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T
he Nazi German concentration camps have been labeled “the Death Factories.” A normal person finds it hard to understand how an ideology with a project to “cleanse the human race” – by the mass extermination of en-
tire peoples and nations it deemed “unworthy of life” – could have been forged in the human mind. In the Nazi ideology this category included us – Poles and other Slavs, Jews, Roma, persons with genetic disorders, psychiatric patients, etc. The entire system of the Third Reich, including distinguished members of its scientific community, was employed to accomplish this aim. On the staff of the Death Factories there were also medical practitioners, whose job it was to see that the slaughter of millions of human beings was carried out as efficiently as possible. The twentieth century, with its two World Wars, the Nazi extermination camps and the Soviet gulags, has left its mark in European and world history as an age of absolute moral disaster – an age of the vanquished and the victors. In the camps human dignity was trampled underfoot and the individual was turned into a number in the camp register. It is no coincidence that there is an inherent connection between concentra-
tion camps and the question of death and dying. Of all the traumatic experiences the inmates faced the deepest was being under a permanent threat of death – the death of fellow‑prisoners and their own death. They were cast into the atmosphere of death by the “welcome ritual” given prisoners on arrival, which told them that the only way out of the camp was through the crematorium chimney. We don’t know what percentage of concentration camp prisoners survived, and many who did died shortly after their liberation. Today only a handful are left of those who say that they are lucky to be alive. Most of them can neither understand nor explain how they managed to survive. For the rest of their lives they will bear the stigma of camp trauma, they may even pass it down to their children and grandchildren. The Kraków Psychiatric Clinic of the Jagiellonian University Medical College (formerly of the Nicolaus Copernicus Academy of Medicine) has been a haven of15
fering support for Auschwitz survivors. It was here that in the late 1950s the psychiatrist Antoni Kępiński and the pulmonologist Dr. Stanisław Kłodziński set up a service offering medical treatment and care for concentration camp survivors and started research on post‑concentration camp trauma. Over the years their work expanded into a research program continued by younger colleagues, medical practitioners and psychologists employed in the Clinic. An enduring testimonial of their endeavor has been recorded in the scientific journal Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim (English title Medical Review – Auschwitz), 31 volumes of which were published from 1961 to 1991 by the Kraków Medical Society, and edited by Professor Józef Bogusz, President of the Society for many years. Today this collection is one of the most abundant sources of information on the medical, psychological, and social consequences of political oppression inflicted by the invaders in wartime occupied Poland. Most of the contributions came from survivors of various concentration camps, with members of the medical profession among them, such as Antoni Kępiński (a former inmate of Miranda de Ebro), Eugeniusz Brzezicki (a Sachsenhausen survivor), Stanisław Kłodziński and Czesław Kempisty (Auschwitz‑Birkenau survivors), and many more. For many of these authors the publication of their recollections served as a starting point for the writing of books. This book is based on survivors’ statements and their bona fide accounts of the concentration camp experience. Dr. Jadwiga Laska, the book’s reviewer, considered it a Holocaust record and recommended it for translation into many languages. Unfortunately, due to the language barrier, only a small fraction of these publications has been accessible to an international readership. Thanks to our co‑operation with the Hamburg Institute for Social Research and its director, Professor Dr. Jan Philipp Reemtsma, we issued a two‑volume German‑language anthology of contributions selected from Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim (1987, 1994, 1995), entitled Die Auschwitz‑Hefte and translated and edited by Jochen August. In 2005, in co‑operation with the Auschwitz‑Birkenau Museum’s publishing department, we published a smaller volume in English entitled Auschwitz Survivors: Clinical‑Psy‑ chiatric Studies (with a second, revised and extended edition in 2013), for which it was my honor to serve as editor. What makes Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim such an invaluable resource is the fact that its articles are made up of testimonials given by survivors (chiefly of 16
