THE NEW YORK TIMES: Survivor of Nazi Experiments Says $8,000 Isn’t Enough By STEVEN GREENHOUSE Published: November 19, 2003 - Commentary by Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD

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Survivor of Nazi Experiments Says $8,000 Isn’t Enough

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Survivor of Nazi Experiments Says $8,000 Isn’t Enough

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

Published: November 19,
2003

The medical experiments
that Simon Rozenkier says he saw and experienced in Nazi concentration camps
strain the imagination.

He saw a hunchback whose hump had been cut
off by Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi doctor. He said Dr. Mengele had
thrown a Jewish man into a bath of ice and let him freeze to death, in a
study intended to help Nazi pilots survive when they were shot down over icy
seas.

Mr. Rozenkier, a native of Poland who
emigrated to New York in 1947, said he saw Nazi doctors administer intense
X-rays to the genitalia of Jews and Gypsies to sterilize them. And he vividly
recalled how a Nazi doctor, Horst Schumann, had repeatedly injected him with
chemicals — he was told they were vitamin supplements — to sterilize him, all
part of a Nazi effort to perfect ways to keep Jews from reproducing.

“They told me, `These shots will give
you muscles to work,’ ” he said. ” `Do you understand that, you
redheaded dog?’ “

When Mr. Rozenkier and his wife encountered
problems having children in the early 1950′s, he contacted the German
consulate in New York. Officials there sent him to a doctor who determined
that he was sterile, confirming his own doctor’s findings.

This year, Mr. Rozenkier filed a lawsuit
accusing two German pharmaceutical giants, Bayer and Schering, of providing
experts and drugs to Dr. Mengele and other Nazi doctors for sterilizations.

“What they did to me is beyond right
and wrong,” said Mr. Rozenkier, who lost his parents and four siblings
in the Holocaust. “They should be punished.”

His lawsuit, in Federal District Court in
Newark, has created a legal and diplomatic tempest because the German
government and German companies insist that there is no place for such
litigation now. They point to a 2000 agreement between the United States and
Germany that created a $5 billion fund to compensate Nazi slave laborers and
victims of medical experiments.

German officials and companies say the fund
was created partly to prevent lawsuits like Mr. Rozenkier’s, which are
difficult to litigate and which embarrass the Germans with details about past
Nazi horrors.

Mr. Rozenkier, who lives on Staten Island,
said that his lawsuit was warranted despite the agreement because, in his
view, the $8,000 that the fund awarded him was woefully inadequate. The
lawsuit does not seek a specific amount. He further argued that the German
foundation that administers the fund had violated the agreement by capping
awards to the victims of medical experiments and not individually judging how
much each victim should receive.

But Roger Witten, an American lawyer
representing Bayer and Schering, said Mr. Rozenkier’s lawsuit should be dismissed.
“Everybody feels sympathy for the plaintiff here,” Mr. Witten said.
“These are all people who went through horrible things.” But he
said creation of the fund should have ended these cases in American courts.

In the agreement, the American government
promised that in suits brought in federal court, it would urge the judge to
dismiss the cases if there were valid legal reasons for doing so. The
government would do so without taking a position on the merits of the
complaints.

“The U.S. side embraced the idea of
legal peace for German companies,” Mr. Witten said. “This was not
just in the interests of German companies and Germany, but also in the
foreign policy interests of the United States for German companies to be able
to put this behind them.”

A State Department official said last week
that the department would file a statement recommending that the judge in New
Jersey dismiss the case if there were any valid legal grounds to do so.

Mr. Rozenkier’s lawyer, Carey D’Avino,
said, “The State Department apparently plans to file a statement with
the court for diplomatic reasons, but the U.S. shouldn’t file such a
statement because the Germans have failed to live up to the letter and spirit
of the agreement and failed to live up to their side of the bargain.”

Experts on Holocaust claims disagree about
how the federal courts should treat Mr. Rozenkier’s case.

Stuart E. Eizenstat, a former deputy
treasury secretary who had helped negotiate the agreement with Germany, said
the suit should be dismissed. “If the plaintiff were correct in this
case,” he said, “it would undercut the entire thrust of the German
settlement, which is to put an overall cap on claims, to create a quick
claims mechanism and to avoid individualized hearings.”

But Lawrence Kill, a New York lawyer who
had signed the agreement after representing former slave laborers who sued
Germany, said Mr. Rozenkier’s case should be allowed to go forward because
the Germans had apparently violated the agreement. “A side letter to the
agreement called for individual consideration as to the amount medical
victims are entitled to,” Mr. Kill said. “How can we give someone
who was subject to some of the worst kinds of atrocities imaginable the same
as somebody else who might have had a toenail removed in a Nazi
experiment?”

