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FREUD IN AUSCHWITZ
"Thoughts of Freud, of course." Franz Kafka, diary for September 1912
"So!"
They gather, herd and move us toward the "showers" as if a flock of sheep. They will gas us,
incinerate our bodies, throw our ashes to the winds. And when I lay on the cement floor dead,
other Jews will look into my mouth with pliers for gold teeth. I will give up my prosthesis.
And what of my reminiscences - "Dora," "Little Hans," "The Rat Man," "Schreber," "The Wolf Man,
" the great quinque of my life; then Abraham, Adler, Breuer, Brill, Charcot, Eitington, Ferenci,
Fliess, Jones, Jung, Klein, Lou Andreas-Salome, Pfister, Princess Marie Bonaparte, Rank ,
Martha, Minna, Mathilde, my six children, Sophie who died so young and the childhood death
of "Heinele," my grandson, my four sisters who perished in the death camps. And faithful,
devoted Anna who changed my prosthesis for me while my chow fled the room because of the stench.
And what will happen to all the statues, the Roman and Grecian pieces I collected throughout
the decades? And who will rent our flat at Berggasse 19 in Vienna? What Nazi family will befoul
our home oblivious of all my life's work with patients? Here I wrote case stories about patients
who I often failed as a psychoanalyst and made my mistakes as mortal man. Einstein had his time
and space, Darwin had his descent of man as grand a principle as gravity and here I saw into
the irrational nature of the ape that is man.
Does Freud at the Auschwitz station raise his hands to the heavens like a patriarchal father,
this man who took aspirin for his cancer, and declare to a god he surely knows does not exist,
therefore cannot hear, that the choice will be his to make in how he dies? Walking into the
"showers" stripped of all clothes, his stark whitish beard, his prosthesis to become
a stunned Sondercommando's "find," Freud stands stoically straight as best as a man
of his years can, and says to his brethren all around him: "Work and love; that is
all there is. I hope you have had at least one of these in your days. If not,
I am here with you now, a friend of mankind."
"So!"
So nothing.
Matt Freese
Email: Matt Freese
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