Inside the Gas Chambers

by Shlomo Venezia

  Still, one man in the Sonderkommando was very thin and certainly ill. I think he was a Polish intellectual, someone respected, since everyone left him alone. Lemke protected him and the guards didn’t say anything. I never saw him working. He didn’t even need to come down to roll call. Until the day when Moll arrived and demanded that everyone come down. For him, it was the end. But it’s a long story and I need to go back to the beginning.

  It all happened a short time after my arrival in the Sonderkommando. Some camp prisoners were still working on the extension of the railway. Those right at the end of the ramp, in other words near the Crematorium, were Jews from Rhodes; they spoke Ladino, as we did. They’d heard that there were Greeks working in the Crematorium and that our group didn’t lack anything. The German allowed them to sing as they worked, so they made up a tune and asked us, in Ladino, to send them some food and clothes. After some hesitation, we finally prepared a little parcel with a loaf wrapped up in shirts, and threw it over the barbed wire to them. The first parcel got across and the German guard watching the prisoners let them take it. But just as we were throwing the second, Moll’s motorbike appeared. He got off in the Crematorium, demanding to know who had thrown the parcel. As he didn’t have time to sort it out there and then, he promised he’d come back the next day to punish the guilty men.

  And back he came the following morning. We were immediately ordered to assemble in front of the Crematorium, but there were two people missing from roll call: the man I’m calling “the intellectual” and … I. As chance would have it, that morning I was outside the building, in the distant corner where the ashes were ground up. Far from the others, absorbed in my own thoughts, I didn’t hear the kapos ordering everyone to assemble. A kapo found me and ordered me to get a move on. I started to run the minute I heard Malahamoves shouting. I was terror-stricken at the idea of what he was going to do to me. I couldn’t stop thinking of that man he’d killed in front of me, in Bunker 2. I had the end of a cigarette dangling from my lips and the Mütze (beret) that we had to take off in front of the Germans. I ran and saw Moll only at the last second, turning onto the square where the roll call was held. I spat out the cigarette, but almost forgot to remove my cap. Of course, he started yelling. Then he pushed me, and stuck out his leg so that I’d trip over it. You had to get to your feet right away, otherwise the punishment was even harsher. He hit me a second time; I fell over and got up again. Then he told me to line up with the others. I was convinced he was going to take advantage of this to shoot me in the back. I don’t know if I flew or ran, but in any case I got to my place in record time.

  The man who had thrown the parcels confessed. Everybody knew that, if no one said anything, the punishment would be collective and just as painful. He was punished with twenty-five lashes of the whip. In the sadistic system of the Germans, it was one of the deportees who had to administer the whipping to his comrade’s back. The Germans checked that the lashes were strong enough, and if they weren’t, both men were punished. I can say that I was lucky: I was given just two lashes, so I got off lightly.

  As for the “intellectual,” he was obliged to come down, in spite of the kapo’s explanations. I’d never really seen him before. He was pale, skinny, and sickly. In my opinion he must have been over forty-five. Before he came down, he managed to hide a blanket under his clothes and thus appear less skinny than he really was. Moll was furious at having been kept waiting and flew into a rage at him, ordering him to be whipped. He chose a Russian for the task, showing him how hard he needed to hit the man. To begin with, protected by the blanket, he didn’t suffer too much under the sting of the lashes. But instead of pretending to be in pain, he just stood there. Moll was sufficiently used to this kind of punishment to know how prisoners were supposed to react. He wasn’t taken in for long and ordered the prisoner to take his trousers down. When he saw the blanket, his anger intensified and he literally beat the poor man to death.

  Did any members of the Sonderkommando try to escape?

  To my knowledge, this happened only once during my time in the Sonderkommando. I know that, outside the Sonderkommando, it happened several times and some men managed to escape.8 But when they told their stories, nobody believed them. The governments, Churchill and the rest, weren’t bothered about the Jews; they simply wanted to win the war. If they’d wanted to save the Jews, they could have done so earlier. In any case, as far as the men from my Crematorium who tried to escape are concerned, I know that it wasn’t planned. They tried to do so when the opportunity presented itself.

