A psychiatrist’s reflections on Auschwitz

Contrary to what many people might have hoped, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, the Japanese bacteriological war—the greatest atrocities of the last War—have not faded over the years. Neither has the burden of responsibility not only on the chief perpetrators, but in a sense on the whole civilised world as well, become any lighter.

Instead of becoming attenuated, the questions “how” and “why” are impinging on the minds of more and more people and still waiting for an answer. How did it happen that such an atrocity could be committed? Why were people able to be so cruel to innocent victims, and how did some victims manage to survive such torture? How have the crimes of the last War affected immediate victims, and those who came in contact with them only indirectly? In other words—have they left an impression on the future of individuals and of humanity as a whole, and if so, what has their effect been? We don’t know whether we will ever manage to fully answer these questions; any attempt to do so comes up against the most profound and relevant issues in human life, which tend to elude an exhaustive answer.

In a certain sense it is the duty of the psychiatrist, who by the very nature of his specialist field is involved with the holistic aspect of human life, to at least try to answer some of these questions. At any rate, these problems have thrown a lot of new light on human nature and have expanded the scope of his work.

The remarks in this article are more like loose comments rather than scientific observations, unlike the research being done by Roman Leśniak, Jan Mitarski, Maria Orwid, Adam Szvmusik, and Aleksander Teutsch, the Cracovian team of psychiatrists working on the psychopathology of Auschwitz.

The American sociologist and psychiatrist Erich Fromm, one of the founders of the cultural school of psychiatry, believes that one of the characteristic features of contemporary civilisation is the dichotomy between the concrete and the abstract. Man is becoming more and more alienated emotionally from his technological environment, which is becoming distant and foreign to him. An example might be the comparison of the old type of warfare, in which belligerents were in much closer contact with their enemies, and the new technological war, in which the enemy is impersonal and unemotional. An aircraft pilot who can kill thousands with no emotional effort by just pressing a button may weep at the death of his pet dog. For him thousands of people are an abstract notion, but his pet is a concrete creature.

The human individual observes the world around him from the point of view of his impact on it. Our nervous system is constructed in a way which makes perception invariably associated with activity. A nerve cell receives diverse impulses of information from its environment by means of numerous dendrites, in order to send a command for action via just one transmission channel, its axon. The reflex arc, the fundamental neural pathway in the human physiology for the transmission of reflexes, consists of an afferent arm and an efferent arm. So there is an inherent blocking device built into the structure of the nervous system limiting the individual’s perception to what lies within its scope for action.

Homo Faber, Man the Maker, shapes his view of the world according to the tool he has to set about its conquest. The world looked different to him when he had a flint or a cudgel than it does now when he is using elaborate technology.

Perhaps one of the biggest dangers attending progress in technology—alongside the many undeniable advantages—is that we see the world in a technological way, through the machinery we are using for its conquest. Many a time the machine becomes more important than the human being and is applied as the criterion to evaluate human achievement. The world around us goes dead, emotionally neutral if not hostile, and we can do whatever we like with it, whatever the current needs. But since it’s the human world, therefore above all a social world, it means this is the way we look at individual people and at society as a whole. The human individual becomes part of a machine which is working more or less efficiently and from time to time needs to be shut down for a rest or repairs. All that you have to do is to give it a dose of chemicals or do a few maintenance jobs to keep that part in working order. Society is a complex machine consisting of millions of cogs (individuals) who can be tuned, controlled, or removed as required. I don’t need to say that this is not a true vision of the human world, nor indeed of the natural world.

A human individual doesn’t want to be considered a cog in a machine. His sense of freedom, a Pavlovian conditioned response, won’t stand for it, and neither will his need for emotional sympathy. Unlike a cog in a machine, a human being can’t be emotionally neutral; he has to love and hate, and to be loved and hated. If we accept the technological outlook on the world we make the human individual feel not only lonely and isolated off, but also threatened; to him the world will look dangerous and hostile.

A feeling of emotional isolation gives rise to a longing for a strong emotional commitment. Hence it’s easy for alienated individuals to integrate in artificial groups subject to a delusional system of this or that kind. Relationships “for life and death” develop, in which the individual is ready to give up everything for the “idea,” and his sense of being a cog in the machine is compensated by the grandeur of the “idea” and the emotional group bond. Without his “companions” he would be just a lonely cog, a nothing. That’s why if the group’s monolithic unity is shattered, or even if its belief in the delusional system is shaken, the result is the almost immediate dissipation of the entire group; the complex social machine breaks down and is split up into useless little cogs and wheels because—like every artificial creation—it’s unstable.

In a “machine society” people lose their sense of accountability, which we know is fundamental for the human individual’s true development. In such a society the individual only carries out orders, he’s a robot, his development is stopped, he’s stunted. His sense of guilt for any crimes he has committed is either reduced or completely wiped off his slate; you can hardly feel guilty for having hurt a thing—you can’t hurt a cog in a machine—neither can you feel guilty if you’re a robot yourself, blindly carrying out orders. However, not feeling guilty doesn’t make you any less accountabble.

