The following is an excerpt taken from the Saturday, May 20, 2006, Post-Journal, Vol. 179, No. 373, Section C, page 7.

Local flavor

Artistic work from authors with area associations

By ROBERT W. PLYLER

We haven’t reviewed books or recordings for several weeks and there are a number, many with local associations, waiting to be called to your attention.

This week, let’s turn our attention to the literary and recorded music:

Doctors from Hell

It’s always a source of disappointment when someone acts in a way unworthy of human behavior, but it is especially angering when the evil-doer is someone who is entrusted to do good.

The Robert H. Jackson Center in downtown Jamestown, has had scheduled for some time, a lecture by author Vivien Spitz regarding her book Doctors from Hell. Unfortunately, the Jackson Center has recently received word that Ms. Spitz has experienced health problems and will not be able to keep her appointment with Jamestown in the coming week.

Nonetheless, we’ve read her book and would like to share our observations with you. The wonderful thing about the published word is that it lives and is available, around the clock, no matter what befalls its author.

In 1945, Vivien Spitz was 22 years old. She had only recently begun a career as a court stenographer, the year World War II finally came to an end. Among the biggest news, once the shooting stopped, was the international tribunals, at which those deemed mostly responsible for the savage inhumanity of Hitler’s Third Reich were being put on trial by the winners of the war.

On trial were the men who planned the invasions of peaceful countries, created the weapons which killed millions, devoted their factories, railroads and other property to criminal aggression and especially those who carried out the deliberate murder of millions of innocent people.

While it could never be said they didn’t do anything wrong, it was clearly true that these people hadn’t done anything illegal. There was no law in their country against what they did and indeed, most of them had been ordered by their government to do the things they did.

But, the winners of the war believed that there are some things which are so bad that no one should consider doing them. At Nuremburg, Germany, the Nazi leaders were put on trial, and many of them were imprisoned or executed, not for breaking any law, but for violating the spirit of simple human decency.

The first trials held were of the government leaders, the names which had filled the headlines, ever since the Nazis had come to power in Germany. Robert H. Jackson, born just across the Pennsylvania line from Jamestown, who began his career as a lawyer in Jamestown, and to whom the Jackson Center is dedicated, was asked by President Truman to temporarily leave the Supreme Court, where he was an associate justice and to serve as the chief prosecutor of these Nazi leaders.

Many people don’t know that when the first trial was over, the tribunals continued to meet at Nuremburg. Ms. Spitz’s book gives us some idea of what it was like to live and work Nuremburg, a city which was once at the heart of a bitter enemy, now lying in rubble from the bombing and attacks of our own troops.

The author tells us she had previously had some experience in being a court reporter in trials involving medical situations, so she was assigned to the tribunal which tried German doctors who had performed savage and immoral experiments on the bodies of men, women and children who had found their way onto the Nazis’ lists of ‘‘human waste.’’

The accounts of people being injected with infections to see if various medications worked in treating them, thrown into tanks of nearly freezing water, to see how long pilots downed in icy water could be expected to survive and what techniques best restored them to health, and a seemingly endless list of such experiments, make it hard to believe that common criminals could do such inhuman things, let alone people trained to provide health and healing.

Doctors from Hell is not easy reading. The words are simple, direct and easy to understand, but the longer one reads about these doctors and their inhumanity, the lower one’s faith in humanity tends to fall.

In 1945, when the horrors of the Holocaust were made public, many Germans were shocked, that their country’s doings were so much worse than they had imagined. Many were consumed with guilt that they had overlooked the sure signs of what was taking place at Auschwitz, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen.

And yet the people who had participated in the mass murder and torture did not have a big red dot in the middle of their foreheads. The staff of the tribunals constantly lived with the knowledge that the waiter in their cafe or the person who came in to clean up the courtroom might have been one of the guilty.

As she goes systematically from case to case, she occasionally interjects information about where she was living, under what conditions. She gives her personal observations of both the troops and the defeated German people.

The book is documentation, rather than an attention-holding narration. It’s greatest effect is to erode the natural numbing which occurs in our minds when we think about the Nazi era. The term ‘‘a million murders’’ means something intellectually, but doesn’t truly register in our understanding.

This book starts with ‘‘murder number one’’ and continues until there is no choice but to remember.

Doctors from Hell was published in 2005, by First Sentient Publications, of Boulder, CO. It has 290 pages, in hardcover edition, not including documentation, informative appendices and bibliography. It sells for $23.95. Look for ISBN number 1-59181-032-9.

Also worthy of note, Ms. Spitz has made it a life mission to speak out against those people who try to deny or minimalize the facts of the Holocaust, realizing that people who saw these things with their own eyes are now in their 80s, and will soon be no longer around to speak the truth which she saw with her own eyes. That is why she has chosen to go case by case by case, even though it becomes repetitive and is difficult to bear, for the reader.

We regret she has been unable to speak to us at the Jackson Center, in the coming week.