Auschwitz (39 page)

This unknown Sonderkommando also recorded the remonstrations of other Jews at the assistance they were giving the Germans—in one case a small boy of seven or eight spoke out: “Why, you are a Jew and you lead such dear children to the gas—only in order to live? Is your life among the band of murderers really dearer to you than the lives of so many Jewish victims?”
¹⁰

Perhaps the most poignant letter of all written by a Sonderkommando is the one that Chaim Herman addressed to his wife and daughter, which was recovered from underneath a heap of human ashes near one of the crematoria in February 1945. He cannot have known for certain if his family were alive or dead, but still he asks forgiveness of his wife, “[I]f there have been, at various times, trifling misunderstandings in our life, now I see how one was unable to value the passing time.”
¹¹
He describes his life in Auschwitz
as “an entirely different world, this one here, if you like, it is simply hell, but Dante's hell is incomparably ridiculous in comparison with this real one here, and we are its eyewitnesses and we cannot leave it alive ...”
¹²
With great pathos he seeks to reassure her about his mental state: “I am taking this opportunity of assuring you that I am leaving calmly and perhaps heroically (this will depend on circumstances).”
¹³
Alas, no eyewitnesses survived to tell whether Chaim Herman kept his promise to his wife when his time finally came to die shortly after he finished this remarkable letter in November 1944.

Many of the Sonderkommando—including Dario and Morris—knew that their close relations had already perished in the crematoria, and they were all aware that they were now easing the process by which the Nazis killed thousands more. Each of them had to develop his own strategy for coping. With Dario it was simple—he “closed” his mind to what was happening around him and remained “numb” like a “robot.” “After a while you don't know nothing—nothing bothers you. That's why your conscience gets inside of you and stays there until today. What happened? Why did we do such a thing?” But, in his heart, he knows why he carried on working in the Sonderkommando. Because no matter how bad it got “you always find the strength to live for the next day” because the desire for life is so “powerful.”

Morris Venezia feels an even greater level of responsibility for his actions, saying, “we became animals too ... every day is burning dead bodies, every day, every day, every day. You get used to it.” As he heard the screams from inside the gas chamber “we feel that we should kill ourselves and not work for the Germans. But even to kill yourself is not so easy.”

As both the testimony from witnesses today and the buried letters make clear, the Sonderkommando were involved in the killing process at almost every stage, but that involvement was at its greatest when smaller numbers of people were delivered to the crematorium to be murdered. In such cases the gas chambers were too large to kill “efficiently,” so a more traditional method was used. “There were times when the transports were fifty people” says Dario, “and we had to take them, bring them one by one by the ears, and the SS [men] will shoot them in the back.” He remembers there would be “a lot of blood” when this happened.

Paradoxically, while the Sonderkommando were forced to witness such
appalling events during their work day, their accommodation was, in the context of how the other prisoners lived in Auschwitz, comparatively good. Morris and Dario slept at the top of the crematorium in beds that were less dirty and lice-ridden than those in the normal barracks. Here, in the evening, they would sit and talk about their past lives, and sometimes even sing Greek songs. The food was better than that found elsewhere in the camp, and even vodka was occasionally available. This life was possible because the Sonderkommando had access to valuables in just the same way as did the prisoners who worked in “Canada.” There were several opportunities during the killing process to “organize” goods for themselves. They were charged with gathering the clothes left in the undressing room, and often found hidden food or valuables—shoes were a favorite hiding place for diamonds or gold. Additionally, in a shameful searching procedure to find jewelry, they were ordered to examine all the orifices of the people who had been gassed.

The valuables were supposed to be handed over to the Kapos, who would then in turn deliver them to the SS. But, just as with the prisoners in “Canada,” it was possible for the Sonderkommando to conceal some of the stolen goods and trade them on the thriving Auschwitz black market, either by negotiating with other prisoners who came, for a variety of reasons, into the crematorium compound as part of their duties—like the Auschwitz firemen—or by dealing directly with the SS. In this way, the Sonderkommando could supplement the meager rations they officially received with delicacies like salami, cigarettes, or alcohol.

