Inside the Gas Chambers

by Shlomo Venezia

  Later on, I was sent to the sanatorium at Forlanini. I was the only ex-deportee there, together with several other tuberculosis sufferers. I stayed there from July 1945 until November 1946 and made some good friends. I was the only one who didn’t get any visits from my family, but everyone shared with me the things that were brought. There, the men’s hospital was opposite the women’s hospital. When we talked to each other through the windows, the girls called me bruno¸ the one with brown hair. This name stuck and all of them got to know me by that name. I didn’t want to reassume my old first name, in case it all started again. So, instead of Shlomo or Solomon, my official first name, I became “Bruno.”

  Did you tell them what you’d endured in the camps?

  No, absolutely nothing, not to anyone. For a long time, nobody knew that I was Jewish. Nobody asked me, since they barely even suspected the existence of the camps. I was the only Jew in that hospital. After some time, I was contacted by a young Jewish woman from the DELASEM.2 Her name was Bianca Pinkerle and she went round the hospitals asking whether there were any people there who were on their own, without families. She lived in Trieste, but she traveled the distance every fortnight to visit me.

  One day, she asked me whether by any chance I knew a certain Niccolò Sagi, who had also been deported to Auschwitz. I told her I didn’t know people’s names, but I might be able to recognize faces. The next time, she brought a photo. I recognized the man straightaway: he was particularly tall and red-haired (I could tell as much even though when I knew him his head was shaved). I’d seen him in the Sonderkommando and I knew he’d been killed during the revolt. She told me that he’d been deported with his son Luigi. She wanted to gather as much information as possible to transmit it to the wife of this Niccolò Sagi, who was waiting for him in Trieste. Years later, Luigi Sagi became one of my best friends.

  In November 1946, Bianca suggested that I be transferred to a hospital in Merano, an institution run by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.3 She went with me by ambulance to Florence, then I continued on to Merano. I stayed in that hospital for several years. As well as providing treatment, the “Joint” helped patients to be re-integrated into professional life. They paid for a house that we shared with two or three other people, so we could learn gradually to get back into active life. With an instructor who’d come from Venice with the express purpose of giving us lessons, I learned to work in leather. Very few of the patients survived their illness. Subsequently, the Joint decided to shut down the Merano hospital since several patients had decided to emigrate to Israel, Canada, or the United States, thanks again to that organization. Those who stayed were sent to Grottaferrata, near Rome, where we were given a house and other assistance. They gave us some money every month, which meant that I could take English lessons and, later on, lessons at the hotel-management school on Lake Como, with my friend Luigi Sagi.

  All in all, I spent seven years, after my liberation from the camps, in various hospitals. I lost the use of one lung, but the care I was given every day, following different treatments, finally led to my recovery.

  How did you meet your wife?

  I met her in the English classes I was taking in Grottaferrata. Marika was only just seventeen, I was thirty-two. Her father had fled from Hungary during the war, which she had spent in Nice with her grandmother. Then, when she came to live near Rome, we met. She came to join me when I started working in a hotel in Rimini and we got married. I was lucky, since it wasn’t easy to find a woman like her – one who could put up with my personality. We had three sons together: Mario, Alessandro, and Alberto.

  When did you first hear about your brother and sister after the Liberation?

  I received news about my brother while I was still in the Ebensee camp, after the Liberation. The men who could still walk went to other camps to see if they could get any news about their friends and family. One day I met a Greek friend, David Tabò, who was in the same camp as my brother. He told me that my brother was ill, but still alive. I later found out that he had been in a coma when the Liberation occurred. He came out of his coma three months later, in a good hospital. He didn’t know what had happened, or where he was. I received letters from him while I was in the hospital at Udine. Then I saw him again, seven years after the Liberation. He was traveling through Italy to emigrate to the United States. I went to meet him at the port, we spent a few hours together, and then he left. I saw my sister again in Israel in 1957. She had picked up my trail at the hospital, thanks to my brotherin-law, Aaron Mano, whom she had married before going to live in Israel.