I’m certainly not trying to diminish the guilt of the war criminals, though their notorious lack of a sense of guilt is quite remarkable; neither am I trying to explain the mechanism of how such crimes arise (it’s a very complex matter and still not fully clarified). All I am trying to do is to draw attention to the danger of criminal behaviour, often even mindless criminality, inherent in the technological approach to society and the human individual. Of course we should not confuse the technological worldview with technological progress; the former may be dangerous, the latter is invariably good.

In his memoirs of his sojourn as a Muselmann in “the waiting room to the gas” (Block Seven), Adolf Gawalewicz presents his opinion that only the small handful of those “who believed in the impossible, in the unlikely,” that they would manage “to come out alive” managed to survive and leave Block Number 7 safe and sound. “Of course, hope on its own was not enough; you had to take action, within the small and very unpromising potential you had to manage your conduct. You had to be an active Muselmann.” Gawalewicz gives a dramatic example to illustrate how important the expression “I want to” was for surviving the camp. “Anyone who thought any otherwise did not survive. One night a companion of mine still physically fit confided, ‘I’ve had enough; this is hopeless; I don’t want to live any longer.’ Indeed, a few hours later we carried his body out and put it next to the wall.”

We should not forget that until recently, still in the period between the World Wars, most psychiatrists and psychologists said there was no such thing as free will. Yet in a situation which must have been the maximum possible enslavement of the human being and abuse of his dignity, an individual’s ability to choose and his will to survive played a crucial role.

And it might seem paradoxical that those who were in an extreme situation were still able to say, “I want to,” or “I don’t want to;” while their oppressors, who were in an incomparably better situation, could not say it. The people who were truly alive in the concentration camp were those who were on the brink of death, whereas those with a skull‑and‑crossbones badge on their caps¹ were robots, not living humans.

Despite the prolific literature on the concentration camps, anyone who is not a survivor himself will not be able to imagine what went on there. The ordeals which made up every prisoner’s day and night surpass the bounds of the human imagination. This is an issue which has intrigued our best writers as well. Zofia Nałkowska, for instance, was a member of the International Commission for the Investigation of the Nazi German Crimes², and visited former camps and sites of torture, talking to survivors and witnesses of the atrocities. She recorded a selection of her observations in Medaliony, a first‑rate, disturbing documentary giving a synopsis of the Nazi German atrocities and considered an outstanding contribution to the concentration camp literature (1946).³ Nałkowska knew that what inmates went through in the Nazi German concentration camps and prisons could not be put into words. Someone who attempts to gauge the vast extent of these crimes retrospectively finds it hard to comprehend their nature at all. In Medaliony Nałkowska wrote, “Reality is bearable, because we haven’t yet experienced all of it. Or we haven’t experienced it all at the same time. It reaches us in fragments of events, in snippets of accounts. It’s only once we start thinking about it that we try to put it altogether, immobilise it, and comprehend it.”⁴

It was a different world, as different as the world of someone suffering from psychosis. On arrival in a concentration camp many inmates went through a condition of acute derealisation (Teutsch; Cohen). What they saw seemed as unreal as a nightmare, it was so different from the ordinary human world. “None of this can be real, I thought to myself, it’s like the dream of a dream…”(Gawalewicz).

Every psychosis, especially of the schizophrenic type, leaves its aftereffects. A victim who survives its attack is a different person from what he was before. But its effect doesn’t always have to be bad; sometimes the patient may change for the better, as in schizophrenia paradoxalis socialiter fausta (schizophrenia which paradoxically is favourable from the social point of view, as Professor Brzezicki called it). Likewise concentration camp survivors came out different persons; they found it difficult to adjust to ordinary life (Orwid). Their assessment of other people, hierarchy of values, aim in life, and even their personality changed, at least for a time (Leśniak). On the other hand the camp had tested their ability to persevere. Every individual has a streak of heroism in him, a desire to test and prove himself, how much he can put up with, what he is capable of doing. Maybe that’s why in so‑called primitive cultures young men are put through “ordeals,” and only once they pass the test successfully do they become members of the group of mature men. Survivors of the concentration camps went through the ordeal successfully, so maybe that is why they feel alienated from ordinary people and their tendency to seek group companionship exclusively among other survivors, the only ones with a chance to understand other survivors (Orwid).

The papers published in this volume of Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim throw some light on survivors’ camp and post‑camp experiences (Teutsch, Leśniak, Orwid, and Szymusik). Notwithstanding the thoroughness of this research and its interpretation, the picture they give is only fragmentary, showing that we should consider work of this type far from finished but only just started.

Translated from the original article: Kępiński, A. “Oświęcimskie refleksje psychiatry.” Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim, 1964.

Notes
1. The skull and crossbones were part of the SS badge.
2. In fact the Commission’s original name was Główna Komisja Badania Zbrodni Niemieckich w Polsce (the Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland), after a short spell of joint Polish‑Soviet work. After several changes to its name, in 1991 the newly founded IPN (Polish Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, Institute of National Remembrance) took over its duties.
3. English translation Medallions, Northwestern Univ. Press, 2000; Translated by Diana Kuprel.
4. Translation of this passage by Teresa Bałuk-Ulewiczowa.