Ep. 59- The Auschwitz Sonderkommando with Dominic Williams

Arguably, one of the worst places for prisoners to work during the Holocaust was the Sonderkommando—the group of prisoners forced to work in and around the gas chambers, disposing of corpses.  

Yet they also managed to create a number of texts that survived the Holocaust even if they did not.  In this episode, I talk with Dominic Williams about the Auschwitz Sonderkommando, its place in the Holocaust, and the documents it left behind.

Dominic Williams is an assistant professor of history at Northumbria University.

Williams, Dominic and Nicholas, Chare. The Auschwitz Sonderkommando: Testimonies, Histories, Representations(2019)

Williams, Dominic and Nicholas, Chare. Testimonies of Resistance: Representations of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando (2019)

Williams, Dominic and Nicholas, Chare. Matters of Testimony: Interpreting the Scrolls of Auschwitz(2015)

Follow on Twitter @holocaustpod.
Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:01.124)
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Holocaust History Podcast. I'm your host, Waipman Bourne. And today we are talking about all things related to the Zonderkommando, the group of prisoners that were forced to work in the gas chambers, predominantly at Auschwitz. But also there was the groups of these that worked in the other extermination centers as well. And we're also going to talk about the literature they produced, the records they left, the testimony they gave and what this means.

for our understanding of the Holocaust. And literally the best person to talk about this is my colleague, Dominic Williams from Northam University, who works on this, has published extensively on this. And I'm really glad that he was able to come for his second appearance. I think you're the first person that has been on the podcast twice. So Dominic, again, thanks for coming.

Dominic (00:54.126)
Thanks for having me, Waichman. Yeah, thanks for continuing to put up with me.

Waitman Beorn (00:57.498)
Of course. Well, you're now my office mate too, so I definitely have to put up with you. So can you tell us how you got into this particular area? Because it's really fascinating.

Dominic (01:00.43)
Yeah.

Dominic (01:10.978)
Yeah, so I mean, a lot of the work that I've done on the Zonda Commando has been in collaboration with Nicholas Cher, who's now at the University of Montreal. Nick and I actually did our PhDs together at the University of Leeds. And at the time, actually, I wasn't working on the Holocaust. I was working on Jewish literature in English. And Nick, in his PhD, was working on the Holocaust. And one of the things that he

worked on were the manuscripts written by the Auschwitz on the commando, often called the Scrolls of Auschwitz. And he came to me a few years after we'd finished our PhDs and said, I think there's more of a project that could be done here. Would you be interested in working on this together? And I sort of had mixed feelings about this. I mean, it's a very difficult, it's very difficult area to research.

thought it would be interesting. And we started working on it. Got a bit of money, not a lot of money to enable us to visit the archive in Auschwitz. And on the basis of that, quite a lot of research has ensued. Yeah, which in some ways I'm still working on.

Waitman Beorn (02:30.628)
Can you tell us a little bit about what the Sonderkommando is, what it's meant to be by the Nazis, some of the, think, important historical details, background that are going to be useful for our listeners to of contextualize what comes next as we start to talk about the way they experienced Holocaust, the way they left testimony, remembered it, et cetera?

Dominic (02:58.84)
Yeah, so mean, Zonderkommando is an example of Nazi euphemistic language. It means simply special squads, something like that you could translate it as. So it's a term that isn't just applied to the prisoners in Auschwitz that you described. This can be used to describe special squads who are involved in the final solution in one way or another. for example, one of the

extermination sites. One of the first ones in Poland, the Helmno was called SS Sonderkommando Kumhoff. So that's describing essentially what perpetrators are doing. Or it can be used to describe squads of people who are responsible for erasing the traces of extermination. So famously, and as you will well know, the group that was in Lviv,

Zonda Commando 1005 were responsible for digging up corpses and disposing of them, burning them, I think, isn't it? But often when people use the term, the group that they have in mind is the group from Auschwitz, the prisoners who were predominantly, almost entirely Jewish, but not completely, who were forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria of Beer Canal.

And really they were given that name when it was the facilities in Beer Canal opened. So not from the beginning of the Auschwitz camp and not from the beginning of gassing there. There was a group there that was involved in disposing of corpses after after gassing in what generally gets called crematorium one. the first crematorium that was used who were named after their leader.

so often called official commando. But the Zonda Commando is the group that once the combined buildings that combine gas chambers and crematory are open in Beer Canal and come into use, these are the group of prisoners that are forced to work there. They were kept apart from other prisoners in Beer Canal, initially as part of the camp at Beer Canal.

Dominic (05:23.286)
in a block that was walled off in the main camp. But then towards the end of the crematoria's functioning were taken, probably because of suspicions of the camp regime, that they were planning something taken to live within the crematoria themselves. they were given quarters in the… depends a little bit on the building, but in some cases in the attic of the building.

some cases just in the think in the undressing.

Waitman Beorn (05:57.56)
And so how were they how were they selected? And I'm assuming that the fact that they were all Jewish or predominantly Jewish was intentional as well to sort of force Jews to be part of the destruction process of their own people.

Dominic (06:11.846)
Yes, I think that that's that's right. So they were selected essentially on arrival. There are some cases where people seem to have been recruited later on and after some time as a prisoner, but in essence, selected at the point of their arrival, okay, kept in quarantine for a few days. But after that, forced to work.

with the initial task generally being assigned to them of disposing of dead bodies. So the selection seems to have been essentially at points when the regime decided that more people were needed as part of this squad. So you will have groups of people who are from the same place. Often actually there's quite a few cases of groups of brothers.

who worked together or in some cases, families, like fathers and sons, who were recruited. Essentially, it seems to have been on the basis of these people looked strong enough to work in it. It's not exclusively just young men. So as I said, you know, there are the odd case of a father and son who work together there. But essentially, people who did

the on arrival were seen as strong enough and fit enough to do this work. And as I said, the recruitment process involved being confronted with dead bodies who had been murdered by gassing. And they were told essentially to dispose of these bodies. So the kind of the initial shock that they faced in

being forced to undertake this task, I think is part of the kind of way in which the recruitment process was designed. So it was something that was so kind of overwhelming, so horrifying, that it was difficult to think about, okay, how it is that you...

