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Inside the Gas Chambers: Eight Months in the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz

SPECS: xvi + 210 pages, photos, drawings, maps, bibl., 5 ¼” X 8”
PUB DATE: 2009

KIND: cloth
ISBN: 978-0-7456-4383-0
PRICE: $22.95

PUBLISHED BY: Polity Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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Inside the Gas Chambers: Eight Months in the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz
by Shlomo Venezia

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"Exceptional….Shlomo Venezia dare[s] to mention the most macabre aspects of his ‘work’ in the Sonderkommando, adding details of unbearable horror that bring out the full extent of this abominable Nazi crime….Venezia does not try to hide the episodes that might give rise to criticism, should anyone dare to formulate it. It redounds entirely to his honor that he is brave enough to speak of his feeling of complicity with the Nazis, of the selfishness he sometimes needed to survive, but also of his desire for vengeance at the liberation of the camps."
— from the foreword by Simone Veil

This is a unique, participant’s account of everyday death and life inside the engine of the Nazi extermination machine.

Shlomo Venezia was born into a poor Jewish-Italian community living in Thessaloniki, Greece. Early in World War II, occupying Italian authorities provided a measure of protection for his family, but when the Germans took control, the Venezias were deported to Auschwitz. His mother and sisters disappeared on arrival, and he learned, at first with disbelief, that they almost certainly had been gassed. Given the chance to earn a little extra bread, he agreed to become a member of the Sonderkommando , without realizing what that entailed. He soon found himself one of the group of ‘special unit’ inmates compelled by the Germans to serve as auxiliaries to the mass murder: they directed the victims into the gas chambers, removed the bodies, ‘mined’ the cadavers for valuables, transported the remains to the crematoria and burned the corpses, and disposed of the ashes. They bought each day of their own lives with these compromises and more; the actual murders remained a German role.

Dispassionately, he details the grim round of daily tasks, evokes the terror inspired by the sadistic SS-man man in charge of the crematoria, and recounts some of the prisoners’ attempts to escape and to resist, including the revolt of October 1944. It is usual to imagine that none of those who went into the gas chambers at Auschwitz ever emerged to tell their tale. Most Sonderkommando members, too, were systematically killed by the SS. But fate allowed Shlomo Venezia to survive, and the horrific privilege to bear witness. This is his unsparing story.

"[This is] a frightening book about his experience…the most important since the testimony of Filip Müller, who spent three years in the gas chambers of Auschwitz."
— Le Monde

Table of Contents
	Foreword by Simone Veil	xi
	Note by Béatrice Prasquier	xvi
	Acknowledgments	xvii
1.	Life in Greece before the Deportation	1
2.	The First Month in Auschwitz-Birkenau	34
3.	Sonderkommando: Initiation	55
4.	Sonderkommando: The Work Continues	93
5.	The Revolt of the Sonderkommando and the Dismantling of the Crematoria	113
6.	Mauthausen, Melk, and Ebensee	131
	Historical Notes:	157
	The Shoah, Auschwitz and the Sonderkommando by Marcello Pezzetti	159
	Italy in Greece: A Short History of a Major Failure by Umberto Gentiloni	189
	About David Olère by Jean Mouttapa	197
	Selected Bibliography	199

Shlomo Venezia is originally from the Jewish-Italian community of Thessaloniki, Greece. He was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau when he was twenty years old and enrolled in the Sonderkommando, of which he was one of the few to survive. He lives today in Israel.