Inside the Gas Chambers
Page 1
INSIDE THE GAS CHAMBERS
INSIDE THE
GAS CHAMBERS
EIGHT MONTHS IN THE
SONDERKOMMANDO OF
AUSCHWITZ
SHLOMO VENEZIA
in collaboration with Béatrice Prasquier
Foreword by Simone Veil Historical notes and additional material by Marcello Pezzetti and Umberto Gentiloni Edited by Jean Mouttapa Translated by Andrew Brown
polity
Published in Association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
First published in French as Sonderkommando – Dans l’enfer des chambres à gaz © Éditions Albin Michel S.A.-Paris, 2007
This English edition © Polity Press, 2009
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I dedicate this book to my two families: my family from before the war, and my family from after it. My first thoughts go to my dearest mother – only forty-four years old at the time of these events – and my two young sisters, Marica and Marta, then fourteen and eleven, respectively. I often think sadly of the difficult life my mother had, being widowed very young with five children. Making many sacrifices, and struggling against almost insuperable difficulties, she brought us up in accordance with wholesome principles, such as being honest and respecting people. These sacrifices and these sufferings all counted for nothing, as they were wiped out at the same time as were my young sisters, no sooner than they had climbed out of the cattle cars onto the Judenrampe of Auschwitz-Birkenau on April 11, 1944.
My other family came into being after the great tragedy. My wife Marika and my three sons, Mario, Alessandro, and Alberto, know many things better than I do and base their lives on the essential principles of honesty and respect for others. My wife’s tenacity has meant that they have managed to grow up into men I can be proud of. Marika has also taken great care of me, and lightened the burden of the infirmities that ensued from my imprisonment in the camps. She deserves more than my silent affection. Thank you, Marika, for all you have done up until now and all that you continue to do with our six grandchildren: Alessandra, Daniel, Michela, Gabriel, Nicole, and Rachel, and our daughters-in-law, Miriam, Angela, and Sabrina.
Your husband, father, and grandfather,
Shlomo Venezia
The whole truth is much more tragic and terrible.
Zalmen Lewental*
* Zalmen Lewental’s manuscript in Yiddish was discovered in October 1962, buried in the yard of the Auschwitz Crematorium. It was written shortly before the outbreak of the Sonderkommando revolt, so as to leave an eye-witness account and some trace of the extermination of the Jews in the gas chambers. Lewental seems to have died in November 1944, only a few weeks before the Liberation. Taken from “Des voix sous la cendre: Manuscrits des Sonderkommandos d’Auschwitz-Birkenau,” ed. by Georges Bensoussan, Revue d’histoire de la Shoah, no. 171 (January– April 2001).
CONTENTS
Foreword by Simone Veil
Note by Béatrice Prasquier
Acknowledgments
1 Life in Greece before the Deportation
2 The First Month in Auschwitz-Birkenau
3 Sonderkommando: Initiation
4 Sonderkommando: The Work Continues
5 The Revolt of the Sonderkommando and the Dismantling of the Crematoria
6 Mauthausen, Melk, and Ebensee
Historical Notes:
The Shoah, Auschwitz, and the Sonderkommando
by Marcello Pezzetti
Italy in Greece: A Short History of a Major Failure
by Umberto Gentiloni
About David Olére
by Jean Mouttapa
Selected Bibliography
Shlomo (age twenty) at Athens in 1944, a few weeks before his deportation. (D.R.)
Portrait of Shlomo at Auschwitz, wearing the blue and white scarf of former deportees (March 2003). (D.R.)
Aerial view of part of the Auschwitz complex with Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau. The railway situated between the two camps, the Judenrampe, was used as an arrival and selection ramp for transports of Jews until May 1944, when it was replaced by the Bahnrampe, which brought victims right into the camp, near Crematoria II and III. (Mémorial de la Shoah/CDJC.)
Aerial photo taken by the RAF on a reconnaissance mission over Birkenau, August 23, 1944. At the top of the picture, smoke is rising from the mass graves of Crematorium V. (The Aerial Reconnaissance Archives.)
Detailed view of Crematoria II and III at Birkenau, annotated by Jean-Claude Pressac. (Mémorial de la Shoah/CDJC.)
Plan of Auschwitz-Birkenau (Yad Vashem/Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah.)