Dominic (08:23.404)
how it is that you react and you just under a set of shouted orders, under threats of violence, under actual violence, they carried this task out. And yeah, I mean, as you say, this is almost exclusively, as I've said, almost exclusively Jewish prisoners, people who arrived on transports from Jewish ghettos. And it certainly makes sense to see this as essentially

a form of co-opting Jews into the...

Dominic (09:02.7)
tainting them with the mass murder that's being carried out on their families, on their community.

Waitman Beorn (09:10.06)
And, and is this, is this a sort of, were they eliminated periodically? Cause this is one of those things that I think is out there and sort of the popular imagination, but that may not be really super accurate. You know, that, that, cause there's this idea that, that they're eliminated every, you know, insert amount, amount of peer, a period of time for, for reasons of secrecy. But on other hand, if you're in Auschwitz, particularly if you're in Birkenau, there's very little secret about.

Dominic (09:20.813)
Hmm.

Waitman Beorn (09:40.162)
what's going on in the gas chambers anyway, right?

Dominic (09:42.542)
Right, right. this is a, I mean, at very least it's a simplification. So the way in which it often gets presented is to say, you know, there were squads who every three or four months were liquidated in their entirety and replaced in their entirety. That seems really to have only happened once, which is in December, 1942. There are people who arrived,

after that time or derived in December 1942, who survived to October, November 1944. I mean, this is from the people who wrote the manuscripts or survived to the point when the camp was liberated. So it seems to be a kind of myth.

that was promulgated by people who were associated with us on the commando. So there's a there's famous text written by a doctor, a forensic pathologist, Miklos Nisly, who was forced to work for Josef Mengele and was stationed in the crematory at Auschwitz. He's one of the people who says in a text published very soon after the war that the squads were eliminated in their entirety. And it seems also that this was believed by

people in the camp itself in Birkenau. There are quite a lot of survivors from Auschwitz and not just Nicely. They say that this is is what happened. But, you know, it's important to stress, of course, the life of men in the Zon-Nikamana was extremely precarious at times when they were perceived by the regime as unnecessary. They could be eliminated. They were, of course,

vulnerable to being attacked, murdered at any time. But it's not true to say that there's some kind of systematic way of murdering them en masse and replacing them.

Waitman Beorn (11:47.578)
Well, it's interesting because I, the, mentioned the, the sonica man, a thousand and five, you know, and of course they had in, in, Oscar in the V they had a, a detail of, of Jews from the camp that was basically forced to do the same thing, just in sort of open air of hires. And actually the members of that, of that still called death brigade. Remember that the SS guy in charge basically said, look, if anybody asks you how long you've been in this, you say two weeks so that nobody.

thinks that we're not killing you like we're supposed to. But the point of it is that I think this probably relates to Auschwitz and other Sonderland as well is that honestly, know, the Nazis are people and they don't want to do extra work. And if you kill everybody, then you literally have to train up a whole group of people who, regardless of how awful and forced and terrible this job is, you know, I'm sure there are better ways to do it and more efficient ways to do it.

And once the people learn how to do it, then that makes your life easier. So why are the Nazis going to really murder these people en masse, particularly when, again, as you point out, if you're living in Birkenau, I mean, it's not like this is a secret what's going on in the gas chambers, you know.

Dominic (13:01.902)
Right, right. Yes, basically that's true. And yes, I think that idea that they were as terrible as is to think about it as you know, they're skilled workers. There are skills that are involved, that it's advantageous to keep them alive so they could carry on with that work. I think that is absolutely true.

Waitman Beorn (13:26.209)
And you mentioned, you know, that one of the things is that, you know, other camp prisoners believed that that these I guess men, I guess these are always all completely men, you know, were murdered periodically to sort of refresh or destroy the evidence. What what did in a larger sense, what did other prisoners think about?

Dominic (13:38.764)
Yeah, the rule man.

Waitman Beorn (13:53.912)
the Sonderkommando. And again, this is, guess, really in sort of two, two timeframes, which may be difficult to parse, but you know, this is what we do. One is sort of like at the time, but then obviously there's a memory piece and then there's a reflective piece. And then there's people testifying after the war, after the Holocaust, about what they thought about them, which may, may or may not have changed or be different than kind of what they thought at the time. Can you kind of reflect on that a little bit?

Dominic (14:05.186)
Mm-hmm.

Dominic (14:23.67)
Yeah, I mean, as you've kind of said in your question, this is a complicated question. And the answer seems to be more complicated than some accounts say. So the kind of

the general belief, let's perhaps say, is that they were viewed with horror and shock by other prisoners. And you can certainly find examples of where people are writing memoirs and talking in those terms. So one example would be the

Polish Jewish survivor, Kristina Żywulska wrote an early memoir, I think it's from 1947, but a year or two after liberation, Przeżywaj mo Swięższym, I Survived Auschwitz, where she talks about encountering a member that's on the commando and saying, you are essentially, you are a terrible person because you burn bodies.

