ANDREAS KILIAN
Historian
Claims Conference - Fund for Former Slave and Forced Laborers, Germany

Significance, responsibility, challenge:
Interviewing the Sonderkommando survivors

Significance:
The Uniqueness of the Sonderkommando testimonies

The importance of Oral History for a genuine and vivid understanding of the Holocaust is widely acknowledged today. In a period where the ruling power did everything to eliminate and burn all relevant documents in order to eradicate any evidence of this enormous crime, the eyewitness reports fill the gaps and enable us to understand the conditions of the persecuted, tortured and murdered Jews. In many places where Jews lived, none of the documents remained. Only the survivors, few as they are, can provide tangible and detailed descriptions of their experiences.

Furthermore, historical documents cannot give answers to all the questions that are necessary for their interpretation. Eyewitnesses, on the other hand, are able to correct credibly, even in hindsight, their own testimonies. In contrast, written documents, whether authentic or purposefully misrepresenting, talk only for themselves and elucidate, if at all, only in a highly limited fashion.

A thorough methodology of questioning is even able to induce an eyewitness to regain access to fragments of his memory that he might have repressed up to now. He might thus be able to reconstruct events in even greater detail. In contrast, a written document only provides answers based on the reader’s interpretation, rather than those intended by its author.

In a historical event like the Holocaust, in which the perpetrators of the crimes did everything they could to humiliate their victims, only the personal account can speak for the humiliated people and explain to us, for instance, what it means to sit three days and nights in a sealed waggon without a real toilet, compelled to use a bucket in front of everybody's eyes. Relevant documents, even where they exist, can scarcely give us an impression of the enormous fear the Jews felt, of the sense of being tormented and treated like beasts, or of the ways in which the malicious de-humanization affected their souls.
A vivid eyewitness account not only facilitates a better and more appropriate understanding of people’s "lived realities", it also helps to classify and explain historical documents.
For these reasons, there are today no more arguments against the historical value of oral testimonies. The reservations that some historians used to profess some thirty and even twenty years ago have all but vanished completely. A keen effort is being made - though very late in time - to save the last testimonies before their bearers will disappear.

Behind this effort also always lies an attempt to give voice to the survivors - and in case of video-recordings to supplement this voice with a face - and to enable descendants and the coming generations to have access to the testimony in a special way. The intimate encounter with eyewitness reports differs subtantially from the abstract nature of a document text. A testimony provides, in addition to being a mere text, an experience that conveys moods and atmosphere, which are communicated by facial expressions, language and voice, behaviour and mannerisms of the interviewee.

The narrative form and expressive potential of audio or visual reports are able to convey more insight and information than the written word alone. Only recently, during a film presentation for this topic, an attentive young woman in the audience asked about the meaning of the empty gaze of the survivors of the Sonderkommando. The profound sense of sadness and traumatization of the survivor could not have been better conveyed than in a filmic portrayal, by his own facial expression and physiognomy.

Over the years, a vast amount of oral histories has been accumulated within the wider field called "Testimonies on the Holocaust". Their importance and relevance naturally vary. Places like big cities (e.g. Warsaw, Krakow, Paris, Saloniki, Amsterdam, Brussels, etc.) have yielded more testimonies than small villages. The life in the big concentration and extermination camps is represented by oral testimonies in much greater detail than events that occurred in the vast number of smaller camps. On the other hand, the extermination of the Jews occurred in thousands of places, many of them tiny, even places that do not appear on the map. Naturally, the written documentation in such places is very scarce.

Whenever the Nazis regarded a site or an operation as "secret", the chance to find survivors and uncover oral evidence is limited. The policy in such cases was to eliminate those, who knew "too much". Such a place of secrecy was the area of the crematoria and the gas chambers in the largest of the extermination camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau, whose existence was labelled "top secret" by the German authorities. The extermination facilities in Auschwitz-Birkenau were never described in terms of what they actually were. Instead, code names and terms were used to hide the real purpose of the death factories.

In contrast to the death zone in Auschwitz-Birkenau, none of the prisoners in the strictly isolated killing areas of the "pure" extermination camps, like Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec, survived the end of the war. For these camps the extermination facilities and the concrete killing process could only be described from an outside perspective, i.e. only by prisoners who worked within the immediate vicinity of the gas chambers and burning sites. Thus, the fact that members of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz survived was highly significant.

None of the people deported to Auschwitz and sent to the gas chambers in the camp, survived. This fact also highlights the importance of the evidence given by the survivors of the very small group of prisoners who were forced to work in the killing installations. Their oral testimonies are essential in our efforts to understand the way in which the Death Factory Auschwitz operated within framework of the "Final Solution", especially since the SS perpetrators who ran these installations refused to shed any light on the crimes committed in the death area.

