by Alan Gold
I returned to work silently and smiled at him. For the first time, I reached over and touched him on his hand, a gesture of friendship, of comradeship. ‘I owe you my life,’ I said gently.
‘I feel I’ve let you down. As I’ve let all the others down when they were taken away from me,’ he said.
I squeezed his arm. ‘You’ve given me a reason to live.’
But he shook his head and whispered, ‘All I’ve given you is a few months reprieve from the inevitable.’
I could be wrong, but I believe that there might have been tears in his eyes.
Then we continued to work, silently, until the end of the day. He didn’t look at me again. I just thanked him for being a truly good man, climbed down, and joined the others in hell.
Tell me, my friend, the reader of this document, this testimony, do you have any idea of what a Sonderkommando did in Auschwitz? And in the other death camps that the world is just beginning to learn about? Can you for one moment imagine the living hell in which we worked?
But the question is, do I want to tell you? And if I did tell you, would you believe me, sitting in your comfortable chair and reading this memoir and thinking to yourself, ‘My God, but Gutman had it tough in the war!’
Maybe I should leave you thinking that Auschwitz was simply a place which wasn’t very nice; a bit like a refuse dump, or a strict prison, and now that the war’s over, it would be a good idea if we human beings never allowed such a place to exist again; maybe that’s how I should allow you to read this memoir, thinking that it must have been pretty dirty and disease ridden; thinking that some people might have died there, and wasn’t that a tragedy?
Yes, maybe I should allow you those thoughts. Why, after all, should I burden you with reality? I assume that you had nothing to do with the war, nor with the creation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
But no! That’s not what I intend to do. I said right at the beginning of this, my memoir, that I, Joachim Gutman, am witness to unspeakable acts. Yet if I don’t speak of them, who will? Who is left to act as witness? For if I don’t bear witness, then they will have won, and that is something which I cannot permit.
I said that right at the beginning of my memoirs—go back to the beginning and read what I said if you don’t believe me—because nothing will stop me from telling you, and everybody else, what happened. For it is important both to me … and to you … that you are made aware of every evil which went on in the death camps so that these things can never—never—be repeated in the future of mankind. Oh, I know what they’re now saying about the Germans; that they were all guilty. Well, they weren’t. Many were! But there were also men like Deutch … men who risked their lives for a Jew. But let me get back to my memories of those days …
I became a Sonderkommando. We were the people who did all the inhuman, dirty work. Like I’ve said, on average we lasted about three months; then many of us would simply stop working. Just like that. We’d stop doing our assigned tasks. Maybe we went crazy with what we were doing. Maybe we lost touch with reality. Maybe we were so struck dumb by the inhuman surroundings that death would have been a holiday.
Whatever the reason, one moment we’d be working at pushing men and women and children to their deaths in the gas chambers, next moment we’d be pulling their twisted corpses out and sending the thousands of dead bodies, every day, by the elevators from hell, up to the retorts for burning. But then a look would come over our faces. Suddenly one of us would stop the struggle of trying to untangle arms and legs, locked in a macabre dance of death. We’d look up as we emptied the gas chambers of the latest batch of murdered Jews; then we’d smile at our colleagues; then we’d strip off our clothes and walk willingly, smiling, singing a song, into the gas chambers and the ovens to luxuriate in the peace and quiet and release of our death.
We couldn’t go on anymore. We didn’t want to live this life. Why? Because we’d seen the reality. We were part of the killing. We were part of the machinery. We were the cogs which made the deaths happen; the oil which allowed the engines of death to run smoothly. And there were so many people to kill. Did we feel pride in our special situation—the slightly better food, the slightly better sleeping accommodation? Does a man about to hang feel privileged and enjoy the taste of a steak when he’s eating his last meal?
