Inside the Gas Chambers

Eight Months in the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz

Shlomo Venezia

• Editore: Polity
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745683775
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Storia
• Categoria: Storia dell'Olocausto

This is a unique, eye-witness account of everyday life right at the heart of the Nazi extermination machine.

Slomo Venezia was born into a poor Jewish-Italian community living in Thessaloniki, Greece. At first, the occupying Italians protected his family; but when the Germans invaded, the Venezias were deported to Auschwitz. His mother and sisters disappeared on arrival, and he learned, at first with disbelief, that they had almost certainly been gassed. Given the chance to earn a little extra bread, he agreed to become a 'Sonderkommando', without realising what this entailed. He soon found himself a member of the 'special unit' responsible for removing the corpses from the gas chambers and burning their bodies.

Dispassionately, he details the grim round of daily tasks, evokes the terror inspired by the man in charge of the crematoria, 'Angel of Death' Otto Moll, and recounts the attempts made by some of the prisoners to escape, 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 - but, as a member of a 'Sonderkommando', Shlomo Venezia was given this horrific privilege. He knew that, having witnessed the unspeakable, he in turn would probably be eliminated by the SS in case he ever told his tale. He survived: this is his story.

Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

1

LIFE IN GREECE BEFORE THE DEPORTATION

My name is Shlomo Venezia, and I was born in Salonika, Greece, on December 29, 1923. My family had been forced to leave Spain when the Jews were expelled in 1492, but before settling in Greece, they spent time in Italy. That’s why my name is Venezia. The Jews who came from Spain did not, at that time, have family names; they were called (for example) Isaac son of Solomon. On arriving in Italy, they chose for themselves family names corresponding to the name of the city to which they had moved, in this instance Venice. That’s why many Jewish families bear the names of cities. In our case, this was what enabled us to keep Italian citizenship.

There were five children in our family, two boys and three girls. My older brother, Maurice, was two and a half years older than I; next came Rachel, who was one year and two months older than I. Then the last two daughters, Marica, born in 1930, and, after her, Marta, born in 1933. For the first years, my family lived in a house. It wasn’t very big, but it was better than the wooden shacks in which most of the poorer Jews of Salonika lived. As the family grew, the house became too small. I must have been five when we sold it and built a bigger, two-story house next door, on a piece of land belonging to my grandfather. My father was a bit egocentric, and he had his name written in red bricks on the path leading to the front door. The upper floor was rented out to Greek families. The money from their rent helped my father to pay his taxes. Unfortunately, things changed with his death, which happened very early. It must have been 1934 or 1935, and he left five fatherless children behind.

So you were very young. How did you react to his death?

I was eleven, I was at school when one of my father’s female cousins came to take me to see him in the hospital. He’d had an operation for a kidney problem, but nothing further could be done. In any case, I didn’t even have time to see him; he died before I arrived. All at once, we found ourselves almost alone, without material support. My father had run a small barbershop that his father had built for him. I obviously couldn’t step into his shoes on his death, since I was still too young. So his assistant took it over in exchange for a small percentage that he paid my family every week. But it wasn’t enough to feed a family of five children. It was only thanks to the help of my mother’s four brothers that we managed to have enough to eat every day. I went to their place every Thursday to pick up a bag of vegetables – eggplants, onions, and other things that they grew and put aside for their sister. This help was indispensable but not enough; as a result, one year after my father’s death I had to leave school to find a job and to help support my family financially. I was barely twelve years old.

And what did your older brother do?

He was sent by the Italian consulate to study in Milan. My father had fought in the First World War, and he was an Italian citizen, so he’d had the right to certain privileges. And that also meant we had one fewer mouth to feed. When the racial laws were passed in Italy in 1938, my brother was excluded from the Marchioni Technical Institute in Milan and sent back to Greece. So he never finished his studies either.

My father never lived to see the years in which the Fascist regime showed its true face. He felt so proud to be an Italian in Greece that he didn’t hesitate to wear the black shirt of the new regime and to march proudly along in the processions whenever the occasion presented itself. In his view, Mussolini was a socialist, and he never understood the real nature of Fascism. We were too distant to see which way this regime was drifting. As an ex-soldier, he took part in all the demonstrations and parades organized by the Italians. It was his only break from everyday life. It gave him a feeling of prestige vis-à-vis the other Jews of Salonika. Not very many of the Jews who’d come from Italy had kept their Italian nationality. Most of them adopted the same attitude as my father: they saw the realities from a distance, without really understanding what was happening in the Italian cities.

Did you sense any difference in Salonika between Italian Jews and Greek Jews?

Of the sixty thousand Jews in the city, there must have been not many more than three hundred of us Jews of Italian origin. But we were the only ones who were authorized to send our children to the Italian school. In comparison with the others, who in general went to the Jewish school, this gave us certain advantages: we got everything free, we didn’t have to pay for our books, we could eat in the canteen, we were given cod liver oil…. We wore really smart uniforms, with airplanes for the boys and swallows for the girls.