  It was two Greeks who made the attempt: Hugo Venezia (the son of the Baruch I’ve already mentioned) and Alex Errera. Nobody ever remembers their story, but Errera, Alekos as the Greeks called him, was a real hero. Before being deported, he’d been a captain in the Greek navy and he was greatly respected by us. One day, the Germans ordered these two to accompany the truck that had come to fetch the ashes, so as to throw them into the river Soła. The two men had to scatter the ashes in the water by placing a cistern on the ground and gathering up the last ashes with a spade to make sure that absolutely no trace remained.

  That day I knew that something had happened when the alarm was sounded. In the camp, there usually were several types of siren signals, but the one that sounded continuously meant the situation was serious. For the Germans, the escape of a member of the Sonderkommando was really serious; they absolutely couldn’t allow a man who had seen the inside of the gas chambers to get away. They immediately increased the number of guards around the Crematorium and ordered interminable roll calls throughout the camp. I found out that, for some people, these roll calls had lasted all night, but not for us; the Germans didn’t want our work to be interrupted for too long.

  We found out what had happened when Hugo Venezia returned. He told us that the SS man accompanying them had gotten in next to the driver and they’d stayed in the rear with the load of ashes. Before they reached the river, Errera had devised a plan and told Hugo what he’d need to do. Errera was to knock down the guard who’d come to open the door for them, while Hugo would go and take the driver by surprise, before jumping into the river. When the truck stopped, they waited for the SS man to come around and tell them to get out; while he was opening up, Errera knocked him out with a great blow of his spade. When he heard the noise, the driver, who was reading a paper, looked through his rear-view mirror and came out of the truck with his pistol in his hand. Hugo Venezia told us he’d been unable to do anything; he stood there paralyzed, frozen stiff with fear when faced with the driver pointing his pistol. He was a young man of barely eighteen, whereas Errera had experience and certainly greater strength of character too. Without waiting, he immediately jumped into the river and started swimming to the other shore. The driver shot at him, but the regulation revolver’s range couldn’t reach him. So, seizing the guard’s rifle that was lying on the ground, the German started firing off those “dum-dum” bullets that are designed to fragment inside the body and cause the maximum amount of damage. Errera was hit in the thigh, but he continued until he had reached the other bank. The alarm was raised, and the manhunt that was immediately organized lasted all night and the following day. But the wound must have been grave; Errera must have lost a lot of blood and he did not survive his escape. His body was found and brought back to Crematorium II. In the meantime, Hugo, brought back by the driver, told us everything he’d seen. The very next day, the Germans came for him and he was never seen again. As for Errera, he was brought back for an autopsy. Then his body, totally dismembered and disfigured, was exhibited on a table in the yard of the Crematorium. They obliged all of us to pass in front of the table to look at the deformed and unrecognizable face of our old companion. The Germans were extremely agitated, and anyone who looked away was beaten with a stick. Then we carried him into the room where the ovens stood and recited a kaddish before burning his body. Nobody ever talks about this episode, since nobody has really carried out a study on the fate of the Greeks
at Birkenau.

  1 For more information, see the historical note, p. 172.

  2 This was a sector inside the Birkenau camp in which objects belonging to the deported Jews were sorted through and stored; the Nazis called it Effektenlager or Kanada II.

  3 SS-Hauptscharführer Otto Moll entered Birkenau to run Bunkers 1 and 2. He spent some time as Lagerführer in the subsidiary camps of Fürstengrube and Gleiwitz I, before being recalled to Birkenau in May 1944, where he stayed until September; he was in charge of all the crematoria. He was later transferred to Dachau. On December 13, 1945, Moll was sentenced to death at the Dachau trials. He was hanged in the Landsberg prison on May 28, 1946.

