Inside the Gas Chambers: Eight Months in the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz (review)

The SS did not plan on prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau’s Sonderkommando surviving. It would be undesirable for them to transmit their knowledge, and they usually were killed after a few weeks of service in the crematoria. But Shlomo Venezia survived. And yet, for decades he kept silent about his eight horrific months in the death camp. Essentially, he says, he never had a normal life: “nobody ever really gets out of the crematorium” (p. 155). After his liberation from the Ebensee sub-camp of Mauthausen, Venezia became extremely ill with tuberculosis, spending seven years in hospitals, where no one asked him about his time in the camps: no one wished to hear about it. Shlomo Venezia began to talk about Auschwitz-Birkenau only in the 1990s, a time when, as he depicts it, antisemitism again became virulent in Italy. He visited schools, appeared in films, and bore witness to the horror in other ways as well; he served as an advisor for Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful. Venezia now has recounted his experience in print with the help of French political scientist Béatrice Prasquier. The conversations between Venezia and Prasquier recorded in this volume took place in Italian, though the book’s original edition appeared in French (2007). Before the present English-language edition, the book was published in a number of other languages.

Shlomo Venezia reports, soberly and seemingly without emotion—and yet the book becomes breathtaking in its forcefulness. That Venezia could recount what he so long consigned to silence reflects in part the achievement of Prasquier: the interview format permits Venezia a crucial distance from his own memories. He reports, explains, reflects—sometimes it seems he is looking at his life from the outside. He speaks of “brutalization,” refers to the camp as “hell,” indicates that he stopped thinking and acted “like a robot.” Such terms allow Venezia (and the reader) to avoid becoming overwhelmed in details . . . and yet Venezia does overwhelm through blunt narrations that reveal in a manner both gripping and terrifying just what it means not to be able to escape one’s memories. In one passage Venezia recalls gold teeth buried in a pouch by murdered Sonderkommando predecessors; he and another prisoner divided the teeth and used them to buy food. He recounts accompanying his father’s cousin to the gas chamber, sharing some food with him, and embracing him before the SS shut the door. Venezia explains that the Sonderkommando was responsible for opening and closing the hatches through which the SS poured Zyklon B—he had to do this many times. He describes the “technique” he developed for transporting the corpses. And he tells us that a prisoner might meet with solidarity “only when you had enough for yourself; otherwise, you had to be selfish if you were going to survive” (p. 100).

Of all the work the SS forced on camp prisoners, service in the Sonderkommando was by far the worst. Only Jews were chosen for it. They had to soothe those who had been selected for gassing, help them disrobe, and lead them to the chambers; they had to cut the hair and remove any gold teeth from the corpses, insert the latter into the ovens, and dispose of the ash. Whoever was assigned to the Sonderkommando gained certain privileges: special rations, a real bed, regular clothing, and an everyday life less dominated by SS arbitrariness than was that of the other prisoners. Sonderkommando members were not allowed contact with the others, but lived apart, directly by the crematoria. The basic criterion for being chosen was having enough strength for the heavy physical labor, which had to be carried out speedily. Venezia was a young man when he was deported to Auschwitz in April 1944; he entered the Sonderkommando three weeks after arriving. But the reason he could endure it was simply...