Although she then says that she's surprised by the fact that he said he replies to her and says, you know, I'm just like, I'm just like you just more unhappy. And so even there where there's an example of someone judging it, the task that is on the command of a force to do, she shows herself reflecting on it and seeing, okay, it's more complicated than I thought. Or another that the famous example would be Primo Levi's essay from

the mid-1980s, the grey zone, in which one of the examples that he has of a group of prisoners who is difficult to judge or impossible to judge, or he says, you we should suspend judgment on them, are the Auschwitz Zonderkommando. And again, he seems to respond to them with a lot of horror and a kind of sense that the conditions they were living in were unimaginable. And because of that, I can't judge them. And the way that he writes about them is this kind of

Dominic (16:23.95)
this sense that he can't, the nearest he can get to imagining them is sort of at the point up to the point when they were recruited. And after that, he doesn't seem to be able to go beyond that. So those are examples sort of from immediately after the war and 40 years later, where survivors of Auschwitz, prisoners from Auschwitz are reacting in troubled ways to the Sonderkommando. But you can also find

instances. If you start looking at the testimony that survivors produced, again, so one example would be the French historian Thel Brutman has been working on this recently. The questionnaires, the testimony that was produced by Hungarian survivors, given a questionnaire by the association DEGOM, which stands for I won't attempt

give the Hungarian but essentially the national body for taking care of survivors in Hungary. The the accounts that they give there, there were quite a lot of those who were taken to Auschwitz and recruited as survivors who were recruited into the Canada command of the part of the camp that was next to the crematoria that was dealing with the effects of victims murdered in the gas chambers.

He said, and from what I've seen as well of this, there's very little judgment in these accounts. There are all sorts of strange rumors there of what they think was going on in the gas chambers, which are not quite right. But there's very little sense that the Sonderkommando were morally problematic figures. And that also seems to be true from what I found, although this is a difficult archive to work with on this topic, with the video testimonies.

testimonies that were recorded in the 1990s in the main for the Shoah Foundation, where, well, for a start, the Zonda Kamanu is a topic that gets introduced into a lot of discussions from survivors of Al-Shuk, because it's just a topic that either the interview or the survivor thinks is important to talk about, even if they don't really have immediate experience of what the Zonda Kamanu did. But if you kind of filter that through and find

Dominic (18:50.134)
cases where there are accounts of encounters which did happen or awareness of what was going on in some kind of direct way. Again, there's very little in the way of judgment of the kind of form that you sort of see in Rzeszowolska's writing. There are some people who express it that way, but there is small minority. So, I mean, obviously that's many years later, that's 50 years later.

But it does seem to be the case that there are a variety of responses and it's not just that prisoners responded to them.

Waitman Beorn (19:29.241)
Well, it's interesting because like it seems like that either we talked about that idea that the Nazis are trying to keep the son of command of separate from everybody else for reasons of secrecy, but that that and that that actually isn't doesn't work. But it seems like actually what they had, what they did was they they did keep them separate enough that people weren't quite sure what they did or what what their conditions of life were like. And if I remember correctly, if you go to Auschwitz Birkenau today, you can still see where they're

Dominic (19:42.574)
Hmm.

Waitman Beorn (19:59.482)
where their two barracks are because there is the wall that is still standing. It's the only place where you have sort of between the foundations, you have a brick wall. So you can actually see where this was.

Dominic (20:09.72)
That's right. So one block is the block for the Zonda Commando and the other is the block for the punishment.

Waitman Beorn (20:17.601)
Right, and so.

Dominic (20:18.196)
I think there were members of the Zonda Kamano who lived in other barracks as well. even that is not straight.

Waitman Beorn (20:24.067)
So what interactions before we move on to the sort of the bulk of the matter, but what interactions did other prisoners have with the Sonderkommand? I mean, was it a question of like in passing because or was I mean, how did they how did they interact with with each other? Because the Sonderkommand is sort of from a certain perspective, you know, they get marched out of their sort of sealed block.

to the gas chambers to work, then they go back at night or whatever. But are there interactions beyond just the rumors of what these people do or that kind of thing?

Dominic (21:01.902)
I mean, I think a lot of the interactions are essentially in passing, right? That it's moments that are snatch when it's possible for one person to talk to another, which is sometimes about passing on information about families or what's going on. There are other instances, though, that are more involved. So one of the things that survivor testimony reports is that members of the Zonda Commando

sometimes were able to supply food and medicine to other people in the camp, often throwing it over the fence. And there are also accounts that people have of survivors and prisoners who were able, because usually of some kind of professional role that they had to fulfill. So for example, someone who's an electrician or someone who is

there are doctors as well, who were able to enter the crematorium compound and then had interactions with the Zonda Kamano in which they learned more about what was happening in the gas chambers and the crematoria. Or also instances of where at the point when the crematoria were being dismantled, right, so in the autumn of 1944, people who were involved in that, who hadn't been part of the Zonda Kamano,

they met members of the Sonderkommando, went into these buildings to dismantle them alongside them and heard about what happened there. So a famous example of that would be from the graphic memoir, Maus, Vladek, Spiegelman's father, talks about that he's dismantling the crematory and talked to a member of the Sonderkommando then. So there were ways in which they certainly

tried to get aid to other people in the camp, but also tried to get information out about what was happening in the crematorium.

Waitman Beorn (23:07.434)
So if we talk, we start talking about, that's a good segue, I guess, into sort of the attempts by members of the Sonderkommando to, and this may be a loaded word, but to testify or to leave, to leave behind information. And I, this, this sort of, I guess, spawns two directions that we could talk about. One is sort of how they, how they viewed themselves, you know, as

as dealing with, you know, what I think we'd all agree in a certain sense is like the worst. I mean, I don't like to we're not playing suffering Olympics here, but as far as like places that you could be forced to be in the Holocaust, this is one of the worst, you know, existences. And how do they and how do they try to? Make sense of this in a in an archival sense, like of leaving behind records or

Dominic (23:48.878)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (24:04.121)
you know, sharing what they know with the rest of world. And that's a really small question, but.

