The Last Consolation Vanished: The Testimony of a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz

238 Pages·2022·3.298 MB·English

by  Zalmen Gradowski, Arnold I. Davidson, Philippe Mesnard

The Last Consolation Vanished

The Last
Consolation
Vanished
The Testimony of a
Sonderkommando in Auschwitz
Zalmen Gradowski
Edited and with a foreword and afterword by
Arnold I. Davidson & Philippe Mesnard
Translated by Rubye Monet
The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London
This publication was generously supported by a gift from
Randy L. and the late Melvin R. Berlin.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2022 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief
quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact
the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.
Published 2022
31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 63678- 8 (cloth)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 66032- 5 (e- book)
DOI: https:// doi .org /10 .7208 /chicago /9780226660325 .001 .0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gradowski, Zalmen, 1910–1944, author. | Davidson, Arnold I. (Arnold
Ira), 1955– editor, writer of afterword. | Mesnard, Philippe, 1956– editor,
writer of preface. | Monet, Rubye, translator.
Title: The last consolation vanished : the testimony of a Sonderkommando in
Auschwitz / Zalmen Gradowski ; edited with a foreword and afterword by
Arnold I. Davidson & Philippe Mesnard ; translated by Rubye Monet.
Other titles: In Harz fub Gehenem. English (Monet) | Testimony of a
Sonderkommando in Auschwitz
Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Includes
bibliographical references.
Identifiers: lccn 2022003413 | isbn 9780226636788 (cloth) |
isbn 9780226660325 (ebook)
Subjects: lcsh: Gradowski, Zalmen, 1910–1944. | Auschwitz (Concentration
camp) | Birkenau (Concentration camp) | Sonderkommandos—Poland—
Oświęcim—Biography. | Nazi concentration camp inmates—Poland—
Oświęcim—Biography. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Personal
narratives. | Jews, Polish—Biography. | lcgft: Autobiographies. |
Personal narratives.
Classification: lcc ds134.72.g72 a3 2022 | ddc 940.53/1853862092 [b]—dc23/
eng/20220218
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022003413
♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48- 1992
(Permanence of Paper).
Contents
Foreword
Beyond the Ashes vii
Philippe Mesnard
First Manuscript 3
Notebook 5
The Letter 52
Second Manuscript 55
Preface 57
A Moonlit Night 60
Separation 68
The Czech Transport 101
Afterword
Desolation without Consolation:
Living with Zalmen Gradowski 155
Arnold I. Davidson
Notes 187
Figure 1 Zalmen Gradowski and his wife, Sonja (Sarah) Gradowski, 1940.
Sonja was gassed and burned on December 8, 1942;
Zalmen was killed in the Sonderkommando uprising on October 7, 1944.
Foreword
Beyond the Ashes
Philippe Mesnard
The members of the Sonderkommando belong to a community of
witnesses who, erased from history, drift between different memo-
rial communities without ever being fully welcomed, even today, and
have for a long time been actively rejected. They cannot be consid-
ered entirely as victims because they also collaborated in the atroc-
ities, albeit forced to do so by the Nazis. Nor have they been rec-
ognized as heroes, despite being the architects of one of the most
hopeless revolts in human history, the October 7, 1944, uprising
against the SS.
This foreword covers the troubled reception of the testimonies
written and buried by members of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando
before focusing specifically on Zalmen Gradowski’s manuscripts. But
first, it presents in broad brushstrokes the history of the Sonderkom-
mando and how they were vilified as something less than human and
relegated to our cultural imagery of Hell, before becoming part of
the historical record.
A Short History of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando
Between 1943 and 1945, a group of Jewish deportees— together with
a few Poles and some Soviet prisoners of war who had recently ar-
rived at Auschwitz concentration camp—w ere conscripted to form
viii Foreword
the Sonderkommando. The first experiments with Zyklon B gas were
carried out on a few hundred Russian prisoners of war and some sick
inmates, initially in the underground Block 11 in the main camp,1 and
then later in waves of sporadic elimination in Crematorium I.2 After
this, it became clear that the mass murders would be perpetrated in
the neighboring camp of Birkenau in its perfected gas chambers and
ovens. The four buildings were up and running by spring 1943 at the
north end of the camp, after two farms on the outskirts of Birkenwald
had initially served as temporary gas chambers. The extermination
operations reached their peak in spring– summer 1944, when con-
voys of Hungarian Jews arrived in Auschwitz. In about two months,
including the last convoy on July 9, 1944, Hungarian military offi-
cials, under the guidance of German SS officials, deported around
430,000 Jews from Hungary. Most of them were taken to Auschwitz-
Birkenau, where upon arrival and after the so- called “selection,” be-
tween 300,000 and 350,000 were killed in the gas chambers.3
At that time, with a team of up to 900 detainees separated into
two shifts, the Sonderkommando kept the wheels of this death ma-
chine turning without interruption. Even though the precise number
cannot be known, it is estimated that about 2,200 prisoners were in
