The fate of Sonderkommando prisoners

The transcript of the podcast

One of the darkest chapters of the history of Auschwitz is undoubtedly the story of the Sonderkommando. A group of prisoners, mainly Jews, forced by the Germans to work in gas chambers and crematoria of the camp. Prisoners assigned to this unit, employed in places of mass extermination could not refuse to do their work or ask to be transferred to perform other tasks in the camp. Failure to carry out the instructions of the SS would result in immediate death. Dr. Igor Bartosik from the Research Centre of the Memorial talks about the fate of the Sonderkommando Prisoners.

When we look at the vestigues of history that remain, we do not really know much about the Sonderkommando because most of its members were killed. We have traces in terms of accounts, we have traces in the notes they left. What can we say about the Sonderkommando from a universal perspective without looking at the chronological development of this work group but rather at their functioning, life and tragedy in the camp. And so I would like to start by asking the question: How was a prisoner conscripted into the Sonderkommando and how did former Sonderkommando prisoners, who could talk about it, recall this moment?

It was conducted in such a way that those who, according to SS doctors, were fit to work in the camp were selected on the ramp. Then the group was subjected to another selection on the camp grounds, very quickly, usually a matter of a few dozen hours or a few days, based primarily on physical appearance and fitness. This was how people were chosen to the Sonderkommando; they simply chose those who were considered physically strong enough to work as carrying dozens or even over a hundred kilograms of corpses for incineration to cremation pits or the furnace was physically gruelling, besides the psychological and mental aspect. Moreover, the job of operating the extermination sites, transporting fuel materials, transporting corpses, removing clothes from the changing rooms all had to be done quickly enough, at a pace. Hence, they had to be physically fit people.
Prisoners were also sent to the Sonderkommando from the penal company. Documents prove that sometimes a Jewish prisoner sent to the penal company for life would be transferred to the Sonderkommando, which was a death sentence for such a prisoner anyway. There were also cases where non-Jews were sent to the Sonderkommando because of their function, such as the German Kapos who supervised the work of the Sonderkommando or the Polish prisoners who initially worked in crematorium I and were later sent to work at the crematoria in Birkenau. So, one can assume that they also became de facto members of the Sonderkommando, the paths varied, but the decisive factor was physical fitness.

The prisoners who recounted these experiences speak of that first encounter with the reality of the extermination world because, at the time of their selection, they were probably unaware of the exact nature of their work.

No, they were selected for hard work, as they might have expected; after all, if people of a particular physical fitness were selected, they indeed suspected that the work to be done would be gruelling. But there were also instances, for example, as Alten Eisenberg, alias Stanisław Jankowski recalled - when they looked for people to work in the rubber factory, or somewhere where physical strength was needed – and that the Sonderkommando prisoners there, sometimes mentioned in their accounts of how a rumour circulated among them during the selection process that they were looking for people to do hard labour. But on the other hand, this hard work often gave them hope for some bigger food rations and a chance of survival because usefulness to the camp authorities, the SS and the Germans, wasn't a guarantee in a sense; but it was certainly a factor that could favour survival, theoretically.
However, regarding their encounter with work in the crematorium, they only learned about it at the worksite, as they were led after selection the next day to work in the extermination area. Take my friend, Henryk Mandelbaum, for example; he found out that he would work on the burning of corpses the same evening. After selection in the quarantine section of Birkenau, he and his colleagues were led to barracks 13 in the men's sector. Once they entered the fenced yard of the Sonderkommando barracks, their colleagues told them that their work would involve burning corpses.

This is also the moment when such a person was somewhat broken because, on the one hand, this work is highly physically demanding, but the psychological shock was also a vital part of this initiation. Was there any work that the prisoners usually had to do at the beginning before they could enter the Sonderkommando, or it didn't matter?

I have come across various accounts; for example, one of the Greek prisoners sent to the Sonderkommando in May of 1944 said they were asked to observe on their first day at the crematorium. According to other accounts, people were forced, practically from the very beginning of their stay at the extermination site, to work in transporting corpses, cleaning the gas chambers or in some other activity connected with mass extermination. The answer to what the psychological adaptation to the situation looked like is beyond our comprehension.

How, then, was the Sonderkommando organised? What functions did the prisoners have to perform in the extermination process carried out in the camp? What were the divisions within the Sonderkommando - what do we know about the tragic work they had to do, the terrible work they had to do.

