Birkenau, one of the three Auschwitz camps, was amongst the worst German death camps. The Sonderkommando were prisoners (mostly Jewish) forced to carry out the most hellish tasks of all. Their job was to drag the gassed corpses out of the Zyklon B chambers, to cut their hair off (and all the other bestial violations the Nazis concocted), to drag the corpses (Venezia records that the best method was to use one of the many walking sticks hooked under an arm) to the gas ovens, to load them onto stretchers and then toss them into the fire, and to shovel out the ashes. These conscripted underworld denizens slept under the eaves above the ovens, isolated and even privileged (they ate better than regular prisoners). A 20-year-old Greek Jew deported to Poland, Shlomo Venezia became one of the Sonderkommando servicing Crematorium II. He arrived in April of 1944 and was one of just under two hundred evacuated by the Germans in January 1945, with only ninety surviving by war’s end in May. He was fortunate, if one can even say that, to be among the last, for Sonderkommando teams were routinely killed every few months.
Inside the Gas Chambers: Eight Months in the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz comprises five weeks of interviews in 2006. Venezia had testified and spoken many times before, including to schoolchildren, so he comes across as lucid, factual and unflinching. He describes how the Sonderkommando ceased to think, surviving from day to day out of some brute instinct: ‘my horizons were restricted to the moment when I would be killed.’ His descriptions of his work are almost unbearable to read. Opportunities to do more than labour and survive were so limited that the rare moments of trivial, and inevitably fruitless, compassion compel even more starkly. ‘We’d become robots,’ he says, yet when asked if he’d have swapped places with anyone else in the camp, he replies, ‘immediately – like a shot!’
I struggled through this slim volume (historical notes pad out the 155 pages of Venezia’s account), agitated as I always am by the questions such inhumanity always prompt in me. The wonderment possibly unanswerable: how can humans do this, beyond all other evils the world has known? And: what hope for ethics that appeal to the morality in humankind? Yet I can commend Inside the Gas Chambers to anyone pondering good and evil, for Shlomo Venezia’s testimony, surely amongst the bravest acts one can envisage, compels attempts to answer just such quandaries. Listen now to this old man: ‘it’s precisely for this reason – because it is so completely unimaginable – that those people who can tell their story must do so. Those of us in the Sonderkommando . . . had seen the worst, we were in it all day long, at the heart of hell.’
An existentialist finds the Holocaust particularly rough going. I won’t quote more than one sentence of Venezia’s moving last couple of pages, when he describes the difficulty of bearing witness and the lifelong impact of his experiences, but I am struck by this: ‘Everything’s going fine and then, all of a sudden, I’m in despair.’ Read the rest yourself – if you can - and marvel at one man’s unquenchable spirit.