Defying Death in Auschwitz (The Written Testimonies of Prisoner-Doctors)

Dr Jacques Lewin, the author’s father and a medical researcher at the Paris Faculty of Medicine, was deported to Auschwitz on 27 March 1942 in the first convoy from Western Europe. He survived almost three years in Auschwitz and later Ebensee, but only rarely spoke of what he experienced. To reconstruct the work and conditions of the Auschwitz prisoner-doctors, the author draws on the written testimonies of 60 physicians, women and men deported from across Nazi-occupied Europe.
This book presents the results of that investigation into life and medical work in the Auschwitz ‘hospitals’ and laboratories, and the ethical problems faced by doctors who tried to treat and save fellow prisoners under coercion, with severe shortages of medicine and equipment. It first considers the range and purposes of prisoner-doctor writings, including early accounts composed soon after liberation to inform the public and the medical profession. It then analyses recurring themes in later testimonies, including the organisation of prisoners’ hospitals, attempts to save lives, insoluble dilemmas, criminal experiments carried out by Nazi doctors, and typhus as a constant threat.