In the entire complex of Auschwitz-Birkenau, there were about a thousand Sonderkommando, divided up into different units. Each of the units was given special jobs to do. None of us was spared the very worst jobs; but the guards realised that we had to be rotated regularly, or we’d suicide too quickly, and that would cause disruption to their precious rosters, to the good order and the smooth running of the establishment. And God forbid anything at all should happen to disturb the production line!
Some of us had to meet new arrivals off the trains which arrived two or three a day. No, not to greet them and show them around like a tour guide. Our job was to climb into the carriages after the living had jumped down, and carry off the dead. They would usually be older people, grandmothers and grandfathers … or the young children, whose hands, now permanent claws, had gone cold with death, as though still trying to clasp the arms of their mother or a father who had been pulled screaming hysterically away by the guards.
Others of us Sonderkommandos had to stand on the ground where the train pulled up, and help the guards herd people into their correct lines … men to the right, women to the left. Then they’d go for a quick shuffle past the doctors, who would select those capable of working into one line, and direct the old and the young incapable of working into another … one which led straight to the crematoria. Our job was to ensure that there wasn’t a riot. Not that the poor bastards knew what was happening. The orchestra was playing, and they were told that they were being sent to be cleaned up, and to be given a strong cup of coffee after the ordeal of the train journey. And we, the Sonderkommandos, were complicit in their deception. If we’d opened our mouths to warn them, we would have died beside them.
Others of us, on a rotating shift, would greet those about to be exterminated at the changing rooms. Sometimes we’d hand out towels and soap, to prevent what would undoubtedly have been mass panic and an affray if they thought they were going to die. But in the changing rooms, we had to help the elderly and the very young undress. Everything had to be done quickly, if the production line wasn’t to be held up.
The extermination programme was under the control of the Political Department of the camp, and they were infinitely more ruthless in their determination to follow the Führer’s orders than were the guards in the concentration camp proper. They were killing thousands a day, but that’s something I’ll come to later.
In the beginning, when I first started to undress the elderly and the young, I felt hideous, as though I was prying into someone’s bedroom and watching them in their most intimate moments. There was nothing pleasant about doing it. They were smelly (not that I wasn’t!) because they’d been travelling by train for upwards of two days without a break and had had no food, air or water. Their clothes were filthy from the journey, and because many had come out of the living hell of a ghetto, and were exhausted, it made the removal of their coats and dresses and jackets and undergarments incredibly difficult.
And of course, we were beaten mercilessly by members of the Political Department and their special guards, if our ‘batch’ wasn’t ready right on time for the next stage of their journey into death. So, as these Jews were going to die within minutes anyway, why should we make their last moments on earth more pleasant and risk a beating and probable death ourselves? We, after all, were the living. So we pulled and tugged and tore their clothes off their backs. When they complained and cried in pain, we said that they’d be issued new and pretty clothes in a few moments after their shower, so why worry about their old things?
Eventually, they all shuffled out of the changing rooms, naked and embarrassed and exhausted, their skinny hands desperately trying to cover their intimate parts. The m
en looked horrified; the women looked down at the ground; the children were terrified. Only occasionally did a woman (never a man, mind you, always a woman) stand magnificently, knowing by instinct and deduction where she’d soon be going, and glare with utter contempt at the guards and the Sonderkommandos. She wouldn’t hide her breasts; she’d stand solidly upright and say to them wordlessly, ‘You can kill my body, but you and those like you will never ever kill my soul, which belongs to the Almighty.’
Almost all of the others, though, left the changing rooms in tears, or in controlled hysteria. Many were jabbering in Yiddish because they were from Poland or somewhere in the east like the Ukraine. But I understood much of what they were saying. They were asking how their God could have allowed this to happen to them, questioning what was the purpose of living if they were to be stripped naked by men with guns and forced to parade around like animals in a zoo. By the time they’d reached the entry to the ‘shower’ rooms, the men and women were crying, weeping, terrified. In the beginning, when I first came there, everything left me bereft. I thought of my grandparents, my parents. But soon, I became hardened to it. All I wanted to do was live.
