Miklos Nyiszli Analysis

The infamous death camp Auschwitz, that was the place where so many lives were lost, withholds many of its secrets of what happened to the people that didn’t die from the gas chambers. In the book, Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account, the author Miklos Nyiszli is a physician, and former prisoner of the German death camp. Nyiszli’s story begins on a train, the train that is on its way to Auschwitz. After arriving at the camp, he meets the head physician of the camp Dr. Josef Mengele, also known as the “Angle of Death”. Nyiszli was chosen by Dr. Mengele to be his personal research pathologist. From this novel I learn about how Nyiszli’s quick decision making kept him alive and how grateful I am for not having to go through what he did. Throughout Nyiszli’s experience, he came a crossed many situation that ended in
At the beginning of Nyiszli’s story, he arrived at the camp in a train car with hundreds of other people with him. When he stepped off the train, he looked around and the first thing that caught his eye was a large brick chimney. At first, he thought it was a factory, but then he saw the enormous flames leaking its way out of the chimney. It made him realize that he was in Germany, the country of crematory ovens. Dr. Mengele came around and asked all doctors that studied in a German university to step forward. Nyiszli turned to his companions and saw that they seemed to be intimidated by Mengele, but Nyiszli said to himself “What did it matter!” he had thought about it already and “[His] mind was made up. [He] broke the ranks and presented [himself]” (Nyiszli 19). Making this decision did indeed save his life but at the cost of seeing horrifying things while working for Dr. Mengele. Another significant event that showed me how his quick decision kept him