During this period, the Fascists were trying to promote Italian prosperity over all else. This was propaganda meant for the eyes of other countries, but we reaped the benefits. So, on Saturdays at school, there was the “Fascist Saturday,” which all the pupils were supposed to attend. I felt proud to join in these processions; I felt different from the others, and I enjoyed this feeling. I even went twice to a holiday camp in Italy, with the Balilla,¹ whereas at that time hardly anyone ever traveled. And then we had several other advantages, since the Italian Embassy gave us a great deal of help. For example, on certain holidays, the consulate would hand out shoes and books to Italians who weren’t so well off. For us, these things made quite a difference. Actually, the Jewish community in Salonika was divided into three categories: a tiny number were very rich, a marginal group managed to scrape by, but the vast majority of people would head off to work each morning not knowing whether they’d manage to bring back enough money to feed their families in the evening. It’s difficult to admit, but at home I couldn’t just say “I’m hungry, I’m going to have something to eat,” since we had nothing. It was completely different from these days when you need to force children to finish up what’s on their plates. Back then, everything was in short supply, and everyone had to do whatever they could to find something to eat. I remember that we had some neighbors who were even poorer than us. My mother always tried to help them, even though we were going short ourselves. This gives you an idea of the extreme poverty in which we found ourselves. All of this forged my character. I’m convinced that, when you have to go without all the time, it makes you a stronger person.

What was Jewish life in Salonika like?

There must have been five or six Jewish districts in the city, all very poor. They were generally designated by the number of the tramline that went there. But the main one was called Baron Hirsch, after a rich donor who’d helped the Jewish community of Salonika. Over ninety percent of the population who lived in this district were Jewish. Actually, we lived just outside this part of town, but I spent pretty much all my time with Jews. At home, everything was kosher. Not because my family was religious or really strict, but because all the shops in the area were kosher. Meat in particular, which we bought on the few occasions when we could afford it. We ate it on Fridays, with beans; that was how the poor feasted. If you wanted to eat non-kosher, you really had to be determined and look for it a long way outside your district. On the other hand, the food at school wasn’t kosher, but this wasn’t a problem as far as I was concerned. The main thing for us was just to eat so we wouldn’t starve to death.

A lot of the Jews we lived amongst were religious. But probably not like in the little villages of Poland, where everyone really was very strict. When I had my bar mitzvah ceremony, I couldn’t read Hebrew, so I learned my portion by heart. My father had already passed away, so it was my grandfather who took me to the synagogue. From then on, every time I went to sleep over at his house, he would wake me up at the crack of dawn to go and recite the morning prayer with him. Like all thirteen-year-old boys, who prefer to stay in bed, I’d roll over, grumbling, trying to get out of prayers.

What were the relations between Jews and non-Jews?

There weren’t any particular problems. Even if most of my friends were Jewish, I also hung around with Christians. There could be the occasional scrap, though, when certain youths from other neighborhoods came into the Jewish district to provoke us and pick a fight with the Jews. But these were mainly just tussles between kids. I don’t know if the word “anti-Semitism” was relevant here. I remember one episode that almost turned out really badly for me; I must have been twelve or thirteen. In those days we’d often go out on a Saturday evening to take a look at the girls from the other districts and maybe meet them. But the boys soon started to get jealous and tried to send us packing – it was their territory. Once, I found myself with four or five friends confronting a gang from another part of town. My friends turned and fled, but I was unaware of the danger and continued walking. When I saw how angry they were, I started to pretend I had a limp. As they went by they said, “We’ll let you off since you’ve got a limp – otherwise ….” I limped along for another dozen steps or so, and then took to my heels. These are things that all children do.

But you didn’t sense there was any particular hostility towards the Jews …

The only time when you felt an unpleasant tension was the Orthodox Easter. In the cinemas, you could see short films that fueled anti-Semitism, saying that the Jews killed Christian children and used their blood to make unleavened bread. Those were the most difficult times, but I don’t remember it turning violent. On the other hand, you did feel that being Jewish wasn’t easy when there was a change of government and a Fascist government came to power. Then Jews had a lot more problems. Even when it was the other boys who came spoiling for a fight, the Jews were always held responsible. But in other ways we were so out of it all that few of us knew what was happening in Germany all this time. Anyway, right up until the end, nobody ever could have imagined it. You know, we didn’t have a telephone, and no radio except in the two town taxis. One of the two drivers was Jewish and when we went past his car we could hear someone talking in a strange voice; it was the radio. We were intrigued by this, and wanted to know how this radio thing worked. But in any case, I was too young to take any interest in what it was saying.

