Aurora – For three years during the early 1950s, Vivien Spitz had a recurring nightmare that placed her in a tunnel beneath a barbed-wire fence, accompanied by four or five children, trying to escape a concentration camp while a Nazi guard marched above.
“I was always looking for the light at the end of the tunnel,” Spitz said. “It never changed.”
Spitz, 81, of Aurora, believes she has found that light – it is a book that she has written about her experience with the Holocaust.
Spitz wasn’t in a camp. As a 22-year-old woman in 1946, she was the youngest civilian court reporter at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial. She spent nearly a year documenting in shorthand every utterance of the terrifying Medical Case.
Twenty doctors and three medical assistants were indicted for crimes against humanity and calculated genocide. They conducted experiments on prisoners, including burning inmates to simulate battlefield wounds; forcing prisoners to drink seawater until they went mad; cutting off oxygen until subjects died; sterilizing Jews, Gypsies and others with prolonged X-rays to their genitals; and killing prisoners to harvest their skeletons for museums. Thirteen doctors and the three assistants were found guilty. Seven were executed.
Spitz recounts the story in her recently published book, “Doctors From Hell: The Horrific Account of Nazi Experiments on Humans.”
The book, she said, “was a catharsis.”
“I really feel that I have recovered. I really feel I have been delivered from all of that evil at age 81.”
Spitz began speaking about her experiences in 1989 after learning an Aurora teacher had told a class that some people doubt the Holocaust occurred.
Spitz has now spoken to more than 46,000 people in three countries. She has been featured in newspapers and on the television news and was interviewed by Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.
“The fact that Denver, Colo., has a firsthand participant and witness who was there (at Nuremberg) is quite an incredible thing,” said Ellen Premack, director of Denver’s Mizel Museum. “She is such a first-time eyewitness. Her account is very, very credible.”
Spitz labored for seven years to get her speech into book form.
“What drove me to do the book is being confronted several times by Holocaust deniers, namely the Institute for Historical Review,” she said. “I felt I had to write a book to educate the public about what actually went on.”
The book features the doctors’ words and testimony from witnesses and victims, detailing the experiments. Spitz also hopes the book can educate, quoting poet George Santayana: “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
Staff writer Jeremy Meyer can be reached at 303-820-1175 or jpmeyer@denverpost.com.
