A review by stumpnugget
Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account by Miklós Nyiszli

5.0

What is the point of dwelling on the subject? Why rake over cold ashes, stir up old animosities? Would it not be better to forgive and forget, turn toward the future rather than look back in anger on the fading past? Fair questions indeed. The answer comes from the victims themselves. “These victims of Nazi atrocities,” Meyer Levin once wrote, “hid fragmentary records of their experience, they scratched words on walls, they died hoping the world would some day know, not in statistics but in empathy. We are charged to listen.”

This is definitely one of my favorite holocaust memoirs, and maybe one of my favorite books, that I've read. It's so moving because it is written from such a profoundly unique perspective, that of a doctor forced to serve under the infamous Dr. Mengele. From that vantage point Nyiszli saw things that very few people have ever seen, and even fewer have lived to tell about.