Auschwitz 5: Sonderkommandos

Our train from Prague to Dresden past along the beautiful Elbe River, scenic in all directions. Across from us sat a young man, Sebastian, a German student engineer who had just spent six months in The Czech Republic on an internship. We talked with him for some time about many things, including about the way people his age in Germany think about or deal with things related to the Nazis and WWII. He said that as students at every age and grade they were taught about the Nazis and about the atrocities that had occurred – perhaps too much he said. He said that of course, these things were terrible and we must know about them and be careful that they cannot happen again. At the same time he doesn’t feel any responsibility for them as an individual, nor does he think of his present day nation as responsible for them. His grandparents, who were in their early teens at the beginning of the war, did not like to talk about it so he knew little from them. One grandmother achieved a rank within the Hitler Youth which gave her the right to carry the German flag in parades. Her father who was a long-time communist would not allow her to bring it into the house. Luckily for the family they lived in a small out-of-the-way place so her father was never denounced and arrested as a communist.

At the end of the war Sebastian’s grandparents suffered a fate common to many of the German people living in Silesia, a large area in the southwest of present-day Poland. Silesia over the centuries was part of Germany, Poland, and the current Czech republic, either whole or divided. There was a large Germanic population living there at the beginning of the war, many families, like Sebastian’s, for generations. This area was one of the first overrun by the Germans in their blitzkrieg offensive in September, 1939. In 1945 the Soviet’s advance through Silesia ruthlessly punished all Germans in its path; thousands, perhaps tens of thousands were raped and murdered. Ethnic Germans fled when possible; many of those who remained were forced to relocate to Germany as by the Potsdam Conference, this area was ceded to Poland, now an “independent” country, though about to become a Soviet satellite. Sebastian was aware that his grandparents had suffered greatly from the Soviet advance and their relocation into a devastated Germany. Speaking of the current situation, he spoke about the sensitivity of the German people and press to categorizing any group in terms of racial bias. It simply cannot happen as international opinion would immediately be aroused. During his time in the Czech Republic he was aware from different indications of the fairly open discrimination against the Roma people there, something he said could not happen in Germany now.

I have been reading another book about the Sonderkommandos that I purchased at Auschwitz 2: Birkenau. It is the transcript of a number of interviews done by Jan Poludniak of Henryk Mandelbaum, a former Sonderkommando survivor of Auschwitz. Jan Poludniak was born in 1926 in Katowice, the main city of Silesia in Poland. He and his family were evicted from their home to central Poland during the German occupation. In 1944 he was held as a hostage at the concentration camp Plazow, near Krakow. After the war he worked as a journalist and was the originator of a Polish centre for the recording of Auschwitz ex-prisoners testimonies. Henryk Mandelbaum was born in 1922 to a Jewish family in a village in Poland. When his family was forced into a nearby ghetto, Mandelbaum managed to elude the German troops and with the help of neighbours stay hidden until 1944. In 1943 his family was transported from their ghetto to Auschwitz where they were all murdered. On April 10, 1944 he was himself captured and sent to Auschwitz; there he was chosen to work in the crematoria. In January, 1945 he was able to escape from the forced march of many thousands of prisoners leaving Birkenau; he was protected by Polish people and survived the war.

Mandelbaum remained in Poland afterward and gave testimony at the trials of the war criminals from Auschwitz. He often visited the Auschwitz memorial museum and would talk with groups and individuals about his experiences. At one of the bookstores at Auschwitz 1 we talked with a woman who had worked there for the past 13 years. She showed us an album of photographs of Auschwitz survivors who had returned to visit the camp, now a museum and memorial. She also had begun a few years ago to collect their autographs in a special book. Tears welled up as she spoke with us about those people and how she loved them; they are her special friends, she said.  As her own family is not especially interested in Auschwitz or its survivors, when she dies (she might be about 40 years old now), she said she wanted to be sure that her collection of photographs and pictures went to someone who truly cared about what had happened there. Mandelbaum, who died in 2008, and visited often, was undoubtedly one of her “special friends.”

It’s quite different to read Mandelbaum’s words and those of Nyiszli. Nyiszli was an educated and sophisticated person who, one sensed reading his book, elaborated some details that shone a good light upon himself. Mandelbaum, who unlike Nyiszli, actually did the strenuous and horror-filled work of escorting newly arrived victims to the undressing room and later of disposing of their corpses left in the gas chambers, spoke simply and with little evasion to his interviewer. He acknowledged that once he realized what he was asked to do by his jailers that he might have refused and joined the others being taken to be murdered. But he was young and he wanted to live. He believed that his sacrifice would be meaningless because the SS would simply designate someone else to take his place. He, like Nyiszli worked in the crematoria area during those extremely busy months of 1944 when the SS was struggling to kill as many Jews as possible before the Soviets pushed their way west. During that time almost a half a million Hungarian Jews were sent to Auschwitz, along with the populations of many ghettos like Lodz and Theresienstadt. His interviews confirm much of Nyiszli’s testimony about the period but also differs in some ways. It was true that the Sonderkommando units were themselves killed by the SS guards from time to time but usually during slower periods when there was less demand for their services. As they could not be allowed back into the regular camp population, they would be murdered, always in an unexpected manner and time in order to avoid their resistance.

