We Wept Without Tears: Testimonies of the Jewish Sonderkommando from Auschwitz (review)

Gideon Greif: How could you work so long in that hell?

Ya'akov Gabai: It's true that people who worked in [Auschwitz-Birkenau] looked death in the eye every day, they were beaten, they had other tragedies. But we saw the most terrible things of all. We did the dirty work of the Holocaust. For eight months I worked with the Sonderkommando. . .. It was grueling labor, especially for the first few days. Everyone was afraid that they'd find relatives among the corpses. The first time was the hardest. But really, believe me, you get used to everything.

Gideon Greif: Did you have time to reflect about what you were seeing?

Ya'akov Gabai: At first it was very painful to see all of this. I couldn't grasp what my eyes were seeing—that all that was left of a human being was half a kilogram of ashes. Sometimes we reflected about it, but what good would it do us? Did we have any choice at all?

(pp. 205–206)

The foregoing is one of many riveting and revealing exchanges found in Gideon Greif's edited collection of interviews. Ya'akov Gabai was deported to Auschwitz from Greece in 1944, and assigned to a unit that cremated 24,000 Hungarian Jews per day that summer. Another Auschwitz survivor, and one of the twentieth century's most important writers, Primo Levi, discussed the Sonderkommando in his last book, The Drowned and the Saved(New York: Vintage, 1988 [1986]). He focused on this particular unit—in his words, "the most extreme case of collaboration"—in order to draw attention to the moral ambiguity of the Holocaust, what he so famously termed the "gray zone." In the context of the Nazi killing centers, the Sonderkommandos were special units of able-bodied men, most of whom were Jewish, numbering about 700 to 1000 each; these men were forced to operate the mass murder factory of Auschwitz-Birkenau (excluding the application of the gas, a task the Germans reserved for themselves). The creation of these units, Levi argues, was "National Socialism's most demonic crime[,] an attempt to shift onto others—specifically, the victims—the burden of guilt, so that they were deprived of even the solace of innocence" (p. 53).

Since the men of the Sonderkommando were designated Geheimnisträger(bearers of secrets), they were isolated, and every three to four months the Germans killed almost the entire unit and replaced it with newly arrived prisoners. Consequently very few members of the Sonderkommando survived—Greif estimates about eighty (p. 83), though the common perception was that nearly all had died, since the surviving Sonderkommando men preferred to keep silent.

Yet some, such as Filip Müller, bravely spoke out, and researchers have unearthed diaries and other writings that deceased Sonderkommando members, such as Zalman Lewental, had buried near the crematoria. From these testimonies and now Greif's interviews, how can we understand the Sonderkommando's experiences and behavior, when the inclination to judge them is strong, and their horrific stories and disturbing confessions are difficult to comprehend? Levi observed that we cannot expect from the Sonderkommando "a deposition in the juridical sense, but something that is at once a lament, a curse, an expiation, an attempt to justify and rehabilitate oneself" (p. 53). Gideon Greif's interviews provide the historical detail lacking in Levi's presentation. Levi doubted whether Sonderkommando testimony would offer us some glaring, hideous truths, yet Greif's volume reveals hitherto unknown facts about how these Jewish laborers coped with their "dirty work" and how Jewish victims behaved facing death.

Greif doggedly tracked down his subjects in Greece, Italy, Poland, the Netherlands, Israel, Canada, and the United States; he gained their trust, and interviewed them with remarkable skill. Though Greif determined that at least twenty were alive as of 2003 (he had started the project in 1986), for reasons not explained...