A true friend of the human race, the father of victimology, the Norwegian Professor of Psychiatxy, Leo Eitinger, died on October 15 in Oslo at the age of 83. Leo Eitinger was internationally renowned for his great unselfish work to help his fellow concentration camp prisoners. His research work on the kz-syndrome became the foundation for all future work in this field.
Leo Eitinger was born on December 12, 1912 in the town of Lomnice in that part of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire which is today the Czech Republic. He graduated as a medical doctor in 1937, but, because of his Jewish background, he was deprived of his right to practice. With the approach of the Nazis, he fled to Norway in 1939, with support from the "Nansen Aid Programme," where he took up his medical practice. However, after the Nazi occupation of Norway in 1942, he was arrested by the Nazis and was kept in different Norwegian prisons and concentration camps until he was deported to Auschwitz in 1943. Of 600 Norwegian Jews sent to Auschwitz, only 12 survived. Auschwitz taught him what "the evil in man combined with the madness of racism can accomplish," as described in his book, Experiences ofLife. There he practiced as a doctor, making it possible for him to help his fellow prisoners through his medical skills and his great compassion, as well as by saving people from the gas chambers by falsifying their papers. He was forced out on the infamous "march of death."
After the war Dr. Eitinger took up his practice again as a medical doctor in Norway and became a specialist in psychiatry, using his personal knowledge of the concentration camp experience to help former camp survivors. He focused on questions such as, "Is it possible to ever become a whole and normally functioning person after having experienced such horrors?" He would quote philosopher Theodor Adorno, "After Auschwitz, how is it possible to think of humanity and the human race? After Treblinka, will it be possible to write poetry again?" He carried out large-scale