Miklos Nyiszli, a prison doctor employed in the Sonderkommando, recalled the sight of the food available: “The table was piled high with choice and varied dishes, everything a deported people could carry with them into the uncertain future: all sorts of preserves, jellies, several kinds of salami, cakes and chocolate.”
¹⁴
He remembered that “the table awaiting us was covered with a heavy silk brocade tablecloth; fine initialed porcelain dishes; and place settings of silver: more objects that had once belonged to the deportees.”

Of course, eating like this did virtually nothing to compensate for the horror of the Sonderkommando's life. And it would be easy to imagine—especially after hearing Dario Gabbai talk of how he closed his mind and
acted like “a robot”—that the emotions of the Sonderkommando were utterly deadened by their sickening routine. But one revealing incident in the lives of Morris and Dario shows that this was not the case, and that there existed a spark of human spirit that the Nazis could not extinguish.

One day, in the summer of 1944, Morris and Dario saw one of their cousins among a group of sick prisoners arriving at the crematorium to be shot. They knew there was nothing they could do to save him—the crematoria were surrounded by high fences—but Morris wanted to do something to make his last moments easier: “I ran up to him and asked, ‘Are you hungry?' Of course everybody was hungry. Everybody was dying for food. So he says to me, ‘I'm very, very hungry.'”

Seeing his cousin in front of him, weak from starvation, Morris decided to take a risk. When the Kapo wasn't looking he ran upstairs to his room, got a can of meat, opened it, and rushed back down to give it to his cousin: “And in one minute he swallowed it—he was so hungry. And then he got killed.” Rushing off to surreptitiously get a relative a last meal on this earth may not sound like a heroic act, but considering this in the context of the lives of the Sonderkommando—who endured lives of the utmost emotional stress, lives of horror equal to anything history has to offer—it surely deserves to be considered as such.

Meanwhile, by the end of the first week in July 1944, nearly 440,000 people had been sent to Auschwitz from Hungary—the vast majority murdered on arrival. The story Eichmann told after the war—that he had been keen to see the Brand mission succeed—is totally discredited by this damning statistic. For the trains started rolling to Auschwitz before Joel Brand had even left Budapest, and they carried on relentlessly as he tried to interest the Allies in the Nazis' proposal.

When his plane landed in Turkey on May 19, Brand immediately contacted the Turkish branch of the Jewish Agency, representatives of the Jewish community in Palestine, at the Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul. There he hurriedly explained to them Eichmann's proposal, and revealed that, in his opinion, it was unlikely that the British would ever deliver trucks to the Germans. But Brand thought that scarcely mattered, as long as the Allies came up with some kind of counter-proposal to keep the Nazis talking. Brand was distressed, however, that not one senior in the Jewish movement was available to meet
him and that sending a cable to Jerusalem was considered impossible—messengers would have to deliver the news personally to Palestine. It was to be the beginning of a lengthy process of disillusionment for Joel Brand.

It was not until May 26 that the head of the Jewish Agency in Palestine notified a British diplomat, Sir Harold MacMichael, of the Nazis' proposals. But it only took the British a matter of moments to reject the Brand mission, seeing it as an attempt to split the Western Allies from the Soviets. The British War Cabinet Committee on the Reception and Accommodation of Refugees met on May 30 and reached the conclusion that Eichmann's proposal was simply crude blackmail and could not be accepted. The Americans just as quickly came to the same view and, keen that Stalin be informed as soon as possible, notified Moscow of the Nazis' proposal on June 9. The Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister duly responded on the 19th that his government did not consider it “permissible”
¹⁵
to carry on any discussions with the Germans on this subject.