Mr. Rozenkier said the sterilization shots
he had received caused his genitalia to swell and bleed and caused wrenching
pain for days. The shots also caused a more lasting anguish. “After the
war,” he said, “when I finally got in touch with my brother, Aaron,
who had escaped to Russia, he said: `I hope you’re going to have a big
family. Look what we lost.’ I said, `O.K., we’ll have a family.’ But it never
happened.”

He pulled out an old picture of his brother
as a lieutenant in the Soviet Army. Then, choking up, he showed a prewar
picture of three primly dressed sisters and a brother, all under 12 at the
time. All four died in the war.

After immigrating to New York, Mr.
Rozenkier served in the Korean War, earning two Bronze Stars, and then spent
20 years working in Manhattan’s garment district. After the war, he and his
wife, Joan, were often invited to reunions of death camp survivors.

“I felt like a jackass,” he said.
“I’d go there, and they all had three or four kids and I didn’t have
any. I was walking around like an outcast.”

Monographs by Nazi doctors and numerous
books and treatises have described the sterilization work at labs run by Dr.
Mengele and others. Chemicals were injected into the uterus of hundreds of
Jewish and Gypsy women, causing blockages in their fallopian tubes that
rendered them sterile. The Nazi doctors also X-rayed male inmates to
sterilize them, but the X-rays often killed the men or caused such severe
burns that they became unfit for work. Mr. Rozenkier said that this must have
led the Nazis to begin experimenting with chemical sterilization on men.

Mr. Rozenkier was one of several thousand
victims who survived the experiments. “Certainly there was widespread
sterilization and castration, and all this was part of a distorted racial
vision that sought to destroy the capacity to reproduce in ostensibly
inferior races and especially Jews,” said Robert Jay Lifton, author of
“The Nazi Doctors.” Mr. Rozenkier was born in Wroclawek, Poland, 75
years ago. In September 1939, soon after Hitler invaded Poland, German
soldiers pounded on his family’s apartment door to arrest Mr. Rozenkier’s
father. When his oldest sister, Helena, stepped outside to protest, a soldier
shot her to death.

Wroclawek’s Jews were sent to a ghetto on
the outskirts of town. Mr. Rozenkier escaped, and for several months slept in
a cemetery next to an aunt’s grave.

He was arrested when he was 14 and sent to
a work camp. There, he loaded sand, nearly died of typhus and was eventually
assigned the job of carting away hundreds of Jews who had died of typhus.

One day while transporting the dead he
visited a Polish family to beg for potatoes. German soldiers seized him and
planned to hang him, but he was spared because the commander of a nearby
women’s work camp put in a good word for him. Breaking into tears, he said:
“My sister, Leah, worked for that commander. She was his cook. But she
sold her body to him to save my life.”

After more than a year in work camps, he
was shipped to Auschwitz in a crammed cattle car. He was tattooed with the
number 143511 and assigned to a nearby work camp that made synthetic rubber.
One day, an associate of Dr. Mengele saw him and had him sent to the nearby
Birkenau camp for experiments.

With reddish-blond hair that made him look
less Jewish, Mr. Rozenkier said, he was spared from the gas chamber because
the Nazi doctors thought he had unusual genes. He said, “They were
trying to figure out why this Jew got red hair.”

At Birkenau, while many were starving
around him, Mr. Rozenkier was fed an ample diet of buckwheat to help him
survive the experiments.

“Sometimes they even gave us chocolate
— can you believe it? Chocolate,” he said.

“Mengele didn’t give a damn if I live
or die,” he continued. “Sometimes he gave people a piece of chocolate,
and the next minute he shoots them in the head.”

After Mr. Rozenkier survived the
sterilization shots, a doctor who took a liking to him arranged for him to
work in a coal mine. From there, he joined the infamous death march to
Buchenwald in which the Nazis shot hundreds of stragglers. He was in
Buchenwald when American troops liberated it.

Had he known that he was sterile, he said:
“I never would have married my wife. It’s not fair to her. She’s
entitled to have children.” They adopted a daughter, Allison, who is now
35.

Mr. Rozenkier is seeking money from
Schering and Bayer, which was then a division of I. G. Farben, because
records show that doctors from Schering participated in the sterilization
work at Birkenau and other camps, while drugs Bayer developed were used in
sterilizations. His lawsuit also wants the companies to disclose which
chemicals were injected into him.

In his eyes, the lawsuit is a way to
achieve justice. He says he will donate any money he wins to Israel.

Like many Holocaust survivors, Mr.
Rozenkier feels uneasy that he lived while so many family members and other
Jews perished. “I’m the only one who suffers right now because I should
have been with them,” he said. “I feel guilty.”

Copyright
2003 The New York Times Company 

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