The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [132]
Those thirty minutes were as horrific as it is possible to contemplate. In the state-of-the-art gas chambers of Crematoria II and III at Auschwitz, the pellets were lowered in containers down Drahtnetzeinschieb-vorrichtungen (wire-mesh introduction columns) and the gas was distributed relatively evenly, but in other gas chambers it collected on the floor and rose upwards, forcing the stronger people to climb on top of the weaker ones in a vain bid to avoid asphyxiation. ‘The people there knew that the end was approaching and tried to climb as high as they could to avoid the gas,’ recalled Sackar. ‘Sometimes all the skin on the bodies peeled due to the effect of the gas.’31 The victims clawed at the doors and walls, and their screaming and weeping could be heard even through the thick metal airtight doors. When the Sonderkommandos entered the chambers they encountered a dreadful sight. As their historian records: ‘The purple, fissured flesh; the faces distorted with pain; and the eyes, bulging and agape, attest to the terrible agonies that these people experienced in their last moments.’32
Speaking at Nuremberg, the Auschwitz guard Otto Moll spoke of the fate of the babies whose mothers had left them hidden in discarded clothing in the undressing room: ‘The prisoners had to clean up the room after it had been cleared of people, they would then take the babies and throw them into the gas chamber.’ Elsewhere he was asked to estimate how quickly the Zyklon B gas took effect: ‘The gas was poured in through an opening. About one half minute after the gas was poured in, of course I am merely estimating this time as we never had a stop-watch to clock it and we were not interested, at any rate, after one half minute there were no more heavy sounds, and no sounds at all that could be heard from the gas chamber.’ Q: ‘What kind of sounds were heard before that?’ A: ‘The people wept and screeched.’33 Few other accounts put the time as short as that.
On occasion a Sonderkommando prisoner would recognize family or friends among the dead, and Höss – whose testimony must be seen through the prism of his unrepentant anti-Semitism – claimed that one had to drag his own wife to the furnace, and then sat down to lunch with his colleagues without displaying any untoward emotion. (Conversely, there is another story of a Sonderkommando member accompanying his mother into the gas chamber and then voluntarily remaining with her there to be gassed.) Unsurprisingly the Sonderkommandos were thought of by other Auschwitz inmates as the Nazis’ henchmen, and as ‘especially soulless and savage individuals’.34 Primo Levi wrote that they existed on ‘the borderline of collaboration’ and it is true that the Nazis’ job would have been far more difficult and laborious if the Sonderkommandos had not existed, although they would undoubtedly have found volunteers among the Ukrainian, Baltic or Belorussian auxiliary units to undertake the tasks.
Yet it should be remembered that the Sonderkommandos had no alternative except death, that they provided food for other inmates when they could, and that they were the only group of inmates to rise up against the Germans. When on 7 October 1944 it became clear that the Sonderkommandos of Crematorium IV were about to be selected, they attacked the SS with stones, axes and iron bars. The ‘uprising’ was over by nightfall, and no prisoner managed to escape, but they killed three SS guards and injured twelve, blew up Crematoria IV with hand-grenades smuggled to them by women prisoners, and tried to escape from the camp, with 250 dying in the attempt and 200 executed the next day. The Jewish women who had smuggled the explosives – Ester Wajcblum, Regina Safirsztajn, Ala Gertner and Róza Robota – were hanged after a week of torture.35 Each of the revolts that took place – in Sobibór, Treblinka and Auschwitz – in the six Nazi extermination camps were carried out by the Sonderkommandos, the only inmates with the physical strength to fight back. It was also they who tried to