The SS regularly murdered the majority of those prisoners, who were part of the Death Factory and therefore labelled according to SS terminology as "Sonderkommando". In principle, according to an order issued by Eichmann, they were all doomed to die in the end, as they were officially considered "Geheimnisträger" - secret bearers.

Every prisoner who knew about secret aspects of the extermination was regarded as especially dangerous for the Germans’ efforts to conceal as much the crimes perpetrated in the camps as possible. In fact the SS tried however to keep and exploit every labourer and trained specialists who were forced into submission and obedience.

Miraculously, about 110 of the originally 2200 prisoners of the Sonderkommando survived Auschwitz and the subsequent Death Marches. Since the end of WWII, a considerable number of those prisoners have passed away and with them their important testimonies. Today, only 20 of those survivors are still alive worldwide, of which a quarter reside in Europe: two men in France, as well as one each in Germany, Poland and Italy; the remaining ones live in Israel, the United States and Canada. Of all the Sonderkommando survivors, approx. 40 men left testimonies of all kinds in 13 different languages: manuscripts, autobiographical writings, drawings or paintings, audio and visual recordings, protocols and hearings in courts of law and other types of interviews.

Accounts of the Sonderkommandos and specific events during its history - in particular the depiction of the resistance movement in the Sonderkommando - has yielded until recently a number of tendentious and problematic representations. This insufficient historiography of the Sonderkommando showed that historians and other scholars were often led to politically influenced or abstract and theory dependent misinterpretations, due to their limited knowledge about survivors’ testimonies, lacking possibilities to compare between testimonies, lacking overview, especially regarding contexts and numerous gaps of knowledge. By relying too heavily on historical documents, rather than empirical knowledge, as provided in eyewitness testimonies, historians investigating the story of the Sonderkommando could only gain limited insights and were unable to grasp the complexity of the issues involved.

Until 1980 no systematic effort has been undertaken to document their testimonies. The first scholar, who engaged in a more specifically directed research on the Sonderkommando from 1980 onwards, was our dear friend Dr. Erich Kulka (1911-1995), who had himself been a prisoner in Auschwitz for 26 months. Then in 1986, Gideon Greif embarked on a systematic study of the history of the Sonderkommando in Israel, which has expanded since 1994 into worldwide project thanks to the joint work of the authors of this article.

The members of the former Sonderkommando were the only prisoners who witnessed fully and first-hand the mass murder of the Jews (approx. 1,100,000 victims), the Poles (ca.75,000), the Gypsies (ca.21,000), and the last extermination operations of the all together 15,000 murdered Soviet POWs - who were mainly gassed or shot in the killing installations of Auschwitz-Birkenau. For this reason alone, it is of utmost importance to save the reminiscences of the members of the Sonderkommando and document concrete, realistic and plastic images of the following points:

• Anatomy:
  The structure and architecture of the killing sites and their technical details: Although much of the architectonic and engineering plans have been found, the testimonies of the former Sonderkommando prisoners enable us to understand exactly how the "factory" of death functioned and how the "Production Line" operated.
  This is the reason why the former Sonderkommando members Henryk Tauber, Shlomo Dragon, Stanislaw Jankowski and Henryk Mandelbaum, after their escape from the Death Marches between February and June 1945, explained the function of the crematoria to the Soviet and Polish Investigation Commissions and supplied evidence for the crimes. Furthermore, it was the Sonderkommando survivors Filip Müller, Dov Paisikovic and Milton Buki, who elucidated the process of extermination in the course of the Frankfurt Trials in 1964 and 1965. Finally, the already mentioned Shlomo Dragon testified in 1972 in Linz against the designers of the gas chambers Ertl and Dejaco.
  In this context, one also ought to mention that in studies on Auschwitz theoretical calculations were often mistakably taken for authentic representations, even though they totally contradicted the empirical data given by those who worked in the crematoria. This explains also the recent revisionist scandal caused by the Spiegel editor Fritjof Meier, who attempted in such a manner to reduce significantly the number of victims in Auschwitz.
  The erroneous conclusions of such statistical studies are often the result of a problematic devaluation of eyewitness testimonies, as well as an overrated and uncritical conception of National Socialist documents and planning. This explains, for instance, the difference between the capacity of the crematoria, as mentioned in the official documents and the descriptions of the survivor testimonies. The practical implementation of the killing and the burning simply differed from the theoretical plans that were set out in the building plans for the crematoria and gas chambers. In practice, the capacity of the killing installations eventually doubled, due to additional methods and innovations that were being discovered over time. In such case, eyewitnesses accounts can provide much more accurate information than documents and operational plans that were mostly written prior to the actual events.
  
