“ Life Unworthy of Life”:
Considering the Meaning of Auschwitz HISTORY BECOMES VISCERAL – AND PERSONAL – FOR A MEDICAL STUDENT VISITING THE OLD NAZI DEATH CAMP. This year, I completed the Fellowship in Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics (FASPE), an intensive two-week program that takes place in New York, Berlin, Krakow, and Auschwitz. For two months prior to the start of FASPE, I studied the role of physicians during the genocide, readings such accounts as The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution, by Henry Friedlander, and The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, by Robert Jay Lifton. I also read autobiographies such as Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz. I learned about “life unworthy of life,” a phrase used by Nazis to describe targeted populations whose societal value they deemed too low to allow their survival. When I reached the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan, I felt knowledgeable about the complex sociopolitical and economic forces that facilitated the rise to power of the Nazi regime, as well as the psychological factors that may have helped the perpetrators silence their consciences. The phrase “life unworthy of life” was in my mind a suggestive historical document of sorts, a window into the thought process of all the physicians who endorsed the plan for the Final Solution. Over the course of my trip, however, the phrase became a central theme in my emotions. Listening to testimonies of Holocaust survivors, slowly pacing along the deportation plaques of Track 17 in Berlin, walking in the rain through Auschwitz I and II, I began pondering what defines a life worth living. At the platform in Auschwitz II/Birkenau, I imagined being there with my family, exhausted from a long trip but hopeful about the future. I pictured being separated from my father
36 ■ PENN MEDICINE
By Noemi Spinazzi
Painting by Noemi Spinazzi
and little brother, watching family members walk through the gates to the left of the platform, only to learn later that they were walking to their deaths. Walking in mud, soaked from all the rain and looking forward to a warm shower and dry clothes, I attempted to picture what it would be like to have no dry clothes or warm meal to look forward to; to be starved and exhausted yet keep walking through that mud, struggling to survive. I wondered if I would fight as hard as the survivors did, if I would consider that life worth living. In Auschwitz I saw a photograph that resonated with my ambiguous feelings about the heroic effort it took prisoners to survive the camp. It shows a young woman at the time of liberation. Her naked body is emaciated; she is looking over her shoulder.
In her eyes, you can see her exhaustion, her disillusionment; if I had to describe it with one word, I would choose indifference, as though nothing could get beneath her thickened skin. When the photo was taken, did she feel glad to be alive, or did she just keep replaying those moments on the ramp when she saw her family and friends for the last time? As I stared into her eyes, verses from Primo Levi’s poem “If this is a man” resonated within me: Consider if this is a woman, Without hair and without name, With no more strength to remember, Her eyes empty and her womb cold, Like a frog in winter.