Dominic (24:11.594)
Well, yes, I mean, I suppose this is the thing that a lot of my work and my work with Nick Cher is focused on. There were a set of manuscripts, documents that was on the command that were able to write and to conceal to bury in the grounds of the crematoria, which were found over the years after liberation.

So some were found in the immediately after liberation in 1940s. Some, I think one from the 50s, a few in the 60s and then the most recent from 1980. So over a period of time, these documents.

Waitman Beorn (24:56.483)
And just really quickly, because it's something that's been that understanding that we've found all of these. These, you know, leaving behind these documents, and we know that there are probably are others, right? Because people have sort of referred to others that they left. but I'm, I'm guessing that there hasn't been any sort of systematic archaeological excavation.

around the sites based on the prescription by Jewish law, you know, that you, but it would seem, this would seem almost like in some sense, worthy exception because we know there's stuff there to be found and it's not exactly a burial ground in the same way that a cemetery is. don't know. Is there anything talk about that or attempts to find these things?

Dominic (25:50.21)
mean, there's been talk. So the nearest to a kind of systematic archaeological dig was one that was in the early 1960s, where some manuscripts were found. But yes, there certainly are accounts that there were many more documents that were written and hidden in this area. I think

Precisely as you say, because of the injunctions that say you should not disturb the dead in their resting place. That's one thing that has made the Auschwitz Museum very reluctant to dig in these areas where there are human remains that are there. I think there are other things as well, but their take is they think it's very unlikely that the documents will have survived. It's very wet grounds.

it freezes in the winter. So anything that was buried there would have would have undergone very kind of extreme conditions. And I mean, one of the things that you see from the manuscripts that were recovered was they're not, they're often not that easily readable. They're quite heavily damaged. And I mean, I was talking to the director of the Auschwitz Museum recently and

He was saying, well, when they were doing restoration work around some of the crematoria, you know, some survivors report that there were manuscripts that were buried very close to the walls of the crematoria. They didn't find anything, he says. So it's a question that, you know, the likelihood of what you find is is not that high that you'd find anything that's readable or usable. And that the

violations of Jewish law that that would involve it, you know, mean that it's not something I think that they're interested in doing, that they think is worth doing.

Waitman Beorn (27:52.121)
So I interrupted you when you were talking about the answer to the question about what they've left and everything else. I want to get back to that. But I did want to raise the question of what's up? It's not there.

Dominic (28:00.046)
Yes, I mean, if you look at these these documents, then I mean, you see, you see some of the answers to the questions that you're asking. So what's how did how did they see themselves and what it is that they saw their role was in documenting what was happening? Well, I mean, OK, I think it is reasonable to call this this testifying.

there's a sense there that, yes, it's important to get down information of what was happening here, what was happening in the crematorium, what was happening in the gas chambers. So you see, for example, a list from one month of all the people who arrived and were murdered in

Dominic (28:51.35)
in a gas chamber. But there's more that they're interested in in doing or feel that is necessary to do than that. So some of that is to

record what had happened to their communities. in a lot of in a number of cases, there's talk about the journey to Auschwitz and what had happened to the people who came from the various communities and the fact that they had been murdered. There's a desire to

reflect on to think about their own position, which you can and they can often write about that in a very self-critical way and give instances of people saying very harsh things to them. People are about to be murdered in the gas chamber saying very harsh, harsh things to them that they record and feel that it's important to transmit to posterity. And I think there's also

really clear efforts to think about how it is that they can convey this experience to the people who find these manuscripts. So they're written in a way that's not just about, okay, here are the facts of what happened, or here is, or written in a way that's just a kind of purely expressive of the feelings that they have. They're written often in quite careful ways that seems to be judging, right, how can I

speak to how can I, I think, touch the reader who comes upon these manuscripts. So that's clear. And I think attracts people to particularly the writings of one person, Zalman Grodowski, writes in this very high literary style, very little, you know, an ambitious literary style, in which he's, you he starts one manuscript, essentially by

Dominic (30:56.864)
invoking a reader and saying, you know, come with me and the first few pages of Constance.

Waitman Beorn (31:01.189)
Yeah, I mean, there's almost it's almost like a. I mean, I'm not a literature scholar, but it's kind of reminiscent of like Dante's Inferno sort of like, you know, like come with me into the and we're going to go, we're going to go to this first the first circle and the second circle, the third circle. And can you tell us more about about about Godavsky because he who is he, you know, and how is he because he does write in a very.

Dominic (31:09.442)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (31:30.969)
I almost said alliterate, but that's not a great thing to say to a literate scholar. you know, he is, he is, he is not just saying, you know, I saw this, this happened, this happened, this happened. It's there is, there is intent to shape the narrative in a way that, that, that goes beyond that.

Dominic (31:33.152)
I think the series won.

Dominic (31:50.86)
Yeah, yeah. So we know a reasonable amount about Salman Grodowski. mean, lots, but we know where he came from. We know something about his life before he came to Auschwitz. So he was from northeast Poland, initially from the town of Słowacki. Seems to have gained some religious education.

was educated at a yeshiva, seems in Wonshah, a nearby town, fairly well-known yeshiva. His brothers seem to have received a more extensive religious education than him. He was the oldest of the family. It looks like that may be that he took over the family business. And the brothers then are recalled as being rabbis. He's not given that title. He was politically active.