  Of all our family, only three of us survived. That’s already a miracle, when you think of all the families who were completely wiped out, from which no one is left to preserve any memories. For example, my mother’s brothers, with their wives and children…. Nobody came back. The family name of their branch, “Angel,” died out with them.

  What were their names?

  My mother’s elder brother was Avraham Angel; I don’t remember his wife’s first name, but I know that his two sons were called Sylvain and Haïm. I even still have a photo of Sylvain when he was about ten, posing with a cigarette in his hand, as they did in those days. Then came Haïm, who was married but didn’t have any children. Then Meïr, who also was married and without children. The youngest of my uncles was called Sabbetaï; he had two daughters, but unfortunately I’ve forgotten their names.

  When did you start to tell the story of what you had seen and experienced in Birkenau?

  I started to talk about it very belatedly, since people didn’t want to listen, they didn’t want to believe it had happened. It wasn’t that I was unwilling to talk. When I came out of the hospital, I found myself in the company of a Jewish man and I started to talk. All of a sudden, I realized that, instead of looking at me, he was looking behind me at someone who was making signs to him. I turned around and was surprised to catch one of his friends gesturing that I was completely mad. I shut up and from that time on I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. For me, it was painful to talk, so when I came across people who didn’t believe me, I told myself there was no point.

  It was only in 1992, forty-seven years after my liberation, that I started to talk again. The problem of anti-Semitism was resurfacing in Italy. You saw more and more swastikas scribbled onto the walls…. I returned to Auschwitz for the first time in December 1992. I’d hesitated for a long time before going along with the school that had invited me, since I didn’t feel ready to go back to hell. My friend Luigi Sagi went with me. I didn’t know that the Nazis had blown up the crematoria when they left, so I was surprised to see the ruins. I returned several times the following years. But the Polish guides made me furious: they didn’t take all the groups to Birkenau and presented history as if everything had happened in Auschwitz I.

  These days, do you feel the need to bear witness?

  When I feel well, yes. But it’s difficult. And I’m a meticulous person, who likes things to be clear and done properly. When I go to tell my story in a school and the teacher hasn’t prepared the pupils properly, I feel deeply wounded. Once I’ve happened to be in a classroom before the lady teacher arrived and a kid came to ask me what we were going to talk about. But, overall, bearing witness in schools gives me considerable satisfaction. I sometimes receive very moving letters from people who were touched by the story I told.

  It comforts me to know that I’m not talking in a vacuum, since bearing witness exacts a huge sacrifice. It reawakens a nagging pain that never leaves me. Everything’s going fine and then, all of a sudden, I’m in despair. As soon as I feel a little joy, something inside me closes up immediately. It’s like an inner flaw; I call it “the survivors’ disease.” It’s not typhus, tuberculosis, or the other diseases that people sometimes caught. It’s a disease that gnaws away at us from within and destroys any feeling of joy. I have been dragging it about with me ever since I spent that time suffering in the camp. This disease never leaves me a moment o
f joy or carefree happiness; it’s a mood that forever erodes my strength.

  Do you think that there is any difference between you, as a survivor of the Sonderkommando, and the other survivors from Auschwitz?

  Yes, I think so, even if I know that saying so hurts some people’s feelings. The other survivors certainly suffered from cold and hunger more than I did, but they weren’t constantly in contact with the dead. This vision, day after day, of all those victims who had been gassed…. The fact of seeing all those groups arriving and entering without hope, having lost all joy. They were all at the end of their strength; it was really terrible to see. If I say that the experience of being in the Sonderkommando weighed much more heavily, this was because I had occasion, in Melk and Ebensee, to share the common experience of other deportees.

  Have you talked about all of this to your wife and children?

