practice performing various operations. One doctor at Auschwitz perfected his amputation technique on live prisoners. After he had finished, his maimed patients were sent off to the gas chamber. A few Jews who had studied medicine were allowed to live if they assisted the SS doctors. “I cut the flesh of healthy young girls,” recalled a Jewish physician who survived at terrible cost. “I immersed the bodies of dwarfs and cripples in calcium chloride (to preserve them), or had them boiled so the carefully prepared skeletons might safely reach the Third Reich’s museums to justify, for future generations, the destruction of an entire race. I could never erase these memories from my mind.” But the best killing machine were the “shower baths” of death. After their arrival at a death camp, the Jews who had been chosen to die at once were told that they were to have a shower. Filthy by their long, miserable journey, they sometimes applauded the announcement. Countless Jews and other victims went peacefully to the shower rooms--which were gas chambers in disguise. In the anterooms to the gas chambers, many of the doomed people found nothing amiss. At Auschwitz, signs in several languages said, “Bath and Disinfectant,” and inside the chambers other signs admonished, “Don’t forget your soap and towel.” Unsuspecting victims cooperated willingly. “They got out of their clothes so routinely,” Said a Sobibor survivor. “What could be more natural?” In time, rumors about the death camps spread, and underground newspapers in the Warsaw ghetto even ran reports that told of the gas ...
