Auschwitz_ A Doctor's Eyewitness Account - Miklos Nyiszli [29]
Following my visit to the SS, I proceeded upstairs to the Sonderkommando’s living quarters. While I was there I treated a few cuts and bruises, common among chauffeurs. The Sonderkommando men seldom had any organic illnesses, for their clothes were clean, their beds were provided with fresh linen, and their food was good, sometimes even excellent. Besides they were all young men, hand-picked for their strength and good physical constitution. They did have, however, a general tendency to nervous disorders, for it was a tremendous strain on them to know that their brothers, their wives, their parents—their entire race—were perishing here. Day after day they took thousands of corpses and dragged them to the crematory ovens, where they loaded them with their own hands into the incineration cases. The result was acute nervous depression, and often neurasthenia. Everybody here had a past which he looked back on with sorrow, and a future he contemplated with despair. The Sonderkommando’s future was tightly circumscribed by time. Four years’ painful experience had shown that its life span was four months. At the end of that period a company of SS appeared. The entire kommando was herded into the crematorium’s rear courtyard. A machine-gun blast. Half an hour later a new Sonderkommando squad arrived. They undressed their dead companions. An hour later only a heap of ashes remained. The first job of every Sonderkommando crew was the cremation of its predecessor. During my visits there was always someone who took me aside and begged me to give him a swift, sure poison. I invariably refused. Today I am sorry I did. They are all dead. Their death was swift and sure all right—not self-administered as they would have preferred, but at the hands of the Nazi butchers.
XI
MY NEXT VISIT TOOK ME TO NUMBER two crematorium, which was separated from number one by a path through some fields and by the Jewish unloading platform along the railroad tracks. It was built according to the same plans as number one. The only difference I noticed was that the space corresponding to the dissection room in number one was here used as a gold foundry. Otherwise the layout of the undressing room, the gas chamber, the incineration room and the living quarters of the SS and the Sonderkommando was exactly the same.
It was to the foundry that all the gold teeth and bridgework collected in the four crematoriums were brought, all the jewelry and gold coins, the precious stones and platinum objects, the watches, the gold cigarette cases and any other precious metal found in the trunks, the suitcases, the clothes, or on the bodies of the dead. Three goldsmiths were employed here. First they disinfected the jewelry, then sorted and classified it. They removed the precious stones and sent the settings to the foundry. The gold teeth and jewelry supplied each day by the four crematoriums produced, once smelted, between 65 and 75 pounds of pure gold.
The smelting took place in a graphite crucible about two inches in diameter. The weight of the gold cylinder was 140 grams. I knew that figure to be exact because I had weighed more than one on an accurate scale in the dissecting room.
The doctors who removed the teeth from the bodies prior to cremation did not throw all the precious metal into the bucket filled with acid, for a portion—sometimes a fair amount, sometimes only a little—went into the pockets of the SS guards when these morbid treasures were being collected. It was the same for the jewelry and gems sewed into the linings of the clothes, and the gold coins left in the undressing room. In the latter instance, however, it was the Sonderkommando entrusted with the job of going through the luggage who profited. An exceedingly dangerous game, though, for the SS guards were ubiquitous, and they kept a close watch on this newly acquired property, which henceforth belonged to the Third Reich. Needless to say, they kept an