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Henryk Mandelbaum (1922-2008)
Former Auschwitz prisoner Henryk Mandelbaum, the last member of the camp Sonderkommando living in Poland, died on June 17 at the age of 85. The Sonderkommando was a group of prisoners forced by the Germans to work in the crematoria and gas chambers.
Mandelbaum was one of those former prisoners who were always willing to meet with visitors at the Auschwitz Memorial. During these encounters, he talked about not only his own tragic experiences, but also his views of the contemporary world. He cooperated frequently with the International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust. In May of this year, he shared his reminiscences with participants in a seminar at the Rafał Lemkin Center. “He was incredibly reliable. He wanted to meet people in every situation. If he had an appointment with a group, he always kept his word. He was outgoing, and contact with people brought him joy,” said Igor Bartosik, head of the Museum Collections Department and a friend of Mandelbaum.
“Henryk Mandelbaum was one of those people who experienced the very worst of Birkenau. He bore witness throughout his life, urging everyone he met to respect life. He knew what evil meant, and he warned against it day in and day out. For me personally, he was proof that people without religious belief can be truly holy,” said Dr. Piotr M.A. Cywiński, director of the Museum.
“Mandelbaum called himself a graduate of the university of life. In fact, the scale of his experience is simply unimaginable. He was a magical personality. He attracted people like a magnet,” said Bartosik. “He could talk about even the most difficult topics in a way that everyone could understand. There was no anger or thirst for revenge in him, and he did not judge people. He told me, ‘Remember, people are different, but not all of them are evil and you cannot measure them all by the same standard.’”
Henryk Mandelbaum was born on December 15, 1922 in a poor Polish-Jewish family in Olkusz. He had to go to work at an early age. When his entire family was forced to go to the Dąbrowa Górnicza ghetto in 1940, Henryk went into hiding. His parents were later transferred to the ghetto in Sosnowiec, and deported from there to Auschwitz, where they were murdered in the gas chamber.
Mandelbaum remained in hiding, aided by local people. He risked his life maintaining contacts between the ghetto and the “Aryan side,” delivering food to the imprisoned Jews. He was arrested in April 1944 after someone informed the Germans about him. They held him briefly in jail and then sent him to Auschwitz on April 10. As prisoner number 181970, he was assigned to the Sonderkommando after quarantine. In April 1945, he managed to escape from the evacuation march in the vicinity of Jastrzębia Zdrój. His sister was the only other survivor from among the whole family.
After the war, he spent 16 years managing a branch of a public commercial enterprise. He also bred foxes. After his official retirement in 1972, he continued to drive a freight truck for the next 15 years. He loved traveling, and visited places including Columbia and Canada. He also had an impressive collection of china figurines.
“He was a pleasant, cheerful man. In the worst of circumstances, he remained optimistic and accepted whatever fate threw at him without ever giving up. After what he lived through, he could have been morose and bitter, but he was just the opposite—he bubbled with joy and good humor, because he was happy, above all, to have survived. He was my best friend. I’ll never have another friend like him,” said Bartosik.
The Sonderkommando
The Sonderkommando was a special group of Jews forced by the SS to remove the bodies from the gas chambers and burn the corpses. One of the first Sonderkommandos in Auschwitz numbered 80 prisoners. These prisoners were liquidated in August 1942. The largest Sonderkommando numbered 900 at the beginning of the summer of 1944, when the transports of Hungarian Jews were arriving in Birkenau.
These prisoners were isolated from the others. They were quartered in block 11 at the Auschwitz I main camp, in a separate block in Birkenau, and, from 1944, in rooms in the crematoria buildings.
When the numbers of transports of Jews to Auschwitz decreased at the end of the summer of 1944, the Nazis decided to liquidate the Sonderkommando prisoners gradually. They murdered about 200 of them in September. The other prisoners realized what danger they were in, and began planning a mutiny.
Soviet POWs, who were also assigned to the Sonderkommando, helped the Jews to prepare. The prisoners planned to blow up the crematoria, burn down the barracks, cut through the barbed-wire fence, and escape en masse. They had rudimentary grenades made with explosives acquired from women prisoners assigned to salvaging old airplanes. The SS quickly learned of the mutiny, and took repressive measures that claimed numerous victims.
On the morning of October 7, 1944, word spread that the Nazis planned to liquidate 300 Sonderkommando members. The Jews decided to put their mutiny plans into effect rather than to submit without a fight. The ringleaders were the Polish Jews Jankiel Handelsman, Josef Deresiński, Załmen Gradowski, and Josef Darębus. Setting a crematorium on fire was to be the signal for the mutiny to begin.
At noon, the SS came to take away the prisoners from crematorium IV. Armed with hammers and hatchets, the prisoners attacked them. They set the crematorium on fire. The prisoners quartered in crematorium II joined in, cutting the camp fence and making a run in the direction of Rajsko, where they barricaded themselves in a barn. The Nazis threw hand grenades into the barn and set it on fire. Machine-gun fire killed many of the Jews. About 200 remained alive; they were seized and shot soon afterwards.
There were 663 men in the Sonderkommando before the mutiny and 212 afterwards—the revolt claimed 451 lives. The Nazis quartered the remaining Sonderkommando members in crematorium III.
After suppressing the mutiny, the Germans began investigating the source of the explosives. They identified four Jewish girls who worked in the factory as the suppliers. Roza Robota, Ala Gertner, Regina Safirsztain, and Estera Wajcblum were hanged in January 1945, 21 days before liberation. Several dozen of the Sonderkommando prisoners survived Auschwitz.