  However, during the last couple of years, a specific effort on part of project groups has increasingly resorted to the detailed knowledge of the only survivors who are still able to report about the workings and the inner life of the killing installations. Between 1997-2000 the former Sonderkommando prisoner Shlomo Venezia accompanied an Italian team of researchers to Auschwitz, who worked on a multi-media project "Destinazione Auschwitz" and could eventually present a detailed virtual reconstruction of the crematorium complex.
  
  In addition, Venezia acted in 1999 as consultant for the production of the feature film "Life is Beautiful" by Roberto Benigni. Morris Kesselmann, the youngest survivor of the Sonderkommando, was in 1998 an advisor for the script to the theatre play "The Grey Zone", which was based on the report of the Rumanian pathologist Miklos Nyiszli and later turned into feature film by Tim Blake Nelson. However, one ought to mention that these cooperations had only become possible after years of carefully approaching the survivors in interviews, where they had opened up, overcome their fears and broken the silence.
  
• Deceit and Strategies of Extermination:
  The tactics of deceit, as implemented by the SS personnel vis-à-vis the victims in the undressing hall and the gas chambers: The thousands of innocent victims were constantly cheated and deceived by the Germans. Every detail in the killing process was accompanied by fraud. The goal was to bring the victims almost voluntarily inside the gas chambers, without investing much efforts and manpower. The benches and wooden hooks in the undressing rooms, the metal pipes and shower heads in the gas chamber, the signs in several languages - all these were intentionally installed in the undressing halls and gas chambers. Over decades this image was determined by the outside perspective of other prisoners and supplemented by rumours and elaborate phantasies - like the idea that soap and towels were handed out to the victims, or that the toxic gas was released from the showerheads. Such myths and other wrong and defamatory accounts, e.g. by Miklos Nyiszli and Primo Levi (whose writings are based on Nyiszli), or those by Hermann Langbein and Tadeusz Borowski, could only be conclusively refuted with the testimonies of the former prisoners of the Sonderkommando. The persistent protest of survivors of the Sonderkommando even pressured Langbein to remove a section that offended the honour of the Sonderkommando from his book "Menschen in Auschwitz", 23 years after its first release. In this way, the testimonies of the former Sonderkommando prisoners help to overcome prejudices and distorted facts.
  
  The behaviour towards the victims on their way to the gas chambers and inside the undressing halls:
  According to survivors’ reports, the behaviour of the SS staff towards the victims was not permanent or steady and moved from courtesy and politeness to aggression, violence and brutality. The testimonies of the Sonderkommando prisoners give an authentic, internal picture of the Germans’ behavioural patterns on the threshold of death and qualify the tendentious and euphemizing accounts of the former camp commander Rudolf Höß in his autobiographic recollections.
  
• Characterizing the perpetrators:
  The behaviour of the SS personnel working at the crematoria: the best and most detailed document can never be a substitute for the testimonies of the survivors, who met SS-people like Otto Moll, the commander of the crematoria, almost every day. Only those former prisoners can convey a realistic picture of the extreme cruelty of the Germans in the Killing area in Auschwitz-Birkenau. In this context, the significance of the survivors’ testimonies becomes especially apparent when considering the SS perpetrators’ tacit agreement not to testify against each other and their refusal to contribute to the uncovering of the crimes.
  
• Reactions:
  The behaviour of the victims in their last minutes after they discovered the truth about their fate: the patterns of the behaviour of those doomed to death enable us, for instance, to answer the question, how much they knew in advance about their forthcoming death, if there were attempts of resistance, and if they tried even in the last minute, to fight for their life.
  
• Covering up the traces:
  The concrete efforts to conceal the traces of the murder, i.e. the removal and incineration of the corpses and the scattering of the remaining ashes: the Sonderkommando prisoners were witnesses to the enormous efforts on part of the Germans to erase the evidences of the crimes and to remove all leftovers, even the ashes.
  
• Uncovering the traces:
  The history of the "hidden scripts" that were prepared secretly by some of the Sonderkommando members: the background of the documentary project, initiated by members of the Sonderkommando, can be revealed only by resorting to the testimonies of the Sonderkommando members, who knew the comrades that were involved in the writing process of the scripts, and who knew the circumstance that enabled its creation. Furthermore, some of the survivors who were either initiated into the secret or buried some of the scripts themselves could even help to find this highly valuable historical source after the war.
  
