all to learn what it meant.’26 Although only SS Sanitäter (medical orderlies) actually introduced the Zyklon B gas pellets into the chamber, the Sonderkommandos did almost everything else except locking the hermetically sealed gas-chamber doors. They calmed the prisoners on the way into the undressing room, often speaking in Yiddish, telling them they were going to be given a shower before joining work details and being reunited with their families; they led nervous, agitated or suspicious ‘trouble-makers’ out of sight and earshot and held them by each ear as an SS man shot them with a silencer-fitted handgun behind the crematoria; they helped the elderly undress, and led them towards the gas chambers, sometimes pushing them on with heavy rubber truncheons; while the gassing was taking place they sorted through the belongings, valuables, food and clothes left in the undressing room, looking for jewellery stitched into the lining of clothing; they burnt whatever the Nazis considered worthless, including photograph albums, books, documents, Torah scrolls, prayer shawls and toys; they cleaned out the remnants of the corpses and human excretion from the gas chambers, so the new transport would see no traces of what had happened to the previous one – women’s scent taken from the victims was often used to hide the smell of gas and bodily discharges; they checked the victims’ mouths for gold coins; they shaved the hair off the corpses, ripped off rings and earrings and extracted gold teeth and tight rings with pliers; they detached prosthetic limbs, then they threw the corpses into the metal freight lift ‘like rags’, piling them in fifteen to twenty at a time. Upstairs, using specially adapted pitchforks, Sonderkommandos pushed the corpses into the crematoria furnaces, which they had to keep well stoked (the smoke went up the 50-foot chimneys); afterwards they used large wooden stakes to crush any skulls, bones and body parts that had not been consumed; they removed the vast piles of human ash in wheelbarrows to a pond between two of the crematoria, or by truck to throw into the Sola river, a tributary of the Vistula.27 Typically, in one gas chamber alone – and Auschwitz–Birkenau had six working round the clock – 2,000 Jews could be killed in ninety minutes by a team of ten SS men and twenty Sonderkommando members.28 Many SS men volunteered for overtime in order to obtain rewards such as extra meat and alcohol rations. There were some twenty-four-hour periods when as many as 20,000 human beings were selected, gassed, cremated and their ashes disposed of in Auschwitz alone.
‘Many of them knew they were going to their death,’ recalled the former Sonderkommando prisoner Josef Sackar of the Jews he had escorted into the gas chambers: ‘They had an intuition. They were afraid, pure and simple. They were terrified. Mothers held their children tight… They were embarrassed… Some of them cried out of shame and fear. They were very, very afraid. The children behaved like children. They looked for their parents’ hands, hugged their parents. What did they know? They didn’t know a thing.’29 Victims were told to remember the number of the hook on which they had hung their clothes in the undressing room, a passageway 50 by 80 feet long with a concrete floor and wooden benches on each side. This too was intended to lull them into the belief that they were only going to be washed and deloused before getting dressed.
Once inside the gas chamber, the victims had no hope of survival. Rudolf Höss was adamant in the memoirs he wrote between his arrest in March 1946 and his hanging on his own gallows at Auschwitz that April that, compared with carbon monoxide,
Experience has shown that the preparation of prussic acid called Zyklon B caused death with far greater speed and certainty, especially if the rooms were kept dry and gas-tight and closely packed with people, and provided they were fitted with as large intake vents as possible. As far as Auschwitz is concerned, I have never heard of a single person being found alive when the gas chambers were