In the meantime, Brand and his traveling companion, Bandi Grosz, found themselves in the custody of the British—and it was the unappealing figure of Grosz that now attracted greatest attention. In mid-June, Grosz was interrogated in Cairo by British intelligence officers and the story that he told was a surprising one. He claimed that Brand's mission was only a camouflage for his own. Under the direct orders of Himmler, Grosz had been sent to facilitate a meeting in a neutral country between high-ranking British and American officers and two or three senior figures from the SD—Himmler's own intelligence service. The purpose of the assignation was to discuss a separate peace treaty with the Western Allies so that—together—they could all fight the Soviet Union.

In the murky world that Grosz moved in—it transpired that he was at least a “triple” agent working for, and betraying, anyone who paid him—it is impossible to be absolutely certain about the motivations behind the offer he laid before the British in Cairo. The proposal did come from Himmler,
¹⁶
however, and the Reichsführer SS clearly thought it in his interests to “fly this particular kite.” There was enough of a buffer, in the form of Clages and others, between him and Grosz for the offer to be deniable should it become public. Equally, if the Western Allies did make any attempt to proceed with the proposal, then Himmler had the intriguing
option of either leaking the information himself to sow discontent between Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union, or actually trying to pursue the deal to fruition.

Of course, the British and Americans never gave serious consideration to Grosz's offer and, from today's perspective, it seems incredible that it was ever made. But it does reveal the mentality of leading figures in the Nazi party, particularly Himmler, at this crucial time in the conflict. Himmler obviously knew that the war was going badly for Germany, and that must have formed a large part of his thinking in suggesting this deal.

But a strong ideological component was involved, too. Simply put, Himmler—in common with virtually all the members of the Nazi party—had almost certainly never understood why Britain and the United States had tied themselves to Stalin. The Nazi dream had always been for an alliance with Britain against the Soviet Union. Hitler's vision had been for Germany to be the dominant power on mainland Europe and Britain to be the world's dominant sea power, via the British Empire.

In 1940, however, Winston Churchill had smashed any possibility of an Anglo–Nazi partnership. So deeply felt was the sense of outrage at this upset in foreign policy that it still rankled with former Nazis after the war. Some years ago, one former member of the SS greeted me, when I arrived to interview him, with the words “How could it ever have happened?” Thinking that he was referring to the extermination of the Jews, I replied that I was glad he felt so badly about the crime. “I don't mean that,” he said. “I mean how could it have ever happened that Britain and Germany ended up fighting each other? It's a tragedy. You lost your Empire, my country was devastated, and Stalin conquered eastern Europe.”

This was no doubt a sentiment shared by Himmler in the late spring of 1944. Part of him would still have expected the Western Allies to act “rationally” and join forces with the Nazis to fight Stalin. This was to be a consistent train of thought among leading Nazis right through to the last moments of the war when, even after Hitler's suicide, German generals attempted to surrender only to the Western Allies, not to the Red Army.

Nothing suggests, however, that Hitler shared Himmler's desire for a separate peace with the Allies in the spring of 1944, and there is no evidence that he knew anything about Bandi Grosz's mission. Hitler was enough of
a political realist to understand that any peace treaty concluded from a position of great weakness would be untenable. The Brand mission thus marks the beginning of a split between Hitler and his “loyal” Heinrich—one that was to become more pronounced as the war drew to a close.

The Brand–Grosz mission may have been rejected by the Allies, but they also were careful never to communicate their negative response directly to the Nazis, so as to allow space for further local negotiation inside Hungary. In the face of silence from the British and Americans, Brand's wife, aided by another member of the Relief and Rescue Committee, Rudolf Kasztner, tried to persuade Eichmann once again that he should demonstrate his own commitment to the “Jews for trucks” proposal by releasing some Hungarian Jews before any response was heard from the Allies. As they tried to negotiate with Eichmann, both Hansi Brand and Rudolf Kasztner were arrested by the Hungarian authorities, who were anxious to know what was going on. Once in custody, they were beaten by the Hungarians before the Germans intervened to have them released. Hansi Brand and Rudolf Kasztner revealed nothing, and still continued their attempts to convince Eichmann to make a gesture to the Allies.