Of course, the division into individual tasks within the Sonderkommando did exist; it could have resulted as much from coincidence rather than the predispositions of individual units, which is what I am getting at.
It may have been the case, for instance, that a man who previously worked as a mechanic or stoker was predestined to work on the crematorium ovens, and the strongest people were predestined to transport the corpses. However, based on the accounts of surviving Sonderkommando prisoners, it seems to me that there was no such thing as a specialisation in the tasks performed. Indeed, the people who maintained temperature in the crematorium ovens, people who smelted precious metals, Nyiszli's group in charge of dissecting corpses in crematorium no. 2, certainly constituted a particular group of people, we may call experts or specialists in their work. However, from the accounts that have appeared on this subject, it seems that no great professional skills were required for such jobs as cleaning the gas chamber, removing clothes from the changing room after the murdered, or transporting the corpses, cutting hair and extracting teeth. The solidarity that existed among the prisoners of the Sonderkommando also played a significant role here. Again, I will refer to Henryk Mandelbaum's memoirs; he said that dragging a corpse is harder than cutting the hair, and cutting the hair is harder than extracting gold teeth and bridges from the bodies of murdered people, which is why the Sonderkommando prisoners used their solidarity to take turns doing this job. Mandelbaum mentioned that when he saw his colleagues transporting corpses in the heat, covered in sweat, exhausted and breathless; they simply switched to lighter work, such as cleaning the gas chamber, and those who had cleaned the room up to that point replaced them during the transport of the corpses. Admittedly, there were some specialised jobs in which replacing an inmate was complicated; however, in the case of these simple, purely physical jobs, there was a natural rotation and change to endure the physical challenge as best as possible.

If we were to make a list, what exactly were the tasks of the Sonderkommando prisoners?

It also depended on where they worked. There was a different subdivision in the area of the bunkers, that is, the provisional gas chambers, the little red and little white house, bunker one and bunker two, and it looked different in the area of the crematoria. There was a different division of labour in crematoria two and three, where the work was largely mechanised - a wrong word, but it does convey the point. In contrast, it was different, for example, in crematorium five, in 1944, during the extermination of Hungarian Jews and the Litzmannstadt Ghetto, where the work was, to all intents and purposes, very similar to the operations carried out by the Sonderkommando in the bunkers. So let us perhaps start with the more modern crematoria two and three. First of all, the staff of the changing room, which consisted of Sonderkommando prisoners who were standing in the corridor area through which people passed, took off their clothes and went on to the alleged bath, in other words to the gas chamber. So, these prisoners were there to calm those going to their deaths and assist the disabled, weak, older people undress. After taking people to the gas chamber and shutting the gas-tight door their work consisted of carrying the stuff that remained in the changing room outside, loading it onto trucks and then taking it to the Effektenlager warehouses commonly known as “Kanada”.
The next group is the group that operates the gas chamber, after killing people with poisonous gas and ventilating the rooms, as in the case of crematoriums two and three, where the ventilation was carried out mechanically, the gas-tight doors were opened. The first thing these people did was rinse the bodies with pressurised water to remove all kinds of impurities and then tried to untangle the pile of bodies. After that, they gradually transported them to the lift next to the gas chamber and later to the ground floor, where the ovens were located. There again, the group transporting the bodies from the underground section along a strip of wet concrete would transport them to individual ovens, followed by haircuts, removal of gold teeth and bridges, and then work on loading the bodies.
The next group is that of the Sonderkommando prisoners tasked with removing the ashes. The ashes from the furnaces were raked into metal crates, taken outside and to specific places where the unburnt bones were ground with wooden pestles and sifted through sieves so that the ash was as fine as possible. Then, it was stored in the temporary storage pits at the crematoria site and later transported, usually to the Vistula River, where the ashes were simply dumped, thus getting rid of any traces of the murdered people. This is roughly how the division of labour in the Sonderkommando can be classified.
Of course, this also included the so-called functionary prisoners, which means supervision by various types of Kapos, Vorarbeiter, and also prisoners who did such more mundane tasks as cleaning the living quarters, keeping records of some sort, because such records certainly had to be kept among the Sonderkommando prisoners; in other words, jobs like those in a typical Kommando working in the camp.

