The Plowboy Interview: Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

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KÜBLER-ROSS: Of course. It's living that's difficult. People who have lived fully are never afraid of death.

So it's much more important for me to teach people how to live than it is to help them to accept death. In fact, when I started what has since become my life's work, I wasn't even concerned about how to deal with death and dying. No, when I first left home, a Swiss girl hoping to do relief work in Germany and Poland at the end of World War II, I wanted to learn what could cause people to kill hundreds of thousands of children in concentration camps. How could normal, average men and women—who were mothers and fathers themselves—do that without any qualms ... and then go home and worry when their own children caught chicken pox?

PLOWBOY: But how does that experience tie into the work you're doing now?

KÜBLER-ROSS: At Maidanek—a concentration camp where 960,000 children were killed—I met a Jewish girl whose grandparents, parents, and brothers and sisters had all died in the gas chamber. She was saved from dying with them only because there was no room left in the chamber to squash in another person. As a result of that horror, she became determined to survive ... so she could tell the world about all the atrocities committed by Hitler's Germany. Yet she told me that when the liberating army finally arrived, she suddenly realized that—if she did what she'd intended—she'd be no better than Hitler himself... because she, too, would be spreading hate and negativity.

This young girl touched my life more than anybody ever had, by teaching me that there's a "Hitler" in every human being. My first reaction to that concept was, "Oh no ... not in me! I'm a very nice person. I want to help the world." But soon after meeting her, I left Germany and headed toward Poland, where a typhoid epidemic was in progress. At that point I hadn't had any food for three days, and I suddenly realized that if a child had walked by with a piece of bread, I would have stolen it!

Then I began to understand what my Jewish friend had been saying. As a result, when I went back home, I studied medicine and tried to figure out how to help people to eliminate some of the negativity from their lives. When I married and came to America, I began working—quite successfully—with chronic, supposedly "hopeless" schizophrenics, and then with multiple-handicapped children. And, as time went on, I started slipping into death-and-dying work, because I found that the terminally ill patients in institutions were just as neglected as were the schizophrenics or the handicapped children. Hospital personnel didn't even refer to them by name ... they'd talk about "the pancreas in Room 17" when they meant a person, a human being with a family and children, who had terminal pancreatic cancer!

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