From Letters (LRB Vol 23, No 16 | cover date 23 August 2001)

In his review of Paul Steinberg's Speak You Also: A Survivor's Reckoning, Adam Phillips (LRB, 19 July) quotes Steinberg's remark: 'I heartily recommend to future candidates for deportation that they enter the medical and paramedical professions, which lead to cushy camp jobs and various perks.' Phillips adds: 'This might not seem a very good reason to become a doctor, but it was clearly a lucky choice of profession for those doctors who found themselves in Auschwitz.' Although the percentage of survivors among prisoner doctors was much higher than among the general population of the camp, and although the ones who worked in the hospitals (most of them intermittently) did benefit from slightly better living conditions, a very large number still perished. I know from my father, a physician who survived almost three years in Auschwitz, and from the testimonies of others like him, that in the camp hospitals prisoner doctors worked under demoralising conditions, fighting epidemics with grossly insufficient medication, only to see most of the patients who did not die in the hospital sent to their deaths by Nazi physicians during selections. On the other hand, it has been estimated that half of all concentration camp survivors owed their lives to prisoner doctors. Theirs was hardly a 'cushy job', even if working indoors did contribute to their survival. This is why my uncle, an orthopaedic surgeon who survived ten years of Soviet gulag, forced his son to become a doctor.

Claude Romney University of Calgary