  No, absolutely not. It wouldn’t have done me any good to talk to them about it. On the contrary, it would have inflicted on them a weight that was useless, and difficult to bear. Only recently did they start to discover my story. I did all I could to avoid them being marked by it. But I know that I couldn’t behave like a normal father who helps his children to do their homework and merrily plays with them. I was lucky to have a very intelligent wife who was able to manage that side of things.

  What was destroyed in you by that extreme experience?

  Life. Since then I’ve never had a normal life. I’ve never been able to pretend that everything was all right and go off dancing, like others, without a care in the world….

  Everything takes me back to the camp. Whatever I do, whatever I see, my mind keeps harking back to the same place. It’s as if the “work” I was forced to do there had never really left my head….

  Nobody ever really gets out of the Crematorium.

  1 A clandestine defense organization in Palestine during the British mandate, fighting to defend the Jews and establish the State of Israel. Immediately after the war, the Haganah helped many survivors of the Shoah to emigrate to Palestine.

  2 The DELASEM (Delegazione Assistenza degli Emigranti Ebrei/ Delegation for the Assistance of Jewish Emigrants) was the main Jewish Italian organization for giving aid to survivors of the Shoah.

  3 The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) was created in 1914 to provide aid to needy Jews throughout the world.

  HISTORICAL NOTES

  THE SHOAH, AUSCHWITZ, AND THE SONDERKOMMANDO

  by Marcello Pezzetti

  The process of persecution of the Jews occurred in three phases:

  1. from 1933 to 1939 (“The Jews in the Reich: From Discrimination to Emigration”);

  2. from 1939 to 1941 (“The War: From Ghettoization to the Formulation of the ‘Final Solution’ (Endlösung)”);

  3. from 1941 to 1945 (“Mass Extermination: The Shoah”).

  THE JEWS IN THE REICH: FROM DISCRIMINATION TO EMIGRATION (1933–1939)

  The first phase concerned almost exclusively the Jews within the German Reich.1 During this period, Nazi policies aimed at the objective of Jewish emigration, thereby manifesting the first enactment of anti-Semitism that hitherto had been simply the expression of a political ideology. Hitler, constrained by the pressure of international opinion and a certain proportion of German opinion, proceeded stage by stage in this first period. The beginning, on April 1, 1933, of the first campaign boycotting Jewish shops (an action which aroused no more than a muffled reaction in the German population and an equally muted reaction abroad) constituted the first real attack on the domestic national Jewish community via the professional sphere.

  On April 7, 1933, the “Law on the Restoration of the Civil Service” for the first time provided a juridical definition of “non-Aryan,” whereby it was enough for a single one of the grandparents not to be Aryan for an individual to be defined as “non-Aryan.” This definition, known as the “Arierparagraph,” constituted the point of departure for all successive persecutions meted out to Jews and also to Roma and Sinti (Gypsies).

  On the basis of this law, several arrangements targeted the various social and professional categories within the German Jewish community, beginning with jurists and doctors, then teachers and university professors, and including even the sectors of agriculture, journalism, and indeed sport (such as the aryanization of sports complexes, decreed on May 24, 1933).

  After a period of relative calm, a new and violent campaign of anti-Jewish propaganda was launched in 1935. Its culminating point was the promulgation of the “Law for the Defense of German Blood and Honor” and the “Law on Reich Citizenship,” better known as the “Nuremberg Laws.” These laws categorized the Jews as “purely Jewish,” “first-degree mixed” (Mischlinge), and “second-degree mixed.” For the first time in history, these measures imposed the isolation of Jews from the rest of the population on the basis of biological factors. The consequences of this decision led to the exclusion of Jews from all forms of social life. From November 14, 1935, Jews were stripped of their civil rights (notably the right to vote). Civil servants, university professors, teachers, doctors, and lawyers, who had until then been able to take advantage of exceptional dispensations, were all dismissed. Mixed marriages and marriages between “Mischlinge” were forbidden. Any sexual relationships between Jews and Aryans were considered as “a race crime” (Rassenschande); this was the most fundamental indication of anti-Semitism. Approximately 502,000 Jews considered “pure” (i.e., completely Jewish), and 250,000 persons considered as “Mischlinge,” were affected by these laws.

