Introduction Knut W. Ruyter
Behind the eyelids await the kapos and a horde of SS‑men, and I fight against all of them, with the anguish of blind outrage, hour after hour, until I wake up in the morning, diseased in mind and tired until death. Herman Sachnowitz
I
t is with great awe and engagement that I introduce the proceedings of the con‑ ference held in Kraków in May 2019, set against a somber and thought‑provok‑ ing visit to the site of Auschwitz‑Birkenau. My interest or, I should perhaps even say, preoccupation with the horrors of
Auschwitz goes all the way to my teenage years spent in tranquil rural surround‑ ings in Norway. I was an avid reader and came across the accounts of lives—and the abuse and destruction of them—in concentration camps, first through Simon Wiesenthal’s books which were translated into Norwegian in the late 1960s: The Murderers Are Among Us1 and The Sunflower.2 Then I read the autobiography of
About the author: Knut W. Ruyter, PhD, born 1955 in Norway, is a professor at the University of Oslo. He served as Director for the Regional Committees for Medical and Health Care Research Ethics in 2009–2019 and is the newly appointed Ombud for Research for the University of Oslo. He taught research ethics, developed courses in the field (including e‑learning courses in Eng‑ lish), and published textbooks and articles, always keeping a keen eye on historical examples for warning and learning.
1
Wiesenthal, 1967.
2
Wiesenthal, 1969.