Where, then, are the differences regarding, for example, the bunkers and gas chambers four and five, in other words, what are the exceptions to this presented routine of the Sonderkommando prisoners?

What I have just said concerns crematoriums two and three, where the staff number does not have to be so high since the distance between the gas chamber and the ovens is only a dozen or so metres, and that includes transport by lift, which is done automatically, and so people are not needed for this backbreaking work of transporting the corpses. However, if we consider the work at the bunkers, that is, the red and the white house, bunker one and bunker two, and at crematorium five, especially in 1944, then bear in mind that the work in the changing room or the square in front of the crematorium and in front of the bunkers, where people left their clothes, looked very similar to the work in the changing room at crematoria two and three. Cleaning of the gas chamber rooms also looks identical, but transporting the corpses is entirely different. To get to the mass graves, or later to the cremation pits, prisoners have to cover a distance of several dozen metres, dragging or transporting the corpses, and so narrow-gauge field railways were used to transport the bodies to the bunkers, that is, the makeshift gas chambers and all these activities take much more time and require many more people. I can tell you that, as far as crematoria two and three are concerned, in 1944, at the peak of the extermination operation, that is, the transportation of Hungarian Jews, there were a total of about 180 people working in crematoria two and three, while about 600 people worked in crematorium five, which was active at the time, where people were incinerated in the cremation pits and one of the makeshift gas chambers, the little white house. So, we can see that it is significantly more, and the transport of the corpses required exceptional strength and was the most difficult and time-consuming work.

Did the Sonderkommando prisoners have any tasks outside the crematorium site?

If we assume that the transport of food, which took place on the site of the crematoria, since they collected cauldrons with, for example, camp soup from the kitchens, and transported them to the extermination site in carts, then we can say that they performed some work and activities outside the extermination site.

But they're never present at the ramp and during the transport selection? They only come into contact with the condemned prisoners at the moment they enter the courtyard or near the bunkers or in the undressing rooms of the crematoria and gas chambers?

Precisely, the Sonderkommando work area stretches from the entrance to the courtyard of crematoria two and three to the area of crematoria four and five and the bunkers. They were neither present earlier, on the ramp nor at the reception of transports, although Shlomo Dragon mentioned that if someone was going to crematorium number five, as was probably the case at other extermination sites, and, for example, collapsed on the way or was unable to get there, Sonderkommando prisoners were sent to take this person to the crematorium, to the extermination sites. There may have been such instances, but it was not a matter of routine that they had to be present at the ramp to receive the transport; it was simply handled by a part of the Effektenlager commando.

Where do the SS men, the Germans, figure in the work of the Sonderkommando? When we look at these successive points of the extermination operation, practically most of the physical work that was needed. was carried out by the victims, which is also the duplicity of this SS organised system.

The SS men who supervised the extermination sites were relatively few, few people per shift. However, the misfortune of the Sonderkommando was that while prisoners could commit greater or lesser acts of sabotage and delay the work done while transporting earth or carrying out various jobs within the camp, the opposite was the case with the Sonderkommando prisoners. Here, the slightest illusion of an attempt to sabotage such activities could be detected instantly, and the prisoner was shot at once.

It seems that the only task of the SS men, in terms of the extermination process and its successive stages, is to throw Zyklon B into the gas chambers.

As far as throwing the cyclone pellets into the gas chamber was concerned, this was done by a different group, the so-called SDG, or sanitary support service. These were people who had been trained to introduce the cyclone into the disinfection and gas chambers. However, as far as the crematoria are concerned, this regular supervision is done by a team of four or five SS men assigned to duty there, who divide the tasks between them, depending on whether it's a day or night shift. The supervision consists mainly in ensuring that the work is done rhythmically and in the event of delays to speed up the work by terrorising the prisoners, of course, with the use of functionary prisoners, as not many of these SS-men were so "ambitious" as to use sticks. However, there were probably a few such cases.
In addition to this, Sonderkommando prisoners were also supervised to ensure they did not try to appropriate the victims' valuables during their work, as the SS men were cautious in this regard. As for such matters as procuring additional food, cosmetics or even parts of the victims' clothing, the SS-men turned a blind eye and allowed Sonderkommando prisoners to do so. However, regarding the collection of valuables, a Sonderkommando prisoner would be taking a huge risk if he dared reach for Reich property.