He was a Zionist, he was a member of the revisionist Zionist group. So this is the group that initially was led by Vladimir Shavotinsky, which took a militaristic approach to how it is that a homeland should be built in the land of Israel in Palestine, as opposed to other forms of Zionism.

approach it often in more collaborative, more socialist ways. Although he broke from Jabotinsky and was with a particular group called the Grossmanites, who believed that it was still important to be in touch with other Zionists. So he's not a kind of full-on Jabotinskyite. So he

When the Germans invaded Poland, he and his family escaped east, so to the part of Poland that was occupied by the Soviet Union and spent time there in a town called Wuna, close to Białystok, close to Grodno, that sort of area. And he, when the Germans

Dominic (34:11.35)
invaded that part of Poland in 1941. He was still there. He was in the Włodna ghetto and became part of the

of the administration there. think he had responsibility for dealing with sewage. Reports from his brother-in-law, who was a literature scholar, said that Grudowski had literary ambitions. He'd always had literary ambitions, but he wrote pieces that were rather sentimental. Talk about his love of Zion, but they weren't particularly well written.

when deportations happened from northeast Poland to Auschwitz, Grudowski was one of those who was brought along with his wife, along with other members of his family to Auschwitz. The other members of his family didn't have any children, the other members of his family were murdered. He was recruited into the Zonda Kamama. He wrote

Well, what survived is we have kind of two manuscripts or sets of manuscripts, one of which is talking about this deportation to start off with and is starting in this way that we've sort of said, it starts by invoking a reader and saying, come with me, come on this journey. Your eyes will turn into camera lenses, your heart will turn into stone. A lot of use of repetition and mafr in literary terms.

a lot of use of striking metaphors, lot of use of of linguistic patterning as well. So he uses kind of rhetorical figures, which are, I mean, clearly then I think fit with the fact that he had these literary ambitions that then become applied to this very, different situation. Now, actually, if you talk to

Dominic (36:22.726)
Yiddishists, so a number of the people who translated his work, they are not that impressed by his literary style. Or I'll say that, yes, yes, he's written in Yiddish. Sorry. Yes, I should say that. Yes, he's written in Yiddish. They're not that impressed with his style. think there's something a little bit sort of, I mean, outerish maybe melodramatic. It seems very weird to use these kind of terms to talk about. But I think that's

Waitman Beorn (36:31.489)
It's written in Yiddish.

Waitman Beorn (36:41.91)
amateurs.

Waitman Beorn (36:49.698)
Yep.

Dominic (36:53.142)
I'm not sure that that's the way to think about this. I think, you know, in translation and you can kind of translate it in a way that it seems very impressive piece of writing. But the very fact that he's using literary means to try to record and transmit what it is that he's writing about is itself what's interesting. Right. There's something interesting about the fact that literature for him is a resource and he uses the resource that's available to him.

which may not be that he's the most refined Yiddish writer that it's possible to find. But it is there as a resource that he's able to use in the same way that he's able to use the resources of the paper and pens that he's able to get his hands on from the effects of victims that they brought there. This is the means that he has in order to transmit the knowledge that he has, what it is wants to say.

Waitman Beorn (37:50.02)
That's interesting. I wonder, it's almost, it sounds like it's almost that because we have Primo Levi's and you know, these people that have sort of created these great canonical literary texts that we then expect other survivors or other victims or people writing these things to sort of rise that level. Whereas the actual point is what they're telling us.

And how they're telling us whether or not it's, you know, quote, great literature or not seems to be sort of a question for that. That's not particularly necessarily relevant in a certain sense. I don't know if that makes sense, but.

Dominic (38:32.014)
Yeah, I mean, I think I'd agree. I I mean, another way would be to think about it. It's like, well, what what are the values that we want to get from literature? And why is it that we're not satisfied with what Grodowski's attempt at literature might be? I think for a lot of readers, right, that certainly reading him in translation, that's not their response. They think this is, you know, the response is this is literature. This is incredibly moving. This is incredibly powerful. I would agree with them about that.

But I think it is reasonable to say, it doesn't have to be part of the canon of world literature or great writing for it to be in a really important and valuable document. And the fact that literature is part of, know, using literature as a resource is part of what Krodowski is doing is something that we can acknowledge.

Waitman Beorn (39:26.669)
And so, so what, does he do? So he, you know, he's, I mean, one of the things that, that I found particularly striking about, about Grodowski is of course, multiple times in these many different documents, which I'm guessing have been, some of them were buried separately. He says he, first of all, he doesn't say who he is except for one in one final document. So he's kind of, it seems like he's hedging his bets at that point. He's like, in case this gets found by the SS, I don't want them to know.

Dominic (39:47.054)
That's right.

Waitman Beorn (39:55.478)
I am. But he also says, please get this information to these people that live in these distant relatives of mine that live in New York City. And he has like the the address, I think is is a really poignant but fascinating part of this. So there's there's almost like a. It's almost like two audiences to the text, there's sort of the general I want to tell the world. About this.

But there's also I want my family to know, but also I want the world to know that it's me. You know, that I am the person that is is I think of I think of a quote that I've used in a couple in my Holocaust, he's in Europe, but which is from a guy that then in Vilnius. And he basically says he's a young kid. He's like, in the end, I would like for people to know that there was a person named David who existed. You know, I kind of feel like.

Dominic (40:30.925)
Yes.

Dominic (40:52.035)
Hmm.

Waitman Beorn (40:54.185)
a certain level, Grodowski is doing that as well to the extent that he's able. And so there are these different audiences that he's speaking to.

Dominic (41:02.262)
Yes, yeah, yeah. And yes, I mean, there are essentially two caches of manuscripts, of which...