When the old people and the young children had left the changing room to walk to their gassing, we were then ordered to clear the clothes from the floor and make the changing room presentable for the next batch of inmates. And it … oh God, I’m so ashamed … it gave us precious minutes to do things with their clothes. We were the only ones who knew for sure where they would be going, what would be happening to them, and the certainty that they wouldn’t be returning on their one-way journey to heaven.
On instructions from the guards, they had left all their clothes on the floor, so we Sonderkommandos quickly searched their pockets, where we’d often find scraps of food they’d managed to save from the journey. Stale bread crusts, mouldy, filthy meats, cheeses eaten almost to the rind, pickles … anything. And the moment we found it, we’d gobble it down, because any extra food was a gift from God.
These things were what we were forced to do to the Hungarians and the Russians and the Poles and the German Jews. However, I quickly learned not to consider them Jews … or even Hungarians or Germans or whatever. Nor even human beings. I could only think of them as things, objects … Golems. It was the only way I could survive without screaming. It was what I did so that I didn’t go insane. I had to fix in my mind that these weren’t people. I had to view them as lifeless, as mechanical, as automatons on their way to the efficiency of German industry’s glorious destruction furnaces in order to be dismantled into their component parts and returned to the earth so that the new Germany could grow on fertile soil. I had become part of the machinery of destruction.
These people we were party to destroying, these in my eyes were anything but living, breathing humanity, because if I recognised their humanity, I would have committed suicide after the first day.
I knew something about the Golem, the soulless creature which legend has it was made from clay by Rabbi Judah Löw of Prague. I’d been to Czechoslovakia before the war on a visit with my father when he was advising the Czech government on some legal matters, and I’d visited the cemetery. I’d read the legend. So long as I didn’t view these people as human beings, I could live with myself.
Don’t dare criticise me, you reader, sitting there in your comfortable armchair, reading this. What I did, I had to do! It’s called survival.
And now I have to tell you what I did when I was a Sonder-kommando. And believe me, what I’m about to tell you isn’t pleasant. Of course, much happens in war which is horrific. What happened in the Pacific with the Americans bombing those two Japanese cities isn’t pleasant; but neither was the unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbour in Hawaii by the Japanese. What the Allies did by fire-bombing Dresden was an act of unspeakable barbarity; if the Allies had lost the war, would Churchill and Eisenhower have been lined up before the Nazi High Command and suffered their own Nuremberg trials for crimes against humanity for the bombing incineration of innocent civilians in Berlin and Hamburg and Dresden? Churchill and Eisenhower created their own, outdoor, death ovens. So who knows whether, if Germany had won the war, the Allies would have been brought to account? Justice and honours go to the victors.
But these things, these dive bombers and tanks and other equipment which murder civilians, are part of the currency of modern-day warfare. A nation attacks another nation, and people get killed. As did trustworthy citizens in the time of the Egyptians, the Romans, the Ottomans, and all other conquerors who rampaged through innocent communities in the name of a god or a national border, or an ideology.
All these things changed forever in 1942. Oh, there had been concentration camps in previous times. Dachau outside Munich, for instance, was first opened in 1933. And the British in South Africa and Russians in Siberia boasted of their obscene marshalling yards where they concentrated their enemies to immobilise and emasculate them.
But on January 20, 1942, everything changed. That was the date on which it was decided at the Wannsee conference in Berlin that we Jews were to be worked to death and those of us who couldn’t be worked to death were to have ‘special arrangements’ made for us. Oh, please don’t think that the Nazis suddenly woke up and decided on January 20 that it would be a nice idea to murder all the Jews. Hitler had given his first indication of his plan in Mein Kampf, but we Germans really understood his message when he addressed the Reichstag on January 30, 1939 and threatened us Jews with extermination if we didn’t stop whatever it was he thought we were doing. I’ll never forget his words. They sent shivers down my spine. ‘Europe will not have peace until the Jewish question has been disposed of. Jewry must adapt itself to respectable, constructive work, as other peoples do, or it will sooner or later succumb to a crisis of unimaginable proportions.’