the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz. Day after day, they participated
in the destruction of their own people, the “Final Solution,” while un-
able to reveal the truth to them, on pain of brutal death in front of the
whole group of Sonderkommandos. They also facilitated the murder
of prisoners deemed no longer capable of work during selections in
the blocks, mainly those having reached the limits of their physical
and mental capacities who were designated as “Muselmänner” (sing.
Muselmann, literally “Muslim”) in the camp jargon.
In exchange for performing these unbearable tasks, the men in
the Sonderkommando benefited from better treatment than other
deportees: they were fed, clothed, and given a bed, unlike many of
the other prisoners. Some became used to the horrific work; others,
few in number, committed suicide or were murdered. They mostly
lived in extreme distress, but it would be a mistake to consider them
as inhuman, unable to feel disgust at what they were forced to do or
to feel empathy for those who were exterminated. Trapped in this
Beyond the Ashes ix
untenable situation, some of the Sonderkommando planned an up-
rising at Auschwitz. There were similar revolts in two other death
camps: in Treblinka on August 2, 1943, and in Sobibor on Octo-
ber 14, 1943, but none in any concentration camps. Actually, in the
concentration camps, the Resistance networks, which were mainly
communist, knew that it would be better to wait for the arrival of the
Red Army rather than risk the strong probability of a massacre
during a general uprising. This reticence is why the Jewish leaders
of the Sonderkommando insurgence reproached these political pris-
oners in the camp’s clandestine network for not having supported
the preparations for an uprising.
One of the most important figures of the Sonderkommando, Zal-
men Lewental, described with great lucidity the anxiety created by
the constant postponement of the insurrection while more Hungar-
ian Jews were selected to be gassed upon arrival. He wrote that the po-
litical leaders of the Resistance network always took their time in re-
sponding to the demands of help from the Sonderkommando. Since
these prisoners were not directly involved with the massacre of the
Jews, the more the revolt could be delayed, the better it was for their
strategy of waiting for the arrival of the Red Army. It is important to
consider this situation in order to grasp the extent to which the Jews
were abandoned. Not only did the Allies and European Resistance
fighters outside the camps fail to save the Jews— showing even less in-
terest in the Gypsies— but even inside the camps the communist Re-
sistance, in a very pragmatic and non- empathetic assessment, did not
want to consider the daily slaughter, of which they were fully aware.
As the idea of a general uprising showed itself to be little more
than a pipe dream, the most determined members of the Sonder-
kommando decided to attempt it on their own. The revolt broke
out on Saturday, October 7, 1944, just after midday. The SS reaction
was immediate. Over the next few hours, more than four hundred
members of the Sonderkommando were killed. The extermination
of the Jewish convoys continued at least until the first few days of
November, when the surviving members of the Sonderkommando
were tasked with dismantling the machinery of extermination and
erasing all traces of the crimes committed there.
x Foreword
From mid- January 1945, a hundred surviving members of the
Sonderkommando managed to sneak in among the thousands of
deportees being forcibly evacuated from the camp in the so- called
Todesmärsche (death marches). Between January 20 and 26, the SS
blew up what remained of the ovens and gas chambers so that all
that was left of the machinery of destruction was rubble and ruin.
As Gideon Greif has pointed out, there was no systematic effort to
document the testimonies of members of the Sonderkommando.
The Clandestine Manuscripts
In discussing the trauma of the Holocaust, Shoshana Felman and
Doris Laub describe the Shoah as the “unprecedented historical
occurrence of . . . an event eliminating its own witness.”4 Giorgio
Agamben draws a comparable perspective when designating the so-
called Muselmann as the “integral witness” who must bear witness
to the unimaginable.5
Between 1939 and 1945, numerous texts were buried, written by
individuals testifying to the events of the Holocaust as they oc-
curred, and by groups such as Oyneg Shabbos, brought together
by Emanuel Ringelblum in the Warsaw ghetto. Among these indi-
viduals was Simha Guterman, who hid his testimony6 underneath
the steps of a building in Radom, Poland, and Itzhak Katzenelson,
who buried three bottles containing the manuscript for his Song of
the Murdered Jewish People7 in the camp at Vittel, France, before be-
ing deported with his last surviving son to Auschwitz, where they
would both be murdered. In January 1945, not long before their
evacuation to Auschwitz, Jewish deportees began to compose a ver-
itable anthology testifying to life in the camp, but only the foreword
has survived.8 The literary motif of a message in a bottle thrown
desperately into the sea reveals the anthropological dimension of
these gestures.
In and around the crematoria at Birkenau, a similar phenomenon
arose with the Sonderkommando. Between 1945 and 1980, the man-
uscripts of five of its members were discovered buried at Birkenau.
First on February 20, 1945, Hersz Herman Strasfogel’s letter,9 written