Inside the Gas Chambers by Shlomo Venezia

Author:Shlomo Venezia
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley

Did they do so, in your view?

Yes, I think some of them did. Frankly, I myself couldn’t have done so. I don’t even know how they could have felt any desire. After the Liberation, I heard some absurd rumors about what was supposed to have happened in the Sonderkommando with dead women. But these are just lies, sick rumors initiated by people trying to undermine and discredit the men working in the Sonderkommando. I never heard anything like that during the eight months I spent there.

On the other hand, I do remember that, one day, among the corpses brought out of the gas chamber, the men found the body of an incredibly beautiful woman. She had the perfect beauty of ancient statues. Those who were supposed to put her into the oven couldn’t bring themselves to destroy such a pure image. They kept her body with them for as long as they could, then they were obliged to burn her as well as the others. I think that was the only time I really “looked.” Otherwise, everything happened mechanically; there was nothing to see. Even in the room where people got undressed, you didn’t pay any attention; you had no right to feel moved.

Sometimes, in spite of everything, we were touched, and affected, like the day I saw that woman and her son arrive; they’d tried to hide in the Crematorium yard…. They were part of a convoy from Łódź. There must have been one thousand, seven hundred people sent to our crematorium from this transport. Everything proceeded as usual. The people entered the gas chamber, the German threw in the gas, then our macabre task began. We worked normally all day long, then the night team took over. The next morning, at around eight or nine, one of the men came in surprise to tell us that a woman with a small boy of about twelve were in the Crematorium yard. Nobody knew how they’d managed to get there, but when we looked at them more closely, it became clear that they were part of the group that had been sent to their death the day before. We stared at each other in astonishment. Then I went over to her to try to find out more. I don’t know if she’d climbed up the fence or if she’d passed between the tree trunks and the barbed-wire fence. I really don’t know how she’d done it, since everything was closed off, and she must have climbed over. The fact remains that she’d stayed hidden with her son. The tall grass – it was a summer month – enabled them to hide from the guards. But they then came face to face with the barbed wire, and no way of getting out. When the mother realized there was no exit, she headed in the direction of the Crematorium, hoping to escape that way. She couldn’t stop crying and saying over and over that, for a long time, she had worked in the ghetto as a seamstress for the German soldiers and she could still be useful.

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