A main guard service with watch tower
BI first sector of the camp
BII second sector of the camp
BIII third sector of the camp, under construction (Mexico)
BIa women’s camp
BIb initially, men’s camp; from 1943, women’s camp
BIIa quarantine camp
BIIb family camp for the Jews from Theresienstadt
BIIc camp for the Jews from Hungary
BIId men’s camp
BIIe Gypsies’ camp (Zigeunerlager)
BIIf prisoners’ hospital
C Kommandantur and barracks for the SS
D storage area for objects pillaged from murdered prisoners (Kanada)
E ramp where the transports were unloaded and selection took place
G pyres where corpses were burned
H mass graves for Soviet prisoners of war
K II Crematorium II gas chamber and ovens
K III Crematorium III gas chamber and ovens
K IV Crematorium IV gas chamber and ovens
K V Crematorium V gas chamber and ovens
M 1 first provisional gas chamber (white house)
M 2 second provisional gas chamber (red house)
S showers and registration (Sauna)
Latrines and washbasins
This snapshot is one of a series of five photographs secretly taken by someone called “Alex,” an unidentified member of the resistance network at Auschwitz. Taken from inside Crematorium V in August 1944, it shows (here in detail) the naked women entering the gas chamber of Crematorium V, after undressing in the open air. (Archive of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.)
Photo of Crematorium III, annotated by Jean-Claude Pressac. (CNRS Éditions, 1993, APMO 20995/507.)
Visualization of Crematorium II. In basement on left, the room for undressing. On the right side, also in the basement, the gas chamber. (Klarsfeld Foundation.)
From The Auschwitz Album, a photo taken by an SS officer on the arrival of a transport of Jews from Hungary. Be
hind the people being sent to Crematorium II, the façade of the oven room of Crematorium III is perfectly visible. (Public domain/Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah.)
General view of the ovens of Crematorium II a few weeks before it started to operate. (The archival collection of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim.)
Ruins of Crematorium II at the Liberation. In the foreground, tree trunks had been piled up at the end of summer 1944 to camouflage the spot. (Mémorial de la Shoah/CDJC.)
Shlomo bearing witness in front of theruins of Crematorium II at Birkenau. Next to him, historian Marcello Pezzetti, who specializes in Auschwitz (March 2004). (Sara Berger.)
Shlomo and Avraham Dragon (also a former member of the Sonderkommando), Israel, July 2004. (Marcello Pezzetti.)
Shlomo and Lemke (Chaim) Pliszko (member of the Sonderkommando and former kapo of Crematorium II), Israel, July 2004. (Marcello Pezzetti.)
From left to right: Avraham Dragon, his brother Shlomo Dragon, Eliezer Eisenschmidt, Yakob Gabbai, Josef Sackar (behind), and Shaul Hazan at Birkenau. (Marcello Pezzetti.)
Shlomo (right) with his brother Maurice Venezia (left) and his cousin Dario Gabbai (center). (Marcello Pezzetti.)
FOREWORD
by Simone Veil
Shlomo Venezia arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau on April 11, 1944; I arrived there myself, from Drancy, four days later. Until September 9, 1943, we had lived – he in Greece, I in Nice – under Italian occupation, with the feeling of being, at least provisionally, safe from deportation. But, after the capitulation of Italy, the Nazi vise immediately tightened, both on those who lived in the Alpes-Maritimes and on those in the Greek archipelago.
When I speak of the Shoah, I often refer to the deportation and extermination of the Jews of Greece, since what happened in that country illustrates perfectly the fierce tenacity with which the Nazis pursued the “Final Solution,” hunting down the Jews even in the smallest and most remote islands of the archipelago. So it was with particular interest that I read the story of Shlomo Venezia, a Jew, an Italian citizen, who speaks not only Greek but also Ladino, the dialect of the Jews of Salonika where he lived. His name, Venezia, refers to the time when his ancestors, in the years of wandering that followed the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, had traveled to Italy before moving on to Salonika, the “Jerusalem of the Balkans,” ninety percent of whose Jewish community was exterminated during the Second World War.
I have read many accounts written by former deportees, and each time they take me back to life in the camp. But the story told by Shlomo Venezia is especially overwhelming because it is the only complete eye-witness account that we have from a survivor of the Sonderkommandos. Now we know precisely how they were condemned to perform their abominable task, the worst task of all: that of helping the deportees who had been selected for death to get undressed and to enter the gas chambers, then of taking away all those corpses, bodies intertwined with each other in their death struggles, to the crematorium ovens. As they were unwilling accomplices of the executioners, almost all of the members of the Sonderkommando were murdered, just like those they had led to the gas chambers.
The force of this eye-witness account comes from the irreproachable honesty of its author. He relates only what he himself saw, leaving nothing out: neither the worst, such as the barbarity of the man in charge of the Crematorium, nor the summary executions or the uninterrupted functioning of the gas chambers and the crematorium ovens; he also speaks of what might attenuate the horror of the situation, such as the relative mercy shown by a Dutch SS officer, or the less atrocious conditions of survival that the members of the Sonderkommando received relative to those of the other deportees, since the Sonderkommandos were the indispensable servants of the machinery of death. Another thing that makes his account exceptional is that only when he engaged in this dialogue with Béatrice Prasquier did Shlomo Venezia dare to mention the most macabre aspects of his “work” in the Sonderkommando, adding details of unbearable horror that bring out the full extent of this abominable Nazi crime.