Dominic (41:17.352)
found very soon well now both of them were found very soon after the the war one was found by members of the red army and so the manuscript is now in st petersburg and one of which was we're not entirely sure who found it but it seems to have been bought by a survivor and then taken that's right that's right so it was

Waitman Beorn (41:40.018)
Is this the one that was transcribed and then has since disappeared? Yeah.

Dominic (41:45.536)
he transcribed it, but then some most of it was stolen. So Yad Vashem in Jerusalem is the place that holds that manuscript. So that manuscript is sort of in three parts. And in each of those, at the beginning of each of those parts, he talks about his family and names them. As you say, it's only at the very end, it seems that he actually names himself.

mean, although it wouldn't have been that easy for members of the SS to read a Yiddish manuscript, he does seem to be kind of concealing his identity, just in case it gets found. But yeah, he also says, let my relatives in New York know about this. I want this all to be, I want this to be published. And I want a picture of me and my wife to be included there. So.

there's this sense of, yes, I want people to know who I was, in some sense, but it's also I want people to know who my family was. And I think you could add to that, although he doesn't name anybody, probably for the reasons that we've just said that there's a risk to it. That's also to some extent what he seems to be saying about the Zonda Kamano as well, but he wants people to know this is what we were like, and get some sense of what life there was like. So for example, he talks

in this Yad Vashem manuscript about...

Dominic (43:17.752)
what a point where part of the squad is selected, almost needs to be murdered. And the other part go back to their barracks and sit in their bunks and kind of reflect on it and deal with it. And he talks about the kind of the bonds that there are between them. The reason why that

Waitman Beorn (43:25.827)
Yeah.

Dominic (43:47.671)
when the split happens, the selection happens, they don't resist.

tries to explain why that happened, but also the kind of feelings that they're dealing with once they're back in their barracks. And this sense of when I'm in my bunk, there is, you know, there's a certain kind of private life and individual life that I can have. And he talks about the different kinds of people, that some of people are praying, other people are thinking about their families. So they're all different individuals, but there's also kind of bonds he says between them as well.

Waitman Beorn (44:24.505)
mean, this was like, particularly, I remember this from the, from the book. I mean, the book, the collection of manuscripts, because if I remember correctly, they have the selection, but the people don't go away immediately after the selection. they, they, they're supposed to be taken away like the next morning. So they're like, they're like still around and everybody knows that they're going to, they're going to go. then, and then he says something to the effect of they have all become basically note cards in this file, you know, because that's, they're, they're sort of reduced to.

Dominic (44:38.636)
Hmm

Dominic (44:52.195)
Mm.

Waitman Beorn (44:54.659)
But it was something that almost spoke to larger, probably larger feelings of people who are selected in other parts of Birkenau or other concentration camps, there's this, he does tell, I think, if I remember correctly, he kind of touches on the idea that on the one hand, everybody who wasn't selected was happy that they weren't selected. But then they kind of felt guilty about being happy that they weren't selected because it's their friends that are being selected.

Dominic (45:21.07)
Right, right, right. And this I think is his attempt, I mean, it's more than an attempt at it, his way that he's thinking through some kind of quite complex emotional lives of...

his own emotional life and those of the people in the Zonda Commando with him. And I suppose that's one of the things that's striking about his writing, but the other writings of people in the Zonda Commando as well. One of the kind of beliefs that there was about the members of the Zonda Commando was that they'd sort of become completely numb, they'd become robotic, sometimes described as zombies as well.

that the what the circumstances they were in were so overwhelming and so shocking and so difficult to deal with that all all they could do was essentially not have a kind of conscious life and just carry out their tasks automatically. One of the things that's really interesting about the writings, they write about that. They talk about, Krodosky, for example, talks about how it's necessary to drown out in one's mind that the kind of feelings those kinds of feelings and become

robotic, but it's clearly a state that is not permanent as he's writing about it. He's reflecting on that state. It seems to be something that can be consciously cultivated, but it's also at other times there's an emotional life that he's writing about that's quite rich and complex. And I think also is a resource, right? I I talk about lots of this in terms of resources, but it's a resource that he's drawing on in order to communicate with.

a future audience, that he does want to touch them emotionally.

Waitman Beorn (47:09.707)
Yeah. I mean, and probably is cognizant of the fact that the future audiences might in a certain sense, dehumanize them by saying, you know, they're, just become these thoughtless automaton servants of the Nazis, but he might want them to know that it actually was painful for them throughout, you know, and difficult and they weren't, they weren't emotional, emotional less, you know, they were experiencing.

Dominic (47:21.195)
and

Dominic (47:30.691)
Mm.

Waitman Beorn (47:38.593)
horrible things, you know, even if they appear to go about their normal, normal day or whatever.

Dominic (47:45.932)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that's, that's true of him. And that's that's true of the other members of the Zonda Kamano whose testimonies, the written testimonies have survived.

Waitman Beorn (47:58.138)
And so can we talk a little about because one of the things that I really wanted to talk about also is the work that you did as an historian trying to literally put these manuscripts together in sort of a very material sense and figuring out because I think one of the things that is masked by, you know, published collections, for example.

Dominic (48:15.086)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (48:24.825)
is that a lot of these pages were just kind of out of order or, you know, illegible or whatever. And so we get this false sense of a ha, like here is here is the manuscript published for us. But actually, you know, unlike a lot of archival sources that scholars work with that are, you know, page one, page two, page three, this was a mess in a lot of ways. And you did some really, I think, path breaking work in.

Can you talk about which manuscript was that that you were looking at and what were the challenges of working physically with the material?

