Between March and April 1951, Les Temps modernes carried a report by the Auschwitz survivor Miklós Nyiszli . 1 Originally written and published in Hungarian, Nyiszli’s account testified to his work performing autopsies in the crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau to support Josef Mengele’s pseudo-scientific experiments. Along with this primary role, he also tended to the Sonderkommando (SK) or Special Squad who worked in the same buildings. 2 Through the SK, Nyiszli provided eyewitness descriptions of the workings of the gas chambers and the ovens of the crematoria: How squad members were tasked with pulling the dead out of gas chambers, removing anything of value left on or of their bodies (mainly hair and gold teeth), and then eliminating all trace of their existence. His testimony provided stories of how the SK were murdered and replaced in their entirety every three or four months, how members of the SK had at times played football with the SS guards, and how, on one occasion, a teenage girl had survived the gas chambers and they had made a desperate but unsuccessful attempt to save her. He told of the Sonderkommando’s doomed uprising in October 1944 as well as his own survival.
Nyiszli’s writing was certainly not the first to explain the role of the Sonderkommando. Post-war testimonies had been gathered in judicial procedures of investigation into Nazi crimes almost immediately after the liberation of the camps. 3 These investigations had also uncovered one manuscript written by a member of the Sonderkommando, dug up in the grounds of the crematoria . The SK’s testimony was used as part of court cases against personnel of the Birkenau camp, most notably in a British military court in Lüneburg and in Polish trials in Warsaw and Kraków, and both had received some coverage in the press. Early post-war memoirs also referred to the SK. But Nyiszli provided the first sustained piece of writing from within the Sonderkommando that was published for a wide audience, and the translation into French made it available in the West.
The context of publication is significant. As Yannick Malgouzou documents, Nyiszli’s memoir was published in a year when disputes among French intellectuals about the legacy of the camps were raging. In a flurry of books, libel cases and editorials, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and David Rousset fought over whether concentration camps could be compared to gulags, and why the political crimes of Communism trumped those of colonialism or the other way round. In 1951, Sartre broke with Camus over his book The Rebel. David Rousset won a court case against Pierre Daix in January of that year. 4 What a camp was had come to be a central concern of French intellectuals. Nyiszli provided evidence that a ‘concentration camp ’ had something that a gulag never had: a gas chamber , and so could be offered in support of the case that Sartre and Merleau-Ponty made against those trying to compare the two. 5 At the same time, the American Richard Seaver and the Scottish writer Alexander Trocchi were editing an avant-garde English-language magazine in Paris: Merlin. They negotiated with Sartre the right to use some material from his magazine. Nyiszli’s writing, it turned out, was the only text that Les Temps modernes shared with them. 6
Nyiszli’s testimony was thus used and reused within different contexts in the early 1950s: judicial examination, political dispute and what might be called an ‘aesthetic’ environment (Merlin also published pieces by Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco and Italo Svevo). But it was also repurposed at other times. Ten years later, Bruno Bettelheim wrote a preface to Nyiszli’s memoirs criticizing him and the Sonderkommando for their failure to resist. Nyiszli and the SK, were thus archetypal of the way he conceived Jews in general as simply allowing themselves to succumb to Nazi persecution. Bettelheim made this accusation in tandem with those of Raul Hilberg and Hannah Arendt , who also fitted the SK to their ideas of Jewish passivity . Two decades after that, Primo Levi made heavy use of Nyiszli in ‘The Grey Zone ’ (1986), which might be called an assay into moral philosophy. And fifteen years later, Tim Blake Nelson took Nyiszli’s memoirs (albeit clearly mediated by Levi’s own essay) as the main basis of his film The Grey Zone (2001).
What these constant returns to Nyiszli show is that there has always been an interest in the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz-Birkenau. They were crucial to conceptualizing key aspects of the Shoah. The SK provided some of the first evidence of the gas chambers , testimony that was central to several of the trials immediately post-war. They were vital for an understanding of the concentrationary universe, at least in the version of it that Sartre and Merleau-Ponty defended against the concept’s originator, Rousset . 7 And they seemed to speak (in Seaver and Trocchi’s judgement, at any rate) to something of the post-war condition, to say something on a par with the works being produced by Beckett and Ionesco. In later versions, they raised the central moral questions for Levi about what the Nazis had done to their victims. And at the turn of the millennium, the SK, in Nyiszli’s version, provided a way for Blake Nelson to claim to be cutting through five decades of accreted representations and getting back to the reality of the Holocaust.
The fact that Nyiszli was the go-to informant on the condition of the SK was also indicative that the SK were surrounded by myths, that people were fascinated yet troubled by them. Testimony from actual members was neglected, and that of someone who had been associated with the squad but not part of it, became the guide to their existence. Many members of the SK lived longer than the four months Nyiszli attributed to them. 8 The incident of the girl surviving the gas chamber was not at all unique but happened so much that there was a routine of how to deal with it. 9 And other football matches than just those between SS and SK took place—indeed, any match between the latter two groups would at most have been a kick-about, as there were not enough members of the SS present at the crematorium to form a team. 10 These ‘facts’ that Nyiszli conveyed were all taken up by Primo Levi’s essay ‘The Grey Zone ’ (1985), one of the most formidable attempts to understand the SK. For Levi these pieces of information were key elements in his picture of the Sonderkommando and therefore of the grey zone that permeated the world of the camps: the SK submitted even though they knew how long they had allotted to them; their ‘work’ gave the SS a false sense of brotherhood with them, and they only returned to human normality when prompted by extraordinary events. The SK’s own words, which Levi quotes once, came from men who were too emotionally and psychologically damaged and tainted by their work and could not ‘be taken literally’. 11 But it is worth examining the source of these words that Levi quotes, because they come, via a collection of testimony made by Hermann Langbein , from an early piece of survivor testimony, a memoir by Krystyna Żywulska .
A prisoner in Birkenau between 1943 and 1945, Żywulska gave an extraordinary account of her dialogue with a member of the SK in her memoir of 1946. Seeing a team of SK below her window, Żywulska feels contempt for these men who are prepared to ‘burn human corpses ’, especially one ‘who seemed quite intelligent’. When he challenges her gaze, argues that he has no choice and that he is waiting for his chance for revenge, she asks him why he does not rebel. ‘Why don’t you?’ he replies. ‘You think that the Sonderkommando are awful people. I assure you that they are like other people everywhere, only much more unhappy’. 12 These words were more or less replicated by Langbein and then Levi . But Żywulska’s astonished reaction to this speech was not and is very different from that of Levi himself: ‘those guys over there in the crematorium—they feel, they reflect, they are emotional?’ Her fellow prisoners chastise her for judging the SK so harshly and seeing them as different from her: ‘You are always afraid to evaluate yourself […] And the most convenient way is always to put yourself in a better light at the expense of others’. 13
Here, right at the beginning of a history of troubled thought over the SK, we see a different way of approaching them. Like Levi , Żywulska is horrified by the work carried out by the SK and considers them morally tainted. But unlike him, she is prepared to listen to their words, which shock her into reconsidering her repulsion. And her fellow prisoners blame that repulsion on a need to find someone more abject than herself.
The discourse of the grey zone , of anguished moral judgement mixed with unwillingness to judge, of failures of imagination and empathy and realizations that they still must be attempted, was, according to Żywulska , taking place in B...