  4 David Olère, a Jewish-French painter of Polish origin, was deported from France in March 1943. He was taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he was assigned to the Sonderkommando of Crematorium III. He was, like Shlomo, one of the few survivors of these special Kommandos. His drawings were made shortly after the Liberation and are an exceptional visual testimony to the extermination process in the gas chambers. With the kind permission of his son Alexandre Oler, some of David’s drawings are reproduced here, illustrating Shlomo Venezia’s words. See also the historical note “About David Olère” at the end of this volume.

  5 Lemke (Chaim) Pliszko, born in 1918 in Czerwony Bor, was deported on January 16, 1943 from the Łomża transit camp.

  6 By late spring 1944, five cremation ditches in the open were used within the area of Crematorium V. Three were in the space that faced the entrance of the biggest gas chamber and two on the side of the Crematorium, between the building and the barbed wire.

  7 This was probably SS-Unterscharführer Johann Gorges, who worked in Auschwitz between spring 1941 and January 1945. He died a free man in his home town, Trier, on July 18, 1971.

  8 Several members attempted to escape from the Sonderkommando.

  4

  SONDERKOMMANDO: THE WORK CONTINUES

  From the moment we started working in the Crematorium, the Germans made us sleep there. There was a place set up for us, under the roof, above the room with the furnaces. The roof had a mansard, but it was quite high; as far as the bed, you could stand completely upright. Everyone had his own bed, unlike in the other barracks in the camp where the prisoners had to squeeze together in groups of five on filthy bunks. The two rows of beds were separated by a set of shelves extending the full length of the room. These shelves contained over two hundred urns all lined up, and all identical. I wanted to know what was in the urns, so I took one and opened it up. It was filled with a very fine ash and had a little medallion on it, bearing a number. It must have been the identity number of a prisoner. I later discovered that the Germans kept these urns for the prisoners’ families. This was certainly not done for the Jews, but for the Christians who’d died in the camp, from starvation, illness, or whatever. The Germans informed the family that the prisoner had died of an illness and that it was possible to collect the ashes in exchange for a payment of two hundred marks. In fact, in each of those urns were the mixed ashes of several people and the urns may not have contained a single trace of the person designated.

  Do you remember any other members of the Sonderkommando who were with you? Did you see any French Jews, for example?

  I remember a few people, especially the Greeks who were with me. But the majority of members of the Sonderkommando were Poles. Some also came from other countries in Eastern Europe, but all of them could speak Yiddish, except for us, the Greeks, who spoke Ladino among ourselves.

  I didn’t see any Frenchmen, otherwise I’d have spoken with them. David Olère, for instance – I didn’t know that he’d been deported from France; as far as I was concerned, he was a Pole who spoke Yiddish. I never heard him speak French, but in any case, as I’ve said before, we didn’t often speak together. Most of the time I didn’t even know the others’ names. If we needed anything, we just said “Du!” “You!” I spoke a bit of German, but certain Greeks, who didn’t speak Yiddish, didn’t even know a word of German. In general, we signed to each other with our hands, or our feet … whatever way we could.

  Were there any non-Jews with you?

  No, all the men working in the Sonderkommando were Jews. The only exceptions, as far as I’m aware, were a few Soviet prisoners of war sent to our crematorium. But they didn’t work there, or at least, I never saw them working. They merely recovered what they could from the victims’ clothes. In Crematorium II, there was also a non-Jewish German prisoner. His name was Karol, and he was a common law criminal prisoner. Everyone was convinced that he’d been sent there to act as a spy for the Germans. He was always elegant but he behaved like a pig. The men tried to avoid him as much as possible. I’ll have occasion to say more about him when we come to speak about the Sonderkommando revolt.

  As for the few Russians I’ve just mentioned, they’d initially been interned in the camp at Auschwitz I. But when there were too many of them together there they were forever organizing escape plans. So, in order to avoid this, the Germans separated them out into different sectors of the camp. In my crematorium, there must have been six or eight of them, all soldiers. I remember two of them in particular, one called Misha and the other called Ivan. If my memory serves me right, there was a third called Sasha. Ivan was the youngest; he had a child’s chubby face. We communicated with our hands and feet, and I found out that they’d been taken prisoner when they tried to parachute down behind the front line.

  In the Crematorium, I never saw them work. The kapo didn’t ask anything of them and left them alone, since, unlike us Jews, they weren’t there to work. There was considerable animosity between the Russians and the Poles, especially the Polish Jews. But they didn’t have any problems with us Jews from Greece. All they ever did was drink vodka, eat sausages, and smoke cigarettes. One day, one of the Russians invited me to share his feast. He said to me, “Grecki, idi cyuda!” “Greek guy, come here!” I hesitated to go over, since I hadn’t understood and was sure he’d insulted me, as the Russians habitually insulted everyone. When I went over, he offered me a glass of vodka. It was the first time I’d had any; I took a sip, but they forced me to knock it back in one gulp. I almost choked to death. A Russian handed me a hunk of bread and told me to breathe out hard into it. That’s how the burning sensation went away.

  They had no difficulty in getting as much vodka and food as they wanted. When the groups arrived and finished undressing, the Russians joined the prisoners whose job it was to bundle the clothes together (as we’d done on the first day in the Crematorium). But instead of really making bundles to send to the Kanada, they had just one aim: to rummage round in the clothes to find any valuables hidden among them. Everyone did this: some were simply trying to find something to eat, others were after valuables. In this way we could salvage various things and not suffer too much from hunger. We also took advantage of the situation to change our clothes when they got too ragged. We just had to throw the old ones onto the pile of clothes to be sent to the Kanada and then to help ourselves, discreetly, from the heap left by the victims. We had to make sure that we weren’t caught in the act, but usually it was easy. The Russians did nothing else. And then they had their system for exchanging these objects for vodka or food from outside the camp. Those things came into the camp thanks to the Polish Vorarbeiter (foremen) from the town of Oświęcim. The Poles were taking a risk, but they profited from the exchange. For example, an old newspaper could be exchanged for a gold ring. In general, these highly risky exchanges passed through several hands and took place discreetly when it was time for the men to get their soup. The kapo would send four men to fetch the soup (even through two were enough) because this was the only time when the men in the Sonderkommando could have any contact with other prisoners and thus with the outside world. But it wasn’t easy, since, in order to avoid this happening, the Germans always made the Sonderkommando go first. In those cases, we never had to wait. But in spite of everything, they managed to establish contact.

&n
bsp; So there could, in spite of everything, be relations between the men in the Sonderkommando and other prisoners?

  Yes, the men who were designated by the kapo to go and fetch the soup managed to establish these contacts. In fact, that’s partially what made it possible to organize the revolt. The women’s camp was another venue. For this, one had to bribe the German guard so that he’d agree to take prisoners into the women’s camp and turn a blind eye. Lemke would sometimes organize little feasts by exchanging the jewels that were given to him when they were found [in the clothes left by those who were gassed], so he could invite the German guards and ensure they’d be indulgent. But obviously, going into the women’s camp wasn’t simply done for the purpose of organizing the revolt. Even if it didn’t happen often, I suppose some went to see their girlfriends. And once they were in, if they did do anything with the women, I don’t know, I wasn’t there, so I can’t say.

  Did they do so, in your view?

  Yes, I think some of them did. Frankly, I myself couldn’t have done so. I don’t even know how they could have felt any desire. After the Liberation, I heard some absurd rumors about what was supposed to have happened in the Sonderkommando with dead women. But these are just lies, sick rumors initiated by people trying to undermine and discredit the men working in the Sonderkommando. I never heard anything like that during the eight months I spent there.