• Social life:
  The daily life within the Sonderkommando, the way they related to each other and to their tormentors, the SS guards: the reality, in which the Sonderkommando members were forced to live and act was without precedence. For the first time in human history, a man was forced to "work" in a Death Factory, to be surrounded day and night by corpses, ashes and painful death. The testimonies depict the various ways in which the Sonderkommando people tried to cope with this gruesome reality. The inside perspective on life in the Sonderkommando also shows that this prisoner unit did not consist of a homogenous group. Amongst these men - who came from very different social and cultural backgrounds, who spoke different languages, had different religious affiliations and had gained different experiences in living and surviving - existed different moralities, mentalities and patterns of behaviour. These differences affected the attitude of each prisoner; they determined his strategy of survival in the extermination camp and also led, from time to time, to conflicts within the Sonderkommando.
  
• Conspiratory activities:
  The underground resistance activities of the Sonderkommando, their relations to the "Kampfgruppe Auschwitz" and the preparations for the joint uprising of the resistance groups: In the history of Auschwitz this chapter is relatively unknown. The range of testimonies reveal the complex world of underground activities in the camp, the group constellations and the negotiations held between the Jewish and non-Jewish underground movements, in their mutual attempt to sabotage the killing machinery and free all the prisoners.
  
  Since conspiratory activities naturally avoid producing written documentation, only a comparative analysis of a whole range of testimonies can enable us to uncover the intricate history of the resistance movement. The details of the Sonderkommando uprising on October 07th 1944: Since this event is only scarcely documented, the oral evidence is especially essential to understand this important event in the camp’s history and evaluate its historical significance.

Steps in the interview process:

To trace and find the former members of the Sonderkommando was tremendously difficult. The few remaining survivors disappeared after the war and dispersed across a number of countries all around the world. Having lived though hell on earth, they all tried to open a new chapter in their lives. Those survivors had all reasons to remain anonymous, and gradually build up a new life in a ‘normal world’, without being surrounded day and night by dying people, corpses, crushed bones and ashes. This explains why the existence of the Sonderkommando survivors has remained unknown for so many years.

An additional reason for the former prisoners of this Kommando to stay ‘hidden’, was the general attitude displayed by former inmates of Auschwitz towards so called "Funktionshäftlinge" (prisoner functionaries), both Jewish and non-Jewish, who held positions like "Blockältester", "Blockschreiber", "Kapo", "Vorarbeiter", and others. In the years following the end of WWII, some of those prisoner functionaries were identified and brought to trial and many had to flee their places of residence and settle down in some remote countries, like e.g. Australia, where people did not know about their past.

The former members of the Sonderkommando did not want to expose themselves to the same treatment those other former functionaries had to endure. The survivors of the Sonderkommando truly and justifiably considered themselves innocent, since they were forced to participate in the mechanism of the killings. They did not kill anybody - the action of killing was always, without exemption executed by the SS men - still the Sonderkommando people were part of the general process and witness to each step in it. They had suffered enough and desperately tried to avoid being associated with those Auschwitz prisoners, who stood condemned and accused for having committed severe crimes against their fellow inmates.
They also tended to conceal from their families the fact that they worked in the Sonderkommando, in order to protect them from the unbearable reminiscences of their life in the camp. They were convinced that they had a responsibility not to burden their wives and children with horror of their past experiences. The refusal to reveal their past was generally an attempt to protect themselves and their loved ones from pain and grief. The desire to stay hidden, to repress, the fear of being seen as a tool in the hands of the murders, and the feeling that nobody will ever be able to understand their ability to "work" in the center of hell - all these aspects made interviewing the former Sonderkommando members exceptionally difficult.
Tracing their whereabouts was only the first steps. The real responsibility and challenges began when confronting these people with the horrors of their past.

As interviewers we had to deal with the following problems:

• A basic resistance and refusal on part of the survivor to confront his memories - a self-protective behaviour, that counteracts the opening of old wounds and scars. This trend is common for most of the survivors. In the case of the Sonderkommando members it is extreme. To overcome this obstacle, strong efforts had to be made in the pre-interview time and during the interview itself.
  
• The necessity to ask direct questions that refer to the most horrible, sensitive and delicate aspects of life and death. Such questions could include subjects like: reaction to nudity, sexuality, carrying out from the gas chamber corpses of family members or friends, incineration and burning in the crematorium-ovens corpses of family members or acquaintances, taking and using the property (especially valuables) of the murdered people, left alone in the undressing room, making "business" with the Germans in the gas chambers area, the conflicts between prisoners of different nationalities and other delicate topics.
  
