Motley Moose – Archive

Since 2008 – Progress Through Politics

Inauguration Day, Miklos Nyiszli and History…

Crossposted at MyDD

Early in the morning today, my colleague send an email asking me to reschedule one of our weekly project meeting scheduled from 11 am on Tuesday to another time. Howard, my colleague, wanted to watch the Inauguration of Barack Obama's Presidency. It took me a second to realize that January 20th is finally right here. And it has even touched my colleague, who is a quintessential forgetful physicist. There is something happening in this country that I haven't been able to put my hands on yet. Our country is in dire straits. Most of us desperately want him to succeed.  People have tremendous expectation from Obama's administration. Thus far, the good man has shown that he can keep his head on his shoulders despite all the flattery, headwinds, difficult times et al.  Good Luck President Obama, you need all the support you can get, we need all the support that we can give you.. This is truly a historical day..

Lately  I've been remembering Dr. Miklos Nyiszli. Eons ago, when I was in middle school, one day Dad handed me a book “Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account”. Till this day I haven't read a more moving account of the worse of human barbarism. We are currently amidst a difficult time with some of us struggling to make our ends meet. But all of our current difficulties pale in comparison with what Dr. Nyiszli faced.  A Jewish medical doctor, Dr Miklos Nyiszli was spared death to perform autopsies and 'scientific research' on his fellow inmates at Auschwitz under the supervision of infamous Angel of Death Josef Mengele. He survived Auschwitz to give us a horrifying detailed account of what actually happened at Auschwitz. Dr. Nyiszli actually found out the range of Mengele's barbarity through the thousands of autospies that he carried out during his imprisonment at Auschwitz.

Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

Of course, Ahmedinejad's fellow Holocaust deniers exist in this country itself. It is hard to imagine that some folks actually fund these idiots..As Voltaire once said.. “It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere.”

http://www.codoh.com/

I was planning to write a separate diary on this. But there you have it…


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/ 13 Comments

13 comments

  2. canadian gal

    which i actually dont mind its quite beautiful – its the cold that’s the bitch.  

    my husband’s grandmother was in auschwitz louis and whenever i think of stains on humanity like mengele i think of a scene in that adam sandler movie where he plays the devil and hitler gets a pineapple shoved up his ass every day.  

    here’s hoping.

  3. Chris Blask

    I feel like writing a diary of some sort to mark the moment, but I don’t know if I have the words for it.

    My niece’s grandmother was in Auschwitz, she has a tattoo that wasn’t given to her by the people who didn’t run the camp she wasn’t in.  I defend the right of Holocaust deniers to flap their gums, no matter how obscene the sounds they make are.  I even usually feel sorry for them – it’s a sign of a particularly pathetic psychosis.

  4. Peter Jukes

    …where these thoughts regularly cross my mind. It’s hard to walk around Warsaw without thinking of the ghetto and the uprising. And I know the borderlands of Eastern Poland much better – I set a play there a few moons ago, covering some of the same territory as Defiance.

    There are still a small handful of Shtetl Jews living in the forests around there. A friend of mine, Dovid Katz, still interviews them (he teaches Yiddish at Vilnius University). But the place is marked by empty synagogues, sad ghost and a feeling that something incredible precious has been lost. Sometimes the emphasis on the end of this culture, on the shoah itself, misses the vitality and diversity and sheer poetic richness of the Yiddish culture there – one of the only places in Europe where Jews were allowed to farm and have land. I miss it. I feel without it, Eastern and Central Europe has lost half its soul.

    I must read Dr Nyiszli’s account though, and thanks for the reference. Primo Levi is one of my heroes, but he avoided the worst parts of Auschwitz-Birkenau.  

  6. anna shane

    to the future scholarship from the Bush years?  I just read a novel that took place in New Orleans post Katrina.  How long do we need to wait to bear reading about what happened and continues to be happening in New Orleans?  It’s very sick stuff.  

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