It is very difficult, perhaps impossible for us, to understand the tragedy of the people forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria. Did they somehow manage to get used to this work, did the hope of survival allow them to go on from day to day? Do we know anything about how the prisoners reacted and what the work looked like from their perspective?

I can say that I dare not speak a word on the subject. It is beyond our cognition, simply put, one thing I do know is that the only authoritative indicator here can be the words written by one of the Sonderkommando prisoners, can be the words written by one of the Sonderkommando prisoners. It may not be direct quote, but the sentence will be very similar to what he wrote: When you are in the Sonderkommando, you look for a hundred choices as to why you exist, why you persist here; one wants to survive because he wants revenge, the other wants to stay alive because he wants to be a witness. And the truth is that man lives because what he is connected to is his life. One may attribute what drove the men of the Sonderkommando as a probe, although that is the wrong word, for other situations.
Take a look at Tadeusz Klimaszewski's memoirs; he' is a Pole who was a member of the group called Verbrennugskommando Warschau by the Germans - a group that burned the corpses of Poles shot in mass during the pacification of Wola in August 1944 in insurgent Warsaw. When one reads Mr Klimaszewski's memoirs, in which he describes the events in this group and the mutual relations between people, we can practically see a picture of the Sonderkommando from Auschwitz. If a man in such a situation realises that his refusal practically means nothing, he will submit himself to save his life - it is a natural human reaction, so it seems to me, as a human being. I do not ask myself how I would act because it is so far beyond the limits of my cognition that I would not dare to ask myself such a question.
But the words of Henryk Mandelbaum linger in my mind all the time: when he was first brought to crematorium five, to the square where the corpses of people who had been gassed a few, a dozen or so hours before lay, the bodies already partly beginning to decompose, and he was ordered to drag those poor people to be burned in the pits, he refused to do so. He recalled his mother's words to him: "Be a good person; otherwise, you'll end up in hell", but I was already in hell, he said. I then asked him if he remembered the first man he threw into the fire. "Oh yes, he is here beside me. A man in his fifties, whose body had been lying in the sun for a long time and was partially decomposing. I grabbed his hand to drag him into the pit, and the skin stuck to my hand like a glove. And I then asked myself - should I do it or not? And I realised that if I said no, I would be in flames in a moment. And the person who takes my place will do the job. And if not him, then the tenth or maybe the hundredth person. But someone will do the job because people want to live. People want to live; their refusal, saying no in this situation, will not change a thing.” These were the words of a man I respected, who was everything to me. I believe him; I believe this was what happened.

Were there any reports of prisoners refusing, objecting, or perhaps at some point not being able to cope, or something inside them, or their brain, or their body, saying enough, I can't take it anymore, and I can't cope?

Indeed, some of those sent to the Sonderkommando were so terrified and psychologically shocked by the work that they committed suicide. Several Sonderkommando prisoners describe a case in 1944 where one of the Greeks sent to the Sonderkommando jumped into a burning pit, presumably under the influence of the shock that he had experienced. Another case is described by Shlomo Venezia, who should be regarded as a very reliable witness. He describes a case where one of the persons who was forced to transport a corpse fossilised. I once spoke to specialists and doctors, and they said that it could happen during a severe psychological shock where the concentration of muscles makes a person unable to move.
The memoirs of people who served in the Sonderkommando for a longer period, such as Henryk Tauber, also reveal that those sent to work, who endured a day or two, would at some point break down under the influence of the psychological shock and either stopped working, thus exposing themselves to a lethal gunshot from the SS men, or attempted to take their own lives. However, despite appearances, there were not that many cases of suicide, at least according to the accounts. It seems to me that the shock they experienced when confronted with the horror of the work at the extermination sites robbed them to a large extent of the ability to feel as we feel today, trying to use empathy, the trace of what they might have experienced. I think their attitude was primarily determined by their survival instinct, just a simple survival instinct, the will to live.

We talked about the work of the Sonderkommando prisoners, but their day was divided into two parts - work and life as prisoners in the camp, living in isolated barracks - so what were the living conditions like for the Sonderkommando prisoners in the camp?