• How to protect the interviewee from being hurt, or feeling attacked and feeling implicitly accused as "collaborator" or "agent" of the murderers.
  
• To which degree it was possible to discuss "unpleasant" subjects, for instance, whether the interviewee has feelings of guilt or remorse about corruption or theft that he might have committed whilst staying in the crematoria installations.
  
• How to receive the maximum amount of information and data (technical, emotional, historical) from the survivor without creating unnecessary mental and psychological distress.
  
• How to interpret several actions, made in a routine manner by some of the Sonderkommando prisoners, without making to them unjust. Those actions include making business and commerce with the German team in the crematoria are, not telling the truth to the thousands of Jews, undressing in the undressing cellars and halls, minutes away from their deaths, the treatment given to the corpses of the suffocated victims while dragging out their bodies from the gas chambers, the rude and vulgar way of behaviour, which part of them used, or: the very significant advantages that they have gained from the Germans, like - much better nutrition, better housing and sanitary conditions, better attitude from the side of the SS-personnel (less strictness) and so on.
  
• The main challenge for us, the authors of this article, in our interview project was to document in detail the full history of the Sonderkommando, in all its aspects and manifestation, but to refrain in this endeavour from any kind of judgementalism. We tried our best to avoid appearing like prosecutors or accusers to the Auschwitz survivors, who were, perhaps, one of the groups who suffered the most in the camp. It was almost a mission impossible.
  
• We had to arrive at the interviews well supplied with a detailed and comprehensive knowledge about Auschwitz, its structure, mechanism, routine manpower, mentality, habits, daily schedule of prisoners and SS guards, etc. - in order to be able to ask the right questions and gain information and details on particular issues and fields, which need to be revealed and exposed.
  
• We had to gain the complete confidence of the survivor, so that he will be open, direct and sincere in his answers, even on unpleasant, delicate and sensible subjects.
  
• We had to decide what language to use in the formulations of questions and remarks, in order to refrain from hurting and opening old scars.
  
• We had to develop sensitivity concerning the decision, when to stop the interview, in other words: to be able to feel the right moment to say goodbye and leave. It was very important to take into account the emotional strength and also the physical conditions and health of the survivor.
  
• We had to find the correct decision, in which to use the recorded material in the research-process, in a way that will do justice to the murdered, to the survivors and to humanity. This was first and foremost in order to prevent the potential instrumentalization and politicization of this highly delicate topic.

Concluding remarks

The testimonies we collected comprise in several cases "explosive" information. As historians, we see ourselves committed to present and verify the authenticity, the truthfulness and the credibility of the testimony.

It is a difficult job. In order not to fail, we had to be simultaneously experts not only in history, but also in areas like diplomacy and psychology. A successful questioning also required a lot of patience and stamina: Only years of consistent and stringent work allowed us to gain the trust of the survivors, which in turn was the precondition for getting direct and open answers. Only after years were the essential "secrets" revealed to us.

The outcome of the interviews we have conducted is an abundant, outstanding historical source, which contributes to the understanding of Auschwitz-Birkenau, its killing installations, its German personnel and the Sonderkommando . The most unbelievable crime in human history slowly becomes a reality - cruel, inhuman, evil and murderous. In this form the collection of testimonies provides a valuable, strong and effective tool and weapon against all those in the world, who wish to commit the murder of the memory of the 1,250,000 innocent people who were killed in Auschwitz. Having no grave - their memory is the only value that remains for us.

The interviews with the former members of the Sonderkommando are in this way also our personal contribution to the strengthening of the remembrance of those, who were brought to that place called Auschwitz-Birkenau, only to be humiliated, de-humanized and murdered, without leaving one complete bone of their tortured soul and body. Some of the victims still reside among us, yet they cannot escape the memory of the death zone in Auschwitz. It is our responsibility to bring to life their memory and to speak for those, who simply cannot speak anymore or who are unable to find the words for the anguish in the hell of Auschwitz.

Das Manuskript von Gideon Greif und Andreas Kilian wurde veröffentlicht im:

International Journal on the Audio-Visual Testimony, No. 9 (juin 2003), Editions du Centre d’Etudes et de Documentation Fondation Auschwitz, Bruxelles, p. 75-83

Wir danken den Autoren und der Redaktion des International Journal on the Audio-Visual Testimony für Ihre Zustimmung zur Veröffentlichung des Artikels auf www.sonderkommando-studien.de