When the Nazis rounded up the Hungarian Jews and sent them to Auschwitz, Dr. Nyiszli was one of them. He escaped the gas chamber because he was a doctor with a background in pathology. He worked directly under Dr. Josef Mengele, who was known as "The Angel of Death", performing "scientific research" Mengele requested on the prisoners of Auschwitz. Nyiszli was also the doctor to the Sonderkommando. These were prisoners who worked exclusively in the four crematoriums at Auschwitz and who were routinely executed after four months to guarantee that no information about what was happening there got out. Dr. Nyiszli spent eight months at Auschwitz and watched thousands of people walk to their deaths in the gas chambers in the crematoriums. He did have a happy ending, though. He was liberated and reunited with his wife and daughter after the war was over.
This was a short read, but a sobering one. Dr. Nyiszli tells the stories of how one Jewish girl survived the gas chamber, only to be executed later, how the people were told lies to comfort them before being gassed, that when the crematoriums were to busy to handle a new "shipment", these people were led out to a field to be shot and thrown into a pit of fire. I can't imagine what it was like to see that on a daily basis. This is a good book to remind yourself of the horrors the Jewish, Gypsy and other people deemed "not good enough" suffered at the hands of other men.
