"At 9:30, a transport of 3,500 people would arrive, and four hours later, not a trace of them remained – as though they had never existed. Our ability to adapt was almost infinite. We functioned like soulless robots, it was the only way to remain sane under such conditions. The only way survive was to cease being human. We reached the stage where we could eat and drink among the corpses, totally indifferent, utterly detached from our emotions. Towards the end it was clear that shipments were becoming smaller since there were no Jews left to kill. I was sure that the entire Jewish nation would be eradicated." - Saul Chazan, Sonderkommando, Auschwitz survivor.
The Sonderkommandos were work units made up of prisoners, usually Jews, who were forced, on threat of their own deaths, to aid with the disposal of gas chamber victims during the Holocaust. Members did not participate directly in killing; that responsibility was reserved for the SS, while their primary duty was disposing of the corpses. In most cases, they were inducted immediately upon arrival at the camp. They were not given any advance notice of the tasks they would have to perform. To their horror, sometimes the inductees would discover members of their own family amid the bodies. They had no way to refuse or resign other than by committing suicide.
Because of their intimate knowledge of the process of Nazi mass murder, the
Sonderkommandos were considered bearers of secrets, and as such, they were kept in isolation from other camp inmates, except for those about to enter the gas chambers. Since the Germans did not want the knowledge to reach the outside world, they followed a policy of regularly gassing almost all the Sonderkommandos and replacing them with new arrivals at intervals of approximately three months and up to a year or more in some cases. The first task of the new Sonderkommandos would be to dispose of their predecessors' corpses.
Only 20 survivors remained at the end of the war. The photo above is one of only 4 taken secretly inside the camp in August 1944 and smuggled out via the underground. #neverforget