Dominic (49:02.678)
Yeah, that's a very useful question. I mean, one of the things that Nicholas Cher and I were wanting to do in the first book, certainly that we published together, was to think about the matter of these manuscripts. I mean, the title of the book is Matters of Testimony for a reason. And so it's how it is that these manuscripts as material objects have a kind of

testifying function. There are ways in which you can read what has happened to them as speaking of the circumstances in which they were written and the circumstances in which they had to be concealed in order to.

in order to reach a future audience. So one of the things that happened to a lot of these manuscripts then is that they get damaged. As I said, the grounds around the crematory, the ground in Birkenau gets very sodden and freezes. And so this is very difficult environment for paper to survive in. Now, the Zonda command though thought about this and they've concealed the manuscripts in containers, containers that they were

able to get from either the effects of victims, basically. And some of this seems to have come from the Canada Commando, the people processing those effects after they've been looted from the victims. But nonetheless, they were working with the resources that they had. And in a lot of cases, damp still seeped in and damaged the manuscripts.

Um, Grudovsky's manuscripts were both found. The ones that we have were both were both found fairly soon after liberation. They survived reasonably well. I mean, there are points of those that are damaged as well. And also, of course, the fact that one of those got stolen means that we don't have the original or we don't seem to have the original. Um, but you know, there were quite a lot of words that were reasonably straightforwardly decipherable. Ones that were found later,

Dominic (51:14.83)
were considerably more of a challenge. So one of those is a manuscript written by Salman Leventhal that was found in the early 1960s, which is quite different from Gorodowski's account because he names names, he names himself and he names other people in the Zonda Commando and he talks about

to some degree, the kind of history of the Zonda Commando, but with a focus particularly on the revolt of the 7th of October 1944, the plans to resist, the attempts to resist that happened before that. And then the point at which when another selection was attempted to be carried out, some people physically resisted, burnt part of a crematorium and other people in another crematorium also.

rose up and escaped briefly. They were captured and killed. So this is clearly then a document that's a really important record of what happened in Auschwitz, a revolt that was important for lot of survivors, prisoners that historians are interested in as well. But and so this is one of the most detailed accounts that we have of it. But the form that it was in

was essentially in an exercise book that had been in the ground for 15, over 15 years and was quite badly damaged. So when it was excavated, the Auschwitz Museum separated the pages from this exercise book and didn't keep track of the order of the pages. This is

The sorts of things that happen with archives and museums, quite a lot, right? This doesn't tell us something particularly, I mean, it tells us in some ways about the Auschwitz Museum and the resources that it had. These were not necessarily people who were kind of archivists or trained in archival studies. They were often people who were survivors.

Dominic (53:32.376)
Polish non-Jewish survivors of the camp. So you had a set of pages that were very difficult to make sense of, because a lot of them, the words on them were quite heavily damaged and not really easy to read. And we're not sure which order that they should come in. And then also, was the fact that the way that Leventhal had written in this book

of made things complicated as well, but he'd started by writing one way through the book. So as it were on kind of the odd numbers of pages, right? So page one, page three, page four, as it were, of the exercise book. And then he turned it round and then he wrote back through it on what would have been the even pages. So the verso side of each of those pages. So what you have on a sheet of paper is bits of the

bits of the story, the account that he wants to give that come from quite different points in the account, whereas he's written it. And so that's quite difficult to kind of make sense of and structure. what historians and scholars working with it, people working in the archive had done entirely reasonably, I think it made sense was they deciphered the words that were on the manuscripts. And then they said, well, okay, how can we make these words fit together in a way that makes sense?

So essentially, how can we put this in chronological order? So there's an account of arriving at the camp, there's an account of the revolt, there's an account of some things that seem to have happened in the Chekhanov region, in north of Warsaw, which is where Levantov was from. And they said, well, OK, it makes sense to put that in chronological order. But there's lots of elements that are missing, and it's very difficult to kind of see what order this should go in. The part that was talking about the revolt,

was particularly well preserved. That's the most legible bit. So then it was relatively straightforward to get a coherent account out of it. But the other parts, it was difficult to see exactly when where they fitted. Now, what we did was we approach this in a slightly different way. We said, OK, rather than thinking about what are the what are the words on the page and how they fit together to tell us a coherent story is like, how can we

Dominic (55:57.772)
reconstruct the object that this book was this exercise book was. And so we did that partly by looking at okay, where, where on the page are these words? And what are the points where it seems that I mean, one thing that was identifiable is that you can get when he gets the end of the when he got to the end of the book and flipped it round.

that is part of that's relatively well preserved. So you can see that that's on the same sheet of paper. Okay, so the last page of the cut, as it were, the odd pages and the first page of the even pages are on the same, the same sheet as you'd expect. And it's part of this, this account of the revolt. And then based partly on that, we said, okay, well, what are the ways in which we can sort of work out how this, how this thing was constructed? So

There are different pages were stapled together, not in the way that a lot of exercise books were, it seems, in which you're essentially looking at, you know, it's one staple in the middle. And that's the whole exercise book. It looks like so that would be what we call one signature. It looks like there were four signatures instead. So there were four groups of papers that were were stapled together. So four separate things that were stapled together. And that made the complete book. So if you if you reconstruct it that way.

And you can do that partly by saying, well, okay, these are the bits that work to make a coherent story. These are the ways in which there are stains on the pages that you can match up. So if there are stains that are kind of mirror images of each other, that's when pages would have been pressing against each other. So that's often in the center of each signature, you see these kind of mirror images, but also other pages where there's a stain that has a...

that's a counterpart stain on another page that would have been pressing against it, which seems most likely to be pressing against it. And if you do that, then you can start to have a plausible reconstruction of what the book is. And then I think at about that point of where we thought, okay, we've got a fairly good construction, we started noticing that that actually matched a set of numbers that were written in the corners of the pages. And if you looked at them, because there are a number of...