With his simple words, Shlomo Venezia gives new life to the emaciated faces, with their exhausted, resigned, and often terror-stricken eyes, of those men, women, and children whom he is seeing for the last time. There are those who are unaware of the fate that awaits them; those who, coming from the ghettos, fear that there is little hope of surviving; and finally those who, being selected in the camp, know that death awaits them – but then, for many of the latter, death comes as a deliverance.
A glimmer of humanity sometimes lightens the horror in which Shlomo Venezia tries to survive in spite of everything. There is his meeting, at the threshold of the gas chamber, with his uncle Léon Venezia, who is now too weak to work, and Shlomo’s attempt to give him a final bite to eat. The younger man can lavish one last gesture of tenderness on the older and then recite a kaddish in his memory. There’s also the harmonica Shlomo sometimes plays. And finally, there are those gestures of solidarity which help him remain a human being.
Shlomo Venezia does not try to hide the episodes that might give rise to criticism, should anyone dare to formulate it. It redounds entirely to his honor that he is brave enough to speak of his feeling of complicity with the Nazis, of the selfishness he sometimes needed to survive, but also of his desire for vengeance at the liberation of the camps. There are those who might suggest that, having been in a kommando where he was given better food and better clothes, he perhaps suffered less than the other deportees. Shlomo Venezia asks such people: what is a bit more bread worth, or extra rest, or a few more clothes, when every day your hands are steeped in death? Because he also experienced the “normal” conditions of life in the camps which he describes with exceptional precision and truthfulness, Shlomo Venezia unhesitatingly declares that he would rather have died a slow death than have had to work in the Crematorium.
So how to survive in that hell, when the only thing to which one can look forward is the moment when one is going to be killed oneself? To this question, every deportee has his or her own answer. For many people, such as Shlomo Venezia, one had to stop thinking. As he says: “During the first two or three weeks, I was constantly stunned by the enormity of the crime, but then you stop thinking.” Every day he would have preferred to die, and yet each day he struggled to survive.
That Shlomo Venezia is still here today represents a double victory over the process of extermination of the Jews; for, in each of the members of the Sonderkommando, the Nazis wanted to kill the Jew and the eye-witness, to commit the crime and eradicate all trace of it. But Shlomo Venezia has survived and has told his story, after a long period of silence, like many other former deportees. If he, as did I and many others, spoke only belatedly, it is because nobody wished to listen to us. We had returned from a world where they had tried to banish us from the human race; we wanted to say as much, but we encountered incredulity, indifference, and even hostility from others. It was only in the years after the deportation that we found the courage to speak because, in the end, people did listen to us.
That is why this account, like those of all deportees, needs to be understood by each person as an appeal to reflection and vigilance. Over and above what he teaches us about the Sonderkommandos, Shlomo Venezia reminds us of that absolute horror, that “crime against humanity”: the Shoah. Shlomo Venezia’s voice, like that of all the deportees, will fall silent one day, but this dialogue between him and Béatrice Prasquier will remain, a dialogue between a witness who saw everything, one of the last to do so, and a young woman, a representative of the new generation, who was able to listen to him because she herself has for years been devoting a large part of her life to the struggle against forgetting. She deserves our thanks, particularly for having the courage to accompany Shlomo Venezia in his overwhelming return to the past.
It is now the task of this younger generation not to forget, and to ensure that Shlomo Venezia’s voice will be heard forever.
Simone Veil
President of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah
NOTE
by Béatrice Prasquier
This account was compiled from a series of interviews I had with Shlomo Venezia in Rome, with the help of the historian Marcello Pezzetti, between April 13 and May 21, 2006. The conversations were conducted in Italian and then translated and transcribed as faithfully to the original as possible and revised by Shlomo Venezia so as not to diminish the authenticity of his story.
Since he was at the heart of that machine designed to pulverize human lives, Shlomo Venezia is one of the few survivors able to bear witness to the “absolute” victims, those drowned amid the multitude of forgotten faces not saved by chance and an exceptional fate.
His witness goes beyond an act of memory; it is a historical document that sheds light on the darkest moment in our history.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am very grateful to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee for all that they did for me and for many survivors throughout Europe. It’s thanks to them that I am still alive today.
I must also thank the Prasquier family, from Paris, of whom I am very fond. Thanks to all the people who were with me and gave me the moral support that enabled me to get through the terrible moments of the Second World War.