Of course, as far as the Sonderkommando's working day is concerned, we must take into account that things looked different on days when mass transports arrived, and their intensity was very high, since every subsequent day practically brought thousands of victims, and otherwise at times when there was what we might call a stoppage in the work of the crematoria. When there were no incoming transports, work was organised for Sonderkommando prisoners in such a way that they either cleaned and sanitised the equipment, carried out repairs under the direction of the engineers from the Topf company from Erfurt, or make some changes in the gas chambers, for example gas chambers in crematoria two and three had been separated in December 1943. So, work was always organised for them in some way. However, when it comes to living conditions, I would like to despell a myth here. It often lingers in historical consciousness that Sonderkommando prisoners enjoyed an abundance of various material goods, food and lacked nothing to keep them in good physical condition.
It's not quite the case. Bear in mind that when the transports arrived, these people surely had the opportunity to obtain some food that the deportees had with them, but for goodness' sake, what sort of food was it - if people came from the ghettos, where there was also hunger, what could they bring with them? And if these transports came from Western Europe or the south, from Greece, for example, consider how long these people were on these transports. Hence some food was no longer fit for consumption. The Sonderkommando prisoners avoided eating these things to prevent exposure to health problems - after all, the Sonderkommando could only consist of working and healthy people. So, as the accounts say, they mainly used things that weren't spoiled, bread of various kinds, rusks, smoked and dried meat, if there was any, and above all tinned food, which was relatively safe to eat.
As far as living conditions were concerned, they stayed in typical barracks similar to these found throughout Birkenau, first in barrack no. 2 in the men's sector BIb, a typical brick barrack, and later in barrack no. 13 in the men's sector BIId, which like barrack no. 2 was constructed in such a way that a wall additionally surrounded the courtyard leading to the entrance of the barrack. In practice, the world of the Sonderkommando prisoners is either a workplace or a barrack or a small walled yard. It was practically their whole world, and the possibility of leaving the barrack was highly, highly restricted. And if they ever did leave the barracks, it was usually associated with extremely risky situations because the isolation was not 100% hermetic. Nevertheless, leaving the barrack was severely restricted.

Is there anything exceptional about their daily camp experience? Is it similar to that of other camp prisoners if we, of course, set aside the nature of their work since it is something quite extraordinary? There is no significant difference in the roll-call, food, work, sleep, but is there anything slightly different?

It seems to me that this difference, the camp rigour we were talking about, that is the routine of roll-call, assembly, counting, marching out to work, returning from work, washing up, attending to physiological needs all apply to every prisoner in the camp, but as far as life inside the commando is concerned, I think it's more difficult attempting to find something normal in this abnormal world. I don't know, but looking at the camp beyond the perspective of the Sonderkommando, it seems to me that they forged some kind of interpersonal relationship. Positive or negative. There's this mindset of the world to come, of freedom. There was hope as information about the fronts filtered through to the prisoners in the camp. However, regarding the Sonderkommando prisoners, it is forbidden to speak about it because these people actually have a death sentence pronounced on them but do not know when it will be carried out; it may be carried out the next day, or perhaps in a few years; they have no clue. I would also like to refer to the stereotype of thinking about Sonderkommando prisoners, that they were liquidated every three months. There was no such thing. Indeed, the first Sonderkommando was set up in the spring of 1942, and the group was most likely murdered in its entirety in December 1942 in crematorium number one at Auschwitz.
Later on, however, Sonderkommando prisoners were only partially selected and killed because, come to think of it, if they knew they were going to die in three months, no one would have forced them to work. Conversely, while they were under the illusion that they would live as long as they were needed and that they would certainly be required for some time to come, these people were automatically more compliant, more likely to obey orders from the SS by deferring the moment of death, the moment of execution. Of course, they did not wait with their hands folded because they realised that the only chance of being saved was either to revolt or to escape. Preferably both, but this loophole was exploited here to give them the illusion that as long as they obeyed, carried out the orders dutifully and thoroughly, they would be able to stay alive for some time.
However, it is true that living with a death sentence does not make people optimistic or profound enough to make far-reaching plans for the future, and another thing to consider is that these were people who were grieving internally for the most part because they were conscious that they were often the last members of multi-generational families. This psychological state of loss and mourning is evident in their memoirs, accounts and manuscripts.

The accounts also include such specific situations as when a Sonderkommando prisoner meets a family member while working in the changing room of the gas chamber; these are almost unimaginable situations.

Undoubtedly, most of them, or at least the memoirs available to us and the conversations I had, show that they were profoundly frightened of encountering someone from their acquaintances or relatives since the level of stress and despair in such a situation could reach unimaginable proportions, and there were cases in which they met relatives among those being led to death. One of them described a situation when he met his cousin among those brought for extermination after selection in the camp and had to lead him after undressing to the gas chamber. Knowing he couldn't help him in any way, he placed him in the spot where the pellet distributor for Zyklon-B was located, so his death would be as quick and painless as possible.
Furthermore, there were times when they came across the bodies of relatives who went to their deaths and later burned them separately. There was even a practice of trying to bury their remains by depositing their ashes into a container and burying them somewhere on the crematorium grounds to create a semblance of a normal funeral. Of course, this is beyond our comprehension because it is a world we can never really know.

How were the Sonderkommando prisoners perceived by other camp inmates? As you know, we only have fragmentary accounts of Sonderkommando survivors and their manuscripts; however, the world of the Sonderkommando also appears in the memoirs and accounts of camp prisoners.

A lot depends on the individual; for instance, Mr Tadeusz Paczuła, whom I had the opportunity to know personally, a survivor of Auschwitz, said in one of the documentary films that he did not find the words to express his sympathy for those people who were uprooted from their everyday life and thrown straight into the very bottom of hell. Of course, some prisoners were very critical of the Sonderkommando, and while I don't want to be misunderstood, in my opinion, they were somewhat unfair to the Sonderkommando prisoners. Generally speaking, people who had a full grasp of the situation in the camp tended to maintain positive neutrality towards the Sonderkommando prisoners and avoided making harsh accusations against them as if they supposedly cooperated with the SS and so on. Let's think about it - every camp prisoner under the clutches of the SS was, in fact, working for the camp and working for the SS. The prisoners who built the crematoria and those who worked there were carrying out the orders of their superiors. The Canada commando, who went out to the ramp to load and sort the luggage of the murdered, were they not carrying out the orders of the SS?
As a matter of fact, the entire camp was forced to work towards implementing the plans and ideas of the SS, the only difference being that, in the case of the Sonderkommando, no one volunteered for this work, at least none that I know of, and secondly, these were people who indeed realised that they were condemned to death, that there was no turning back from this work, no transfer to another place, and no escape from it. That is the difference and tragedy of the Sonderkommando.

However, we did mention that our knowledge of the Sonderkommando world is also based on the accounts of survivors. Looking at this small number on the historical record, because there were very few survivors, first of all, do we know more or less how many people went through the Sonderkommando, how many prisoners ended up there, and if there was any way that the Sonderkommando could have made it through alive among the survivors, since it's related to the last period of the camp's existence, the liquidation of the camp, and as I suspect, they had quite similar experiences of what it was like to survive after the end of the extermination.

We can document this to the best of our ability, taking into account the selections that took place and of which we are aware, and the events that unfolded that somehow influenced the number of people in the Sonderkommando, that this number is between 1,500 and 2,000. About 100 of them survived, and several factors determined the survival of the Sonderkommando member. First of all, seniority. I would like to refer to this issue because I mentioned earlier that there was no such thing as a permanent liquidation of all Sonderkommando prisoners every few months. By my estimates, at least a few dozen of all the qualified persons in the Sonderkommando survived. We know well that there is no complete list of people who were conscripted into the Sonderkommando or survived. That's the first thing.
The second thing contrary to appearances is undoubtedly seniority because the SS also treated the Sonderkommando rationally, which gives it a tragic dimension here. If these SS men had people in the Sonderkommando who had been doing their job for several months, it was clear that during successive selections, they were to be kept alive, among other reasons, because these were proven people, and it was obvious they would not, for example, in any act of desperation, attack an SS man with a shovel. What's more, some informal arrangements were made between the Sonderkommando and the SS men, for instance, whereby these, let's call them "proven" prisoners, paid the SS men off by illegally obtaining valuables for them. Later, for example, they offered to iron a uniform or jacket for one of the crematorium managers, and the ironed jacket was returned to him with valuables in the pocket. So, if an SS man had such people collaborating with him - wrong word, but there's no other way - it is evident that they were not crossed off from the list of the living during subsequent selections. There was no point in creating new networks between the Sonderkommando prisoners and the SS men from the crematorium.
Survival also depended, without a doubt, on one's mental and moral attitude. I know, for example, from my friend Henryk Mandelbaum that he was quickly drawn into the orbit of the Sonderkommando conspirators because of his moral and mental attitude, physical fitness and strength, but there was another important aspect - Henryk Mandelbaum was from the Oświęcim area. In case of revolt and escape, this man knew where to navigate in the area, where to escape to; he knew the people and how one could hide, so it is clear that such conspirators wanted to have someone in their ranks who, in case of revolt and escape, would be their guide or someone who could help them navigate the area. So, these are very different factors, and as with most prisoners in the camp, plain luck. Well, all these factors can work together somehow. If we consider the revolt of October 7th, where the Sonderkommando prisoners laid on the ground and randomly shot, then, in this case, no smartness, no will to survive, and no other factors were at play here but blind fate and luck, plain and simple.

Where, then, was the loophole in this world organised by the SS, since it was in their interest not to have anyone from the Sonderkommando survive as a witness to the extermination?

There were several factors. The first factor was that the possible killing of the last surviving group of Sonderkommando prisoners - we are talking about events after the previous selection in November 1944 with a hundred people left in the camp, seventy of them working on the demolition of crematoria two and three, and thirty delegated to work on the burning of corpses in crematorium five. The killing of these hundred people would have required some special order, an order which, as the Sonderkommando prisoners said, no one was willing to give in late 1944 or early 1945 because they knew that they would soon have to explain their decisions.
So that's the first issue; the second is undoubtedly the commotion in the last days before the evacuation of Auschwitz in December 1944. There were still a hundred Sonderkommando prisoners in Auschwitz in the last days of the camp's existence, 16th, 17th, 18th January 1945. For unknown reasons, this Sonderkommando group, then called the Abruchkommando, or Demolition and Crematorium five Kommando, was quartered in one of the barracks housing the so-called ordinary prisoners. Once the evacuation began, they left the camp together with the others, not as a separate Sonderkommando group but as one of the regular prisoner groups. And this, fortunate or not, rather fortunate coincidence made it possible for them to leave the camp and disappear into the crowd. I guess, firstly, it was because there was no "brave" SS man who could take the decision to liquidate these people, and secondly because they were quartered in one of the barracks where the ordinary camp prisoners lived, and in this way, the Sonderkommando seemingly disappeared into the crowd. And thanks to this, most of them later survived.

The Sonderkommando disappears into the crowd and probably disappears from historical consciousness for many years, resulting in myths that they collaborated. For many years they too refuse to talk about their experience. It probably began much later, after the war - except perhaps for some cases during the trials, but it seems that the awareness of the Sonderkommando and our present understanding of this group did not begin immediately after the war.

Absolutely yes, the first moment, 1945 - 1946, marked the presence of these Sonderkommando witnesses here in Auschwitz, during the work of the Soviet commission, and later on cooperation with Jan Zen's commission, which was working on the evidentiary process against commandant Höss and other members of the SS garrison. And after that period these Sonderkommando members practically disappear from the sight of the witnesses and researchers. The Sonderkommando is present however in the background, but later these people even disappear, and the first return to the Sonderkommando as witnesses was in the 1960s. It resulted from the fact that there was an attempt to find and publish manuscripts created by the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz. We, post-war people, are finally beginning to learn about these accounts from the heart of hell. The memories of Gradowski, Lewental and other Sonderkommando prisoners are recalled. The 1980s, and the film Shoah, featuring one of the Sonderkommando witnesses, Filip Müller, trigger our interest in these people as historians. And as we get to know them, as in my case, we develop a fascination for them. They were people of unbelievable character, experiences, and thinking shaped in them by these experiences.
I can say this using the example of my friend Henryk Mandelbaum, this relationship and friendship. I will never meet another man like him. Although I will, perhaps, meet many more highly regarded people. However, he was one of a kind, a man who had survived such a trauma, whose family was taken away from him, who was forced into the worst work one could imagine, with a death sentence handed down in absentia. This man came out of the camp as a man who loved people, the world and his entire surroundings - a man of great emotional and moral strength, who feared nothing and no one, not even death, even though he had seen it first-hand on a massive scale. I want people to read the memoirs of the Sonderkommando prisoners from time to time because they show that man overcomes everything, even such a horrible crime and violence, and retains his humanity. It seems to me that we can learn something from the history of the Sonderkommando for posterity.