Review: "Mistress of Life and Death" by Susan Eischeid

Mistress of Life and Death by Susan Eischeid
Published December 2023 via Citadel Press
★★★

When Maria Mandl, an overseer at several Nazi concentration camps, was brought to trial in 1947, the charges against her were vast and chilling. The outcome was perhaps inevitable, and her name has since then been linked with incredible cruelty.

In Mistress of Life and Death, Eischeid—a musician who was intrigued by Mandl's decision to start a concentration-camp orchestra—sets out to tell a more complete story of Mandl's life, from her small-town upbringing to the series of events and choices that put her in positions of power in various concentration camps to her eventual death.

It's...a pretty depressing book. The chapters are very, very short, making it a fast read, but a huge amount of the book is about cruelty. People who grew up with Mandl seem to have agreed that her turn to cruelty was a surprise, that she was "a nice girl from a good family" (18)...but there aren't that many specifics, whether because those who knew Mandl before the war were dead by the time Eischeid did her interviews or because they were unwilling to speak. Consequently, much of the book becomes a litany of abuses that Mandl perpetrated.

In theory, Eischeid also sets out to answer questions along the lines of what caused a nice girl from a good family to become one of the most notorious criminals of the Holocaust? andhow does one reconcile good things about a person with terrible things? In practice, though, so much of the book is about those terrible things that the more complicated questions get buried; Mandl's initial move to work in the concentration camps is written off with a limp explanation that her engagement had just broken up. (Might have been a catalyst, but most people whose engagements break up do not go on to be notorious for their use of torture and murder!) A Holocaust survivor who knew Mandl sums it up as "She was a nobody. Suddenly she was a somebody" (299), and that feels on point, but I would have loved a bit more of a delve into psychology (surely there are volumes upon volumes written about the psychology of the Holocaust). There's brief discussion of some of the other woman guards in the concentration camps—and the fact that they generally did not come from privileged or educated backgrounds—and I wish that had been gone into further. To me, the interesting question is not what atrocities did she commit? (which is basically the question answered in the book) but rather what makes a person do such terrible things, especially when others choose not to? How much might feelings of inferiority, or a first chance to have any kind of power, have played a factor? Or youth? None of this takes away from the crimes, obviously, but they beg for more investigation. Consider, again, a nice girl from a good family—what stands between that and a Nazi concentration camp guard?

An oddity: Mistress of Life and Death was first published in 2023, but when Eischeid talks about the "now" she's generally talking about 2006 or so. Hanna Wysocka, eighty-seven years old in 2006, is a keen, wiry woman... (205). I imagine that this is because most of the research and interviews were done around that time and it took a long time to complete the book, which is fine, but I wish some updates had been done to the language. (2006 was almost twenty years ago! It's no longer "now"!)

I'm glad to have read this, because it's important history, but I think I would have gotten just as much or more out of (e.g.) a more general look at the Holocaust's concentration camp guards.