It was only when I went to Birkenau, the Extermination Camp of Auschwitz, that I fully understood what Hitler meant by ‘unimaginable proportions’. And he was right, because what happened there defies the imagination. What I am about to tell you in these, my memoirs, will shock and sicken you. But you have to know. For if you know then at least one other person alive today will pass on the knowledge, and it stands a chance of being remembered. And this is especially important when, at some time in the future, people look back on what happened in the middle of the twentieth century and say, ‘Of course it didn’t happen. Nobody could have behaved like that!’
But it did happen! They did behave like that! And I was a part of it.
Firstly, let me tell you something. When I was forced to leave the mechanic, Deutch, I was taken over to Birkenau, and I could smell death hanging low over the buildings. They looked like some nineteenth-century factory complex, squat, red-brick buildings that could have been a hospital or a sanitarium or an ancient asylum, except for the central building which had huge chimneys billowing dark grey or black smoke. There were nine hundred of us Sonderkommandos, specially selected because we were strong and young and still had the inexorable will to live. The administration knew that we’d do anything to stay alive. They read it in our eyes.
In each of our groups—those work units rotated to do the various death tasks—there were about ten SS Sonderkommandos, who had been seconded from the killing squads, in charge the Einsatzgruppen. These Einsatzgruppen were a band of truly evil men, utterly devoid of conscience. They were 100 percent Nazis, the scum of Germany and the Ukraine. They enjoyed the activities which drove so many of us Jewish Sonderkommando slaves to suicide. They reveled in the piles of corpses, in the naked dead bodies of the old and the young. They got such a thrill of seeing the naked men and women and children pushed and shoved into the gas chambers, and then to the gas ovens for their bodies to be burned into cinders.
Of course, we Sonderkommandos lived separately from everyone else, because we were pariahs. Most of the Jews accepted that we had been forced into this work, but there was still an underlying hatred of us for what we were doing. There was an expectation th
at somehow, we Sonderkommandos, we who were chosen at random from the healthier inmates to do the ghastly work, should be noble and refuse to do this work; that instead, we should willingly go into the fires of the ovens rather than becoming a part of the machinery which was exterminating our race. But that assumes we would choose death over life. It wasn’t until we became Sonderkommando that we understood that death was a more pleasant alternative to life.
More than anything, more than any other work I had to do, what I hated most was the rotation of my squad when it came to pushing the naked people into the gas chambers after they’d stripped off their clothes in the reception room. That, more than anything!
When the poor yidden had come out of the changing rooms, they were cold and terrified and naked and crying for help. The assurances of the other squad who had helped them strip naked meant nothing when they came out of the changing rooms and saw the halls into which they had to go. We parked a van, painted white with a large red cross on it, to prevent them panicking. Our Nazi masters thought that a Red Cross vehicle would calm their fears and prevent a riot, making it easier to get them into the gas ovens. The van was used to deliver the Zyklon-B to the gas chambers.
Zyklon-B. Now there’s an interesting thing. We Germans, it turns out, had been using Zyklon-B since the 1920s for exterminating rodents and insects such as lice and cockroaches. Very effective it was, too. It’s a compound called Hydrocyanic Acid, manufactured by two German companies, Tesch/Stabenow and Degesch after they bought the patent from I. G. Farben. The Nazis called the directors in one day and asked how it could be used on human beings. All too willing to cooperate, they removed the ‘danger-odour’—used to warn human beings of the danger of being too close to it—and gave good advice on how much to use, and how quickly the air would clear under forced ventilation so that one load of bodies could be cleared out in preparation for the next load. Between them, these two companies supplied nearly three tons a month for use in the Final Solution. Oh, what patriotic Germans were these industrialists, these directors of good upright German companies. How proud the Führer must have been of them. Doing such good work for the Fatherland, and at the same time making a handsome profit from genocide.
