I worked on the WTC recovery when I was in my early 20s. I was pretty nervous driving into job site for the first time, even having worked in anatomic pathology while in college. To be perfectly honest, I was surprised at how unaffected I was while working there for the better part of a year. My first response was to think, “this is f*cked… this has to be fixed.” There was no shortage of sights or smells, but I never found it really bothering me; had there been suffering survivors, that would have been much more difficult.
I do, however have some residuals. I don’t generally go to work on 9/11 - mostly because there’s usually some twit with little/no connection to the event playing the reading of victims’ names on the radio. Or jackasses scuttlebutting about things they know nothing about… I have been known to blow up on a few people who talk about conspiracies like explosive charges. I have a recurring nightmare every few months (about something that didn’t even happen, but it involves picking up pieces of kids); but I’ve had it enough times over the last 12 1/2 years that I usually wake up sweating and immediately realize that it was just that dream again.
From Nizkor.org, describing body disposal at Auschwitz:
Additional information may be found at the following link at Nizkor.
At Treblinka, all bodies were disposed of by either burial or cremation on large metal grates. Those that were buried, were late exhumed and cremated, to try and hide evidence of the mass killings. My recollection from other sources is that the SS/Sonderkommando would construct the pyres using alternating layers of railroad ties and corpses, with layers laid perpendicular to each other to assure sufficient air circulation.
I imagine it’s the same reason surgeons put up a sheet between the head of the patient and the body part being operated on. If you were a surgeon, wouldn’t you focus better on the task at hand if you didn’t see your patient’s face? It’s a professional mindset that all EMT/doctors/coroners, et al, must get into in order to do their jobs.
Long ago in the early 1990s when I was getting ready to change career paths (and before the OJ case, which I think of as pushing forensics into the public domain), I was interested in getting into forensics.
My plan was to get a Master’s in Public Health from UC Berkeley, but a visit to the San Diego Crime Lab downtown changed all that. Close to 100% of the people working there were divorced and all of them said that while you get over the dead bodies pretty quickly, dead children will stick with you. Being newly married and not wanting to have my soul destroyed, I went the MBA route instead.