The Hell of Auschwitz

The Sonderkommando, made up of about two thousand Jews, was responsible for removing the victims from the gas chambers and disposing of their bodies. But not only that. Their story was discovered by pure chance in 1980

Until the 1980s, no one knew the story we are about to tell. The atrocities committed by the Nazis in the concentration and extermination camps went far beyond the annihilation of life and dignity. They destroyed every inch of the soul of millions of men , even Jews, reducing them to slavery and forcing them to perform the most atrocious tasks.

They made them accomplices in the genocide of their own people , with no possibility of refusal. It is the story of the Sonderkommando ("special unit"), discovered by pure chance in 1980 by a student at a forestry institute, busy digging to plant trees.

He was working to restore the beautiful forests that once dotted the landscape of Oświęcim , the Polish name for the German Auschwitz. Suddenly, a leather suitcase emerged from the ground , among cigarette butts and withered roots. Inside was a piece of history.

The Writings of a Greek Jew

 The student's name was  Lesław Dyrcz and he was busy cleaning the area around the crematorium III complex in Birkenau . The briefcase he found in his hands also contained a thermos. A flask like many others, but with a name on it:  Marcel Nadjari . He didn't know it yet, but it was the name of a Greek Jew deported and detained in Auschwitz with his whole family. His father, mother and sister died after a few days, while Marcel survived much longer. The Chinese boxes of History were not finished yet. Inside the thermos were dozens and dozens of handwritten sheets, a sort of serialized diary that Nadjari himself had written. The letters were written in Greek and for years they were not translated until 2013, when two Russian historians revealed their contents.

The Holocaust, Slavery, Sonderkommando

 The pages found in the thermos revealed a previously hidden truth. A portion of the Jews had become the slave-executors of the Nazi death machine. Nadjari says he was enslaved along with about two thousand other people, mostly Jews, and forced to help the Nazis operate their grimly efficient death machines. The Greek himself calls it the Sonderkommando, a special unit at Auschwitz tasked with removing victims from the gas chambers and disposing of their bodies. At the height of the camp's operations, the Nazis gassed up to six thousand Jews a day. But the Sonderkommando's duties went beyond material aid. Its members also had to draw up documents and bring the names and counts of the victims. A gigantic and atrocious scientific operation. Some of this critical documentation is cited in letters found by chance in the land of Auschwitz.

Terrible secrets

 The tasks of the Sonderkommando during the Holocaust were top secret. They lived under constant threat of death from the Nazis. Those who refused to cooperate were murdered in front of everyone else, to set an example. Since all inmates who were taken to the gas chambers were murdered, the members of the Sonderkommando were potentially the only surviving witnesses to the barbarity of Auschwitz. And since they knew the terrible secrets of the camp firsthand, their lives were marked by fear and absolute isolation from the rest of the inmates. The Nazis selected them as soon as they arrived at the facility, secretly recruiting the young men who seemed the most able and healthy. They were not told anything about the tasks that awaited them. Since their main job was to lift corpses, the members of the Sonderkommando were given better food rations than the other prisoners.

The Inhuman Tasks of the Sonderkommando