among doctors too, since humans are never completely good or bad. But those singular, individual examples of depravity did not ruin the general opinion about the medical profession. The black characters were hardly visible in the multitude of the righteous.

What is more, the eyes of tens of thousands of prisoners were fixed on the doctors, who were the only source of support in sight, the only refuge where prisoners could seek assistance. The doctors worked under the pressure of a hitherto never and nowhere encountered responsibility for their doings. When all else had failed, a Polish doctor was the prisoner’s last resort. Those who felt quite apprehensive or insecure in the face of the constant threat of death learned fortitude by watching their braver colleagues. A couple of doctors, just a few of them, or even—as happened in the large camps—about a dozen of them, to all those tens of thousands of prisoners, who were sick, injured, utterly exhausted, all urgently in need of medical treatment and care: such were the proportions. Yet usually what the doctors had were the best intentions in the world, coupled with the terrible awareness of what was needed and just their two, empty hands. And all around the mass of misery rotting and perishing. You did not die in a concentration camp, you perished, you dropped dead, you died like a dog. That was what the new makers of the world wanted you to do.

End of Part One

Translated from the original article: Niewiarowicz R., Medycyna in articulo mortis w hitlerowskich więzieniach i obozach koncentracyjnych. Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim, 1973.

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