When he first began working at the crematoria he and his team of workers did not live in the area set aside above one crematorium as did the group that Nyiszli wrote about. Rather they were returned after their shifts to a special spot in one of the regular camps at Birkenau. They were separate from the other prisoners but had some opportunities to communicate with them. In this way he met with briefly and agreed to help a Polish prisoner whose family had been close to his own when they were children. For this man he took enormous risks, stealing some of the gold and money from the properties left in the undressing room at the gas chamber. His friend needed these to bribe guards in an escape attempt with some others. Their escape was successful. Mandelbaum and others would sometimes bring items of clothing with them back from the chambers which they would drop along their route between the neighbouring camps for others to find them. On one occasion Mandelbaum was caught doing this and was punished with 25 blows on the back. Later in the summer of 1944 his team was moved to the attic of crematoria II and III described by Nyiszli.

Jan Poludniak pressed Mandelbaum about his early impressions when he first came to the gas chamber and saw the bodies dead there.  Mandelbaum replied: “The first time it made an incredible impression on me. Shocking. I was broken by what I saw, for never in my life had I seen, had I even thought that people could be murdered in that way..... (Then having to pull them down to be burned), everything inside me died, it all died because never in my life had I witnessed something like this, you see.  It’s difficult, it is difficult to explain my first impressions. When I think about what I have seen and what I have been through, even today (about 50 years after the events) as I sit here talking I feel like someone who has risen from the dead..... risen from the dead.” Poludniak asked if the men became indifferent to the humans they were burning once they became accustomed to the work. Mandelbaum agreed that that happened, saying, “from a normal person you became quite different, like an animal.” He could have rebelled but “I wanted something else. I wanted to tell the world that I had come from another world. I wanted to survive this world and tell the people... but you were unfeeling, that’s obvious ...Inside in such situations, do you know what a person experiences? It cannot be described, it’s impossible. You really needed to be healthy because only someone able to resist, in full health was able to experience this so that the heart didn’t burst, so that you didn’t experience too great a shock, so that you didn’t go crazy.”

Asked if there were co-workers who did break down, Mandelbaum replied, “Yes, indeed.” He would say to his companions, “Tough, we’re here, we know what is planned for us but we need to have this tiny ray of hope. Perhaps there’ll come a time when we’ll be freed.” He spoke of the despair formerly devout people felt, leading them to abandon their faiths, no longer believing in God or in justice. If the camp was purgatory, they would say, then the Sonderkommando work was hell and there is no other hell. Mandelbaum also described in his interviews some details of the revolt that took place in the crematoria in October 1944. It had been conceived as a camp-wide experience but was precipitated when guards came to take away one section of the Sonderkommando, who then began the revolt. Mandelbaum himself was working in a different part of the crematoria complex that day so was not involved. When the revolt was subdued, however, all of the men were rounded up and made to lie on their faces on the floor with their hands behind their backs. The SS-men then shot every third man. An investigation into the revolt and its instigators went on for several weeks, involving people throughout the whole of the camp. Some were tortured and later executed, including four women who had been instrumental in getting explosives to the Sonderkommandos.

Mandelbaum told Poludniak some of his post-war difficulties: “After liberation when I went out into the street, I didn’t know if I was walking on the pavement or on the road. I was too busy looking around, making sure that nobody would suddenly grab me by the coat or trousers and drag me back to the camp.” He had constant nightmares about that period and about the work he had done. Asked by Poludniak if he felt hatred for the Germans, he said he did not, though he did hate the murderers who sadistically committed such crimes. He told about incidents in which he knew that Germans had helped prisoners. He believed that it is important to not give in to hatred “because that is exactly what can turn a decent person into a fiend.”

I continue to be interested in these men and what happened to them and also in the men who became SS or Gestapo members. What were the things that motivated them to follow those paths? What did they think of as they moved deeper and deeper into acts of criminality? Did they feel regret or guilt during or after the end of the war? Many clearly involved in murder were tried and executed soon after the war, not just at Nuremberg which tried the main leaders, but also in different countries, related to the crimes committed there. But many people also evaded capture and imprisonment.