So at the age of twelve you had to look after yourself and leave school to get a job …

Yes, I didn’t have any external support to encourage me and help me with my studies. My mother had been born in Greece but didn’t even speak Greek; that was because her parents, like a lot of Jews, didn’t want their daughters to socialize with non-Jews. The language I spoke at home was always Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish dialect. But with my friends, out in the streets, I always spoke Greek. I spoke it perfectly, without the accent and intonations that were particular to the Jews of Salonika. All I knew I had picked up in the streets. I hadn’t been to the Jewish school, and hardly to the Italian one either. My father was no longer around to teach me about life and my mother merely gave me a bit of practical advice. In poor families, the main worry wasn’t education but just getting enough to eat. We just grew, out in the open air.

So at twelve I started to do small jobs. I’d do anything I could find, just to take a bit of money home and help my mother. For instance, for a few months I worked in a little factory that made mirrors. I was still just a lad, but they put me on the press; I had to attach the mirror to the handle. Then I worked in the factory of one of my father’s friends, an Italian – he wasn’t Jewish. He produced thermosiphons. Right near where we lived I also worked in a factory that made beds. I did odd jobs, carrying this, fetching that … it wasn’t much, but it made all the difference to my mother.

My brother was still in Italy and neither my mother nor my sisters worked. My mother had married while still very young and had gotten nothing out of life apart from us, her children. She devoted herself entirely to her family and did all she could for us. I remember that her only relaxation, when we were still little, was going out on Sunday evenings. My parents would take us to a little place that sold various kinds of beer and cheese. They’d sit down at a table and order a beer or two and the waiter would bring a little cheese. We never left them alone, we were always asking for a little bit. In the end, my mother had none left for herself. I have kept these memories, even if they make me sad. I’ve often thought about what I could have done to help my mother. I loved her so much and I know that she was especially fond of me. Her name was Doudoun Angel Venezia. I know all the sacrifices she made for us, I made an effort to help her as much as I could, but I’d like to have done more.

But I was still young and I, too, wanted to enjoy life. For instance, I tried to put a few coins aside so I could rent a bicycle for a little while. I loved doing that. After all, I got by on my own. Since I couldn’t buy a bike, I managed to build myself a kid’s scooter. I used a long piece of wood, with another one as the handlebars, two wheels that I’d found – and I racked my brains to invent some way of getting the handlebars to turn. I managed it, but before I could go scooting, I had to walk two or three hundred yards to find a road I could use. This scooter was the occasion of my first big disappointment as a child. The first day I went out to give it a try, I was proud and very happy. I slung it across my shoulders, and walked past a cart that had come to a stop. The road was really muddy and the horse couldn’t pull the cart. When he saw me coming by, the man driving the cart took my scooter without so much as a by-your-leave, and used it to thwack the horse, which took fright and heaved itself out of the mud that was holding it back. My scooter lay on the ground, completely broken. All I could do was start to cry. He took my scooter, broke it, the horse got out of the mud – and I was stuck in it. You can imagine how disappointed a youngster must have been when he’d put all his energies into putting this toy together. It was one of life’s lessons.

Did things change when your brother came back from Italy?

He came back in 1938, after the promulgation of the laws excluding the Jews from school in Italy. The situation at home didn’t change much. I was a bit cross with him – instead of thinking about the family, he was thinking only of himself, going off to have fun…. I think he resented my mother for having sent him so far away. He and I weren’t all that close: he had his gang, and I had mine. Even though my sister was older than I, I played the role of the big protective brother with her. I even remember that, one day, I tore a blouse that she’d sewn herself – I thought it was too low-cut….

The war was brewing. How did the people around you react, and how did the start of hostilities affect you?

We didn’t really realize what was happening. The community leaders got together to discuss it. They were worried, and they searched in the Torah to try to interpret events. But it was all so far away from us. We’d heard certain things about Germany. All we knew was that the German regime had it in for Jews. We were so hungry and had so many problems with our own lives that we didn’t have time to wonder about the future. This is why, later on, the Germans had no difficulty at all in deporting the Jews from Greece. The Germans easily persuaded them that the occupation forces were going to allocate lodgings to them depending on the size of each family – the men would go off to work and the women would stay at home. We were naïve and didn’t know what was happening politically. And then, I suppose that people thought the Germans were precise, decent people. When you bought something “made in Germany” it worked properly. It was precision-made. People believed what they were promised. They didn’t have enough to eat, and here people were offering them a place to live in exchange for their labor – it didn’t seem such a big deal….

For us, the war really started with the invasion of Albania by Italy.² Even before entering Greece, Italy bombed the city of Salonika. The bombs set fire to the houses and terrified the populace. When Italy declared war, the Greek police immediately came to arrest all men of Italian nationality. I wasn’t of age yet, so they left me, but they took my brother Maurice. A policeman I knew told me I could stay for the time being, but I’d need to make sure I didn’t have anything in my pockets that might cause problems. I didn’t immediately realize what he meant, but the fact was, if someone was found with a mirror in his pocket, he might be accused of having been signaling to the planes.

So they took my brother, but only him. They also took all the Italians, Jews and non-Jews, and put them into a big block in the city center. It wasn’t a prison, but they weren’t allowed out. The problem was tha...