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Auschwitz‑Birkenau) and studies based on these materials. Thousands of survivors have been in touch with our Clinic, coming to us for medical and psychological assistance. Their accounts of their experience of the concentration camps have made them co‑authors of our publications. I had the privilege of joining this research already at the beginning of my professional career, moreover under the guidance of my preceptor Antoni Kępiński, and Dr. Stanisław Kłodziński and Jan Masłowski, the editors of Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim. I cannot rule out that one of the reasons why I chose such a difficult subject area for my scholarly and professional activities was the experience of my own childhood, which coincided with the war years under foreign occupation. From the very outset of my work as a psychiatrist I have always been fascinated by the way humans behave in situations of extreme hardship. Survivors’ experiences provided me with a veritable mine of information on this subject. Thanks to Dr. Kłodziński’s indefatigable efforts we managed to persuade many survivors to give oral or written accounts relating to subjects in our research interests. Dr. Kłodziński’s chief aim was to collect documentary material, and my task was to conduct a scientific analysis of these texts and prepare them for publication. The result was a series of papers first published in Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim. This book comprises four enquiries into life and death in concentration camps. Its title, The Rhythm of Death, is a reference to Antoni Kępiński’s renowned book Rytm życia (The Rhythm of Life),1 in which he first published his Auschwitz essays. My four essays outline the complex issues involved in the psychology of the individual condemned to die, with all the diverse states of his body, mind and spirit and the various defense mechanisms available to him. The four chapters, “Mysterium tremendum,”2 “Suicide,”3 “The heroic trend,”4 and finally a chapter on the concentration camp Muselmann,5 take the reader 1
Kępiński, A. 1972. Rytm życia. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie.
2
Ryn, Z., and S. Kłodziński. 1982. “Śmierć i umieranie w obozie koncentracyjnym.” Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim: 56–90.
3
Ryn, Z., and S. Kłodziński. 1976. “Z problematyki samobójstw w hitlerowskich obozach Koncentracyjnych.” Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim: 25–46.
4
Ryn, Z., and S. Kłodziński. 1986. “Postawy i czyny heroiczne w obozach koncentracyjnych.” Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim: 28–45.
5
Ryn, Z., and S. Kłodziński.1983. “Na granicy życia i śmierci. Studium obozowego muzułmaństwa.” Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim: 27–73.
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into the reality of the Death Factories, in which the human person was reduced to the raw material ready for processing into the end‑product, the concentration camp Muselmann – a human being suspended on the border between life and death. In my third chapter I reconstruct the circumstances attending the heroic death of Father Maximilian Kolbe, now a canonized Roman Catholic saint who was killed in Auschwitz. Eye‑witness accounts tell us that in the Hell on Earth of concentration camps there were also situations in which individuals attained to the very peak of dignity and humanity. During a retreat he delivered in the Vatican Karol Wojtyła, Archbishop of Kraków, mentioned Father Kolbe’s death and said, The concentration camps were and always will be a true symbol of Hell on Earth. In them the greatest evil that humans have done to their fellow humans found its expression. In one of them – Auschwitz – on August 14, 1941 Father Maximilian Kolbe was dying. The whole camp knew that he was going to his death voluntarily, giving his own life for one of his brethren. This extraordinary manifestation of love brought into the camp a wave of undaunted, indestructible goodness, a sense of salvation – a human being perished, but humaneness was saved.5
Antoni Kępiński wrote that the world could still not fathom and get over what had happened in the concentration camps, so his psychiatric prognosis for survival may be applied to the reality in them. If the humans of the future are to survive they will have to be able to reconcile two opposing attitudes – that of the cosmonaut with that of the artist. That’s what it was like in the concentration camps. In that cosmically inhumane world those who survived were the ones who were able to adopt either the abstract attitude of the artist, or the altruistic attitude. Even if they died, their endeavor lives on in human memory. Zdzisław Jan Ryn, MD, PhD
5
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Translated from the original Polish edition of Wojtyła K. 1980. Znak sprzeciwu [Sign of Contradic‑ tion], Paris: Éditions du Dialogue, 57.
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