Holocaust Survivors Tell Haunting Stories Of Life In Concentration Camps

When the Nazis decided Auschwitz would serve as the focal point for the extermination of Jews and various other groups, they were faced with the logistics of transporting millions of people to southern Poland, some from as far away as the Netherlands, France, Italy, and Greece. Transportation was done by railroad, typically in cattle cars, but occasionally in passenger trains, in which wealthy Jews were encouraged to bring as much of their wealth with them as possible.

A typical journey is described in the book Perfidy, written by Ben Hecht and compiled from transcripts of the trial of Rudolf Kastner, a Hungarian Jew tried for collaboration with the Nazis in Hungary:

The Jews are deported to Auschwitz daily, on schedule. They leave from the ghetto embarkation depots, on schedule. Conductors signal, "All aboard." Brakemen wave lanterns. German and Hungarian guards shoot a few reluctant travelers, club and bayonet a last group of mothers into the compartments. The engineer opens his throttle. And the train is off for Auschwitz, on schedule.

Eighty Jews ride in every compartment. Eichmann [said] the Germans could do better where there were more children. Then they could jam 120 into each train room. But 80 is no reflection on German efficiency.

The 80 Jews must stand all the way to Auschwitz with their hands raised in the air, so as to make room for the maximum of passengers.

There are two buckets in each compartment. One contains water. The other is for use as a toilet, to be shoved by foot, if possible, from user to user.

I wonder here, why the water and toilet buckets? One water bucket, one toilet bucket for 80 despairing men, women and children plastered against each other as in a packing case, and riding to death. Why? One water bucket, one toilet bucket are not enough to relieve the misery of these barely living ones. Jammed together, how can they use any buckets? They must urinate and defecate in their clothes. They must continue to burn with thirst until they arrive at the gas ovens. But the buckets are there.

These transports typically took four days to reach Auschwitz. One infamous transport from the Greek island of Corfu took 18 days. Upon arrival, all of its inhabitants were dead.

The Nazis exterminated thousands of people when a new train convoy arrived at an extermination camp, and dozens of workers handled the most distasteful aspects of this process. Almost always Jews, these workers were known as Sonderkommando - literally "task force" or "special force." The Final Solution was an unspoken secret even within the Nazi hierarchy, and camp authorities took great pains to ensure that no physical evidence, such as photographs of their deeds, existed.

To eliminate witnesses, the Sonderkommando were exterminated every three months or so until late 1944, when Heinrich Himmler, aware Germany would lose the war, suspended transports to, and mass killings within, Auschwitz. Because of this, some Sonderkommando survived, and in the confusion of the last days of the camp, they were able to blend in with regular workers before the forced march west, away from the Soviet occupation of Auschwitz.

One of these individuals, Shlomo Venezia, survived not only the Sonderkommando, but also a forced march to Mauthausen concentration camp. In 1992, to combat what he felt to be a resurgence of anti-Semitism, Venezia began discussing his Auschwitz experience. In 2007, he published a book. His account was very specific regarding the process that awaited those who had been condemned to die:

Every time a new convoy arrived, people went in through the big door of the Crematorium and were directed towards the underground staircase that led to the undressing room. There were so many of them that we saw the queue stretching out like a long snake.

As the first of them were entering, the last were still a hundred yards or so behind. After the selection on the ramp, the women, children and old men were sent in first, then, the other men arrived.

In the undressing room, there were coat hooks with numbers all along the wall, as well as little wooden planks on which people could sit to get undressed. To deceive them more effectively the Germans told people to pay particular attention to the numbers, so that they’d be able to find their things more easily when they came out of the "shower."

After a time, they also added an instruction to use the laces to tie shoes in pairs. In fact, this was to facilitate the process of sorting out when the things arrived at the Kanadakommando. These instructions were generally given by the SS standing guard, but it sometimes happened that a man in the Sonderkommando could speak the language of the deportees and transmit these instructions to them directly.

To calm people down and ensure they’d go through more quickly, without making any fuss, the Germans also promised them they’d have a meal just after "disinfection." Many of the women hurried up so as to be first in line and get it all over with as quickly as possible - especially as the children were terrified and clung to their mothers. For them, even more than for the others, everything must have been strange, eerie, dark and cold.