Dominic (58:19.598)
numbers that were on these. mean, of course, archives often like number the pages that they have. So it wasn't completely clear how these numbers occur. But if you looked at these particular numbers, they seem to be in the same kind of colour ink and in what looked like pretty much the same kind of colour handwriting as what was on the pages itself. So it looked like, and I think this is our claim, that Leventhal had numbered the pages himself. So in a sense, he'd made our job easy for us, but it wasn't.

It wasn't the first thing that we kind of came across. And then if you have that, you've then got a number of different separate ways in which you can reconstruct the page order. So you can say, right, here is a material object. Here are the page numbers. Here are the stains that seem to match up. And that I think we have a consistent account of what the book looked like. I don't think that's the end of the story in the sense that there's more things that you could do.

You could certainly look more into what did exercise books that were produced at this time look like? See if you could reconstruct what was the ink, although one of the things that the ink that was used, although one of the things that's a difficulty with these pages is in an attempt to preserve them, they were encased in a plastic coating. Again, one of these stories where restoration and preservation often

done with the very best of intentions ends up causing a problem for people later on, especially if it's not reversible. one of the principles of restoration and preservation as it should be, it has to be reversible, but that's not what was done then. It's certainly not easily reversible. So there's more questions that could be asked. And I think we could test our hypothesis further. But I think this is a pretty plausible reconstruction of the Order of the Pages.

Waitman Beorn (01:00:11.341)
Well, I mean...

So what does this tell us? We have like the one, and I'm using logical here in scare quotes, but sort of the logical, okay, let's do it chronologically based on content. And that gives us one document. presumably when you put it in the document that it was in the order that it was created, that tells us something else. What does that tell us?

Dominic (01:00:38.144)
Right. It does seem to. the account, as I said, the account of the revolt is fairly well preserved and we're all in agreement that the order that most of that is in. But what our reconstruction says is that the document is not chronologically written. So it essentially starts by giving a history of the Zonda Commando. And the beginning of the document is part of

that's the is one of the parts that's the most damaged. So there are several pages where it's very difficult to see anything that's said there. But a few pages in and we're talking sort of like 10, 12 pages in, there are things where he starts talking about, OK, well, this is what we know about Auschwitz and this is what the world knows about Auschwitz. And a few pages after that, he starts talking about the Zomda commander. Again, this is this is very patchy. So, I mean, what's in between these things is different.

construct. And then he talks about the Zonda Commando and his own part of that. And then the revolt of the 7th of October lists the names at the end of that and says, you know, honor to these people's memory, signs it himself. The accounts of what happened elsewhere. So these are account of Chekhanov, the town where he came from, and other accounts that are about

travelling to Auschwitz or certainly travelling on trains come after this. So it looks like the thing that was important to him was to record the story of the Sonderkommando and their revolt. And that's different, it seems, from other members of the Sonderkommando, where they often want to attest to what happened to their home communities. Grudowski, one of the first things he seems to write about is the journey to Auschwitz. Another person we haven't talked about, but I think is a really interesting writer, Leib Langfuss.

one of his whole documents is called the deportation. And that's essentially about what happened to his town, Markov Mazubiecki, again, north of Warsaw, quite close to Cechanov. And he talks about the

Dominic (01:02:51.436)
what happened with the announcement of the deportation, how they were deported to Auschwitz. That's one of the first things he seems to have written. Leventhal, it looks like in this manuscript, there's another short manuscript he may have written before that. But in this manuscript, the first thing that he wanted to get down on paper is the story of the Zornikano and the story of their revolt. And it's after that. So perhaps, and again, we're not completely sure.

We have to go from what seems plausible, but perhaps he found time, found he still had the resources and sense of time, paper, the fact that he was still alive to be able to record other stories as well. It's very patchy what's there in this part where he's talking about Chagano from the train journey. We've suggested, and I think it's no more than a suggestion, that it may not be that that's one story in itself.

And also, it may not be that it's just his story. So it may not be that the story of that train journey tracks his train journey from Chekhanov to Auschwitz. And one of the reasons why we think that's so, or might be so, is that he talks about taking a route that it's very implausible that the train would have taken. So he talks about going through the town of Malchynia, which is to the northeast.

of Warsaw, whereas Chekhanov was to the northwest of Warsaw. And Malchynia was the turnoff on the main line, the turnoff to the site of Treblinka, the extermination site there. And people recall and write about knowing that this was the site where mass murder was taking place from there.

It doesn't seem, however, that Leventhal and the people in Chicano went that way.

Waitman Beorn (01:04:55.575)
Yeah, I mean, yeah.

Dominic (01:04:56.222)
He seems to be writing about somebody else. That seems to be what's happening.

Waitman Beorn (01:05:01.109)
And so, mean, guess the one other, I mean, I have two questions that are unrelated. So I guess I'll do the first one because you talk about it in addition in some of your work. We we have we have these written sources, but then we also have these very famous photographs, these four photographs, the so-called Sonderkommando photographs. Can you talk a little about those? Because I think

Dominic (01:05:20.504)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (01:05:28.757)
Many of these are potentially things that people have seen, you know, if anyone's interested in the Holocaust and has read things about it, but probably hasn't seen them in the way they were actually taken because they're usually routinely cropped to sort of highlight the so-called action in the photographs. you know a little about these because I think they're also a good example of something that I want to highlight for listeners as well, which is

Every step in the process of creating one of these manuscripts required a kind of exceptional amount of effort from the people creating it. Not just in finding the time after a very difficult and exhausting day to write, but literally to smuggle, you know, a briefcase into the yard and bury. mean, think about each one of these elements is a a life risking kind of event.

Um, if you're caught doing it and it's just something you have to like plan