Miklós NyiszliCritiques

Barnes and Noble had this on sale as a nookbook for $1.99, so I bought it and opened it up on my nook, just intending to read a few pages. It was hard to put down. At just 194 pages, it was a relatively quick read and could easily be read in one sitting. This book may be just 194 pages, but they are 194 of the most horrifying pages I have ever read. I can't really review this book, I can just recommend that you read it once.

Horrifying. Beyond belief. I am going to Auschwitz next month, so am doing my reading. Everything I have ever read about it defies comprehension. This was no different.

A remarkable book, about the horrors that went on inside the Auschwitz prison camp. Dr. Nyiszli saw many things while a doctor working under Dr. Mengele, forced to perform useless autopsies those who died in the camp. He became a witness to the work of what went on inside the camp offices. This should be a book that is read with other books on the Holocaust to show what went on in these camps.

264-1

A fast and horrifying read. Different from other holocaust accounts because it is a rare look on the side of the wire you didn't come back from.

Heartbreaking

Another account of this man's experience during the holocaust. So many events are the same and it is very interesting to read others accounts. Difficult to read as the author is very honest and open.

A Jewish medical doctor working with Mengele in a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz. Ai, yi, yi. Just simply excellent.

Horrifying. Hard to read without taking breaks. I've read both historical fiction and true accounts about the horrors of Hitler's regime. It's hard to separate the fact from fiction. All of it too surreal and terrible to comprehend.

è un saggio storico in forma di libro autobiografico scritto dal medico di nazionalità ebraica Miklós Nyiszli poco dopo la fine della seconda guerra mondiale, con l'intento di raccontare le atrocità a cui aveva assistito da deportato all'interno del campo di Auschwitz. Pietra miliare della letteratura e della testimonianza concentrazionaria, il libro fu pubblicato per la prima volta in lingua ungherese nel 1946 e successivamente ha avuto traduzioni in varie lingue. (fonte: Wikipedia)

Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account / Miklos Nyiszli
3.5 stars

Miklos Nysizli was a Hungarian Jew taken to Auschwitz with his wife and daughter. He was a doctor and was taken on to work in the crematoriums, primarily doing autopsies. Most of the Jews who worked in the crematoriums were killed, but luckily for Nyiszli, he made it through.

I imagine when this book was originally published, in 1960, it was quite shocking. It still is, but I’ve read so much about the Holocaust, that there wasn’t a lot new, though there was some. I feel badly that I’m not rating it higher. I didn’t feel as much of an emotional connection (usually) as I thought I might. I’m not sure if it was written in a more detached way; both as a doctor and just trying to force himself to get through it all to survive, I’m sure he had to do his best to try to detach. He did say at the start of the book that he is a doctor, not a writer, so maybe that was part of it, as well (though it was definitely “readable”). Still, a worthwhile read, for sure.½

Oh, wow... definitely the most horrifying book concerning the Holocaust that I've read.

I bought this book while visiting Auschwitz, and this book was recommended by the on-site bookshop salesgirl. This is quite a harrowing book to read, and I found it hard to read it for a prolonged period, especially the parts about the atrocities the doctor was forced to commit.

Horrifying reading. The chapter about the girl buried beneath a stack of bodies who survives is most disturbing.

Dr. Myklos Nyiszli is chosen by Dr. Mengele for a much more horrific fate. He is to help with "scientific research" on his fellow inmates. Nyiszli is named Mengele's personal research pathologist. He also was the doctor for the Sonderkommando, those Jewish prisoners who were working in the crematoriums. The Sonderkommando were executed every four months so they could not tell what was going on in the camp. This eye witness account is another horrifying story of what the Jewish people went through during this dark time in history.

Interesting to read the same incident from different angles! Krystyna Zywulska mentioned in her book about the Sonderkommando rebellion and Miklos Nyiszli also documented the event albeit from a different angle. Both survivors belong to the exceptions rather than the norm. The fact that they lived to tell their stories means that they had some way of gaining favor from the SS men, however, they did provide a very harrowing depiction of the fates of other concentration camp prisoners.

Dr. Miklos Nyiszli was sent to Auschwitz when the Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944. As a Jew he was a condemned man. As a medical doctor he was useful so was spared from death and assigned a worse fate: to assist in performing "scientific research" on his fellow inmates under the direct supervision of Dr. Mengele himself. Somehow Dr. Miklos survived Auschwitz and wrote this short memoir of his time there.

This was an interesting read about a difficult subject. The writing is surprisingly accessible and Dr. Nyiszli's story engaging, though I found I had to read it in small chunks due to the subject matter. Dr. Nyiszli explains at the beginning of the book that he writes this as a doctor from a doctor's perspective so there is a bit of a clinical feel to it which lessens the emotional impact to a degree. I wonder if this is how the doctor protected himself to keep his own sanity while relating his story of the horrors he lived through. Dr. Nyiszli was a pathologist and performed many autopsies after the prisoners were killed. While he does describe some of the methods of death at the Nazi's the bulk of the atrocities committed are absent from this text. Still it's an important book and worth reading for a different perspective of someone's time at Auschwitz.

I picked up this book to read, along with a book of other WWII related books, for free at an auction in November. My reading has tapered off a bit, so I decided I wanted to read a book for me, and not a review book, as a "treat". My TBR pile is huge, as with everyone else's, but what the heck, right?

This book is another one of those books that you need to read somewhat slowly, in order to think about what you are reading. I've read a few books about Auschwitz, and I know this to be true (for me, personally) about all of them.

I can't say I LOVED this book, because how can one love a book about things so horrific? But one needs to read it, espcially the younger generations, for whom WWII was "ancient times".

On the one hand, this book was totally as expected: a description of the often-told horrors of Auschwitz by in inside witness. And yet it manages to shock again, not just through the physical cruelty described herein, but with the psychologically dehumanising effects of the extermination programme. People in this camp were resigned to their eventual deaths, including the Sonderkommandos (jews who worked in the gas chambers and the cremation ovens) who knew that they would survive four months at most. And yet only one of the 14 Sonderkommandos decided to go down fighting (and to destroy one of the four crematoria in the process). The author continues to perform autopsies for Dr. Mengele on sets of twins that were murdered especially for this purpose, as if he were working "in the pathology university faculty of a middle-sized town". I was struck by little details that illustrate this madness: the prisoners inthe Sonderkommando would trade food for 140 gramme gold coins (melted from gold tooth fillings extracted from the gassed corpses),since that was the only currency they could have access to. Nazis would talk to a Jew (especially a useful jew like the expert pathologist who wrote this book), but would never greet him when arriving or leaving - because they didn't deserve to be further acknowledged. Not a fun read, but one I will remember for a long time.

Take nothing for granted!

A sad book. The foreword is very strong. After and even while reading this book I had many questions. Weird because I have read so many books about this horrible war and about the people that survived the camps but this was the first time I started to wonder and think. Maybe because of the total of numbers Nyiszli mentioned in this book and that made me realize how many people were living in Auschwitz. Some of those questions were answered by the foreword written not by the author but by Bettelheim.

I enjoyed this book a lot, to the extent you can "enjoy" a book about the Holocaust. Dr. Nyiszli was in a very, very unique position as a prisoner at Auschwitz. As an accomplished doctor with a great deal of experience in dissection, he was afforded comparatively luxurious accommodations at Auschwitz so that he could assist Dr. Josef Mengele in his medical "research." He worked in the crematoriums, so he witnessed the masses of people being led to the gas chambers, the firing squads, and so-called medical research on living subjects, particularly twins. This book is a chronological account of his time at Auschwitz.

If you are looking for a lot of details on Nazi medical research, you really won't find it here. It's more a personal account of how Dr. Nyiszli used his academic and practical background to survive, and how he was largely spared from physical abuse but could not avoid psychological horrors. He does talk about his dissections and what he learned about Nazi experiments, but the detail is more in his observations about life as a crematorium worker.

There is a long introduction to this book that is a rambling philosophical treatise on why concentration camp prisoners behaved the way they sometimes did. Why they willingly got on trains to go to the camps, why they didn't fight, etc, etc. I read a little bit of this section and ended up skipping it. I found that the facts of the book spoke for themselves, and that we can understand the "whys" by trying to conceive of the horrors that the prisoners faced for years.

Overall, a horrifying but necessary read.

The writing style is very bare-bones, pared down, and concise. Nyiszli recounts his experiences in a detached, almost emotionless-seeming way, and this approach serves to highlight the atrocities and horror of the concentration camps by dint of the very factual, almost scientific approach. It's a must-read for everyone.

Eyewitness journal from a doctor in the camp. Impressive book . The only thing I did not like was the Introduction of the book written by another author.

Jewish doctor account of the happenings in Auschwitz. Shocking true story 1946.

This was sort of an odd book. It felt difficult to discern how much time was really passing in book-time, and I never felt particularly connected to the story, which is a horrific one about a Jewish doctor who was assigned to work with Joseph Mengele at Auschwitz. Mengele's weirder work was not referenced, and I often got the feeling that atrocities were just part of the job for this doctor. In the last few pages, his prose got a bit purple, and there finally seemed to be a bit of outrage on his part, but the feeling was that it arose because he was almost executed. I can't say that the writing or the story were compelling, but I did feel driven to actually finish the book instead of putting it down.