The Sonderkommando were present at all times during the gassing process, frequently conversing with the victims in their native languages. Shlomo Venezia described what unfolded once the victims undressed and were bolted into the chamber behind a hermetically sealed door:

Once they had taken off their clothes, the women went into the gas chamber and waited, thinking that they were in a shower, with the shower heads hanging over them. They couldn’t know where they really were. A woman would sometimes be seized by doubt when no water came out and went to see one of the two Germans outside the door. She was immediately beaten and forced to go back in; that took away any desire she might have to ask questions.

Then the men, too, were finally pushed into the gas chamber, the Germans thought that if they made thirty or so strong men go in last, they would be able, with their force, to push the others right in. And indeed, herded by the rain of blows as if they were so many animals, their only option was to push hard to get into the room to avoid the beating.

That’s why I think that many of them were dead or dying even before the gas was released. The German whose job it was to control the whole process often enjoyed making these people, who were about to die, suffer a bit more. While waiting for the arrival of the SS man who was going to release the gas, he amused himself by switching the light on and off to frighten them a little bit more.

When he switched off the light, you could hear a different sound emerging from the gas chamber; the people seemed to be suffocating with anguish, they’d realized they were going to die. Then he’d switch the light back on and you heard a sort of sigh of relief, as if the people thought the operation had been canceled.  

Then, finally, the German bringing the gas would arrive, it took two prisoners from the Sonderkommando to help him lift up the external trapdoor, above the gas chamber, then he introduced Zyklon B through the opening. The lid was made of very heavy cement. The German would never have bothered to lift it up himself, as it needed two of us.

Sometimes, it was me, sometimes others. I’ve never said this before, since it’s painful to admit that we had to lift the lid and put it back, once the gas had been introduced. But that’s how it was.

Once the gas had been thrown in, it lasted about ten to twelve minutes, then finally you couldn’t hear anything, not a living soul. A German came to check that everyone was really dead by looking through a peephole placed in the thick door - it had iron bars on the inside to prevent the victims from trying to smash the glass.

The real tasks of the Sonderkommando began after a German officer determined the inhabitants of the gas chamber were all dead. Shlomo Venezia describes the gruesome aftermath of this process:

When he was sure that everyone was well and truly dead, he opened the door and came out right away, after starting the ventilation system. For twenty minutes you could hear a loud throbbing noise, like a machine breathing in air.

Then, finally, we could go in and start to bring the corpses out of the gas chambers.

A terrible acrid smell filled the room, we couldn’t distinguish between what came from the specific smell of the gas and what came from the smell of the people and the human excrement.

When the job of cutting the hair and pulling out the gold teeth had been completed, two people came to take the bodies and to load them onto the hoist that sent them up to the ground floor of the building, and the crematorium ovens.

All the rest, the undressing room and the gas chamber, was underground. Depending on whether the people were big, small, fat or thin, it was possible to load between seven and ten people onto the hoist.

On the floor above, two people collected the bodies and sent the lift back down, the hoist didn’t have any door, a wall blocked the one side, but when they reached floor level, the corpses were unloaded on the other side. The bodies were then dragged and laid out in front of the ovens, two by two.

In front of every muffle, three men were waiting to place the bodies in the oven. The bodies were laid out head to foot on a kind of stretcher. Two men, either side of the stretcher, lifted it with the help of a long piece of wood slipped underneath it. The third man, facing the ovens, held the handles that were used to push the stretcher into the furnace. They had to slip the bodies in and pull the stretcher out quickly, before the iron grew too hot.

The men in the Sonderkommando had got into the habit of pouring water onto the stretcher before disposing of the bodies, otherwise these remained stuck to the red-hot iron. In cases such as that, the work became very difficult, since the bodies had to be pulled out with a fork and pieces of skin remained attached.

When this happened, the whole process was slowed down and the Germans could accuse us of sabotage. So we had to move quickly and skillfully.

Any member of the Sonderkommando who stole valuables from corpses or who even mistakenly neglected to remove all of the gold from a body's teeth would be shot by an SS guard on the spot.