Robert Waitz (1900–1978)
So it was my friendship with Professor Waitz that saved my life.”
(Knoller, Freddie (with John Landaw): Desperate Journey. Vienna – Paris – Auschwitz (London: Metro, 2002), p. 181.)
“Under normal conditions, 90 percent of the entire prisoner strength at Monowitz would have to have been sent to hospital. [...] Members of the I.G. could not possibly have failed to notice that after a certain period a certain language was no longer to be heard on the building-site.”[1]
Robert Elie Waitz was born in Neuvy, France, on May 20, 1900. After finishing high school in 1917, he studied medicine in Paris, where he received his M.D. in 1931. In 1933, he became an associate professor at the Université Strasbourg. After the German invasion of France in May 1940, he was active in the French resistance movement, where he rose to the position of head of the Franc-Tireur movement in the Auvergne region. As such, he was arrested by the Gestapo in Clermont-Ferrand on July 3, 1943, and put in prison in Moulin. On September 10, 1943, he was taken to the Drancy transit camp and from there was deported to Auschwitz on October 10, 1943. As soon as he arrived, he and 250 other Jews were selected by the SS for the Buna/Monowitz concentration camp. There, Robert Waitz became a prisoner-physician for the in-house clinic in the camp’s prisoner infirmary.
On the death march in January 1945, Robert Waitz, together with many other Monowitz prisoners, was forced to walk to Gleiwitz, and from there they were transported in open cattle cars to Buchenwald. There he worked as a volunteer in the typhus ward until he was liberated by the U.S. Army in April. Prof. Dr. Robert Waitz returned to Strasbourg, where he became a full professor at the university in 1946. In addition, he was president of the Amicale d’Auschwitz, a Chevalier of the Legion d’honneur, and a holder of the French Resistance Medal and the Croix de la Valeur militaire. As early as 1947, he published an account of his time and work in the prisoner infirmary of the Buna/Monowitz concentration camp. Robert Waitz died in 1978.
(SP; transl. KL)