  In the first phase (1933–39), 1938 turned out to be a decisive year. On April 26, the Jews were ordered to declare all their belongings, which marked the beginning of the process of the systematic “aryanization” of Jewish businesses and struck a profound blow against those who were seeking to emigrate. March 1938 marked the time of the “Anschluss” (the “annexation” of Austria to the territory of the Reich). All the anti-Jewish measures promulgated in Germany over the first six years of the regime were automatically applied to Austria. That country thus became a testing ground for adapting, in occupied countries, the anti-Semitic policies decreed by the Nazi regime. This year also saw the failure of various international bodies to find a “solution” to the problem of refugees, mainly Jews. Apart from the patent failure of the League of Nations, the Evian Conference, organized in July to solve the question, failed lamentably because no country, not even the United States, declared itself ready to welcome in threatened Jews. The existing quotas were rigorously enforced.2

  On November 9, the “Pogromnacht” (generally called “Reichskristallnacht”) occurred;3 this marked the end of spontaneous anti-Semitic acts and reassured the bureaucrats that the German people as a whole were indifferent to the anti-Jewish policies of the regime. The pogrom was rapidly followed by a new wave of mass arrests.

  The fact that Jews were imprisoned in Lager was not in itself new; but hitherto, this had not been a mass phenomenon. So this was the first time that Jews as such, simply because they were Jewish, were included within the system of the “concentration camps.”

  This “system” had been operating since spring 1933, when, after the burning of the Reichstag, the regime adopted a series of preventive measures targeting the expression of any form of political opposition. The people arrested (Communists, pacifists, Social Democrats, trade union members, Jews active in workers’ organizations, and certain non-aligned churchmen) were imprisoned as a measure of “protective detention” (Schutzhaft)4 in a number of camps, among which the most infamous was Dachau. The prisoners were subjected to particularly difficult conditions of detention characterized by violence, arbitrary torture, and, in some cases, executions. However, the length of time for which they were detained and the conditions in which they were kept could vary, and several prisoners were released after a few months of imprisonment.5 In 1934, Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS, managed to bring all the camps under his total control and to embark on a broad p
rocess of reorganization of the Nazi concentration camp system.6

  Between 1936 and 1937, developments within this system rested on two main factors. On the one side, there was the realization of the four-year plan defined by Hermann Göring, whose main objective was German rearmament (in principle forbidden by the Versailles Treaty). In anticipation of an approaching war, the plan provided for the use of the prison workforce in factories run by the SS.7 The other decisive factor was the extension of the principle of “protective detention” to other social categories defined more broadly to include all persons considered “harmful” to the “Volksgemeinschaft” (the “community of the people”): common law criminals, the work-shy, persons infected by contagious diseases (especially VD), prostitutes, homosexuals, vagrants, alcoholics, psychopaths, and disturbers of public order (including dangerous drivers), as well as possibly some nightclub and cabaret performers and professional dancers, all of them considered as “asocial” or antisocial, as were Jehovah’s Witnesses and Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), who were deemed “parasites on the nation” (“Volksschädlinge”).8

  From 1936 onwards, five large KL (Konzentrationslager) were opened to intern these new categories and the regime’s opponents: Sachsenhausen (1936), Buchenwald (1937), Flossenbürg (1938), Mauthausen (1938, after the “Anschluss”), and Ravensbrück (1939, a women’s camp).9 The increase in the population of the concentration camps led to the adoption of a system to designate various categories by different-colored triangles: red for political prisoners, black for the “asocial,” brown for Gypsies, purple for Jehovah’s Witnesses (Bibelforscher), pink for homosexuals, green for common law criminals, blue for the stateless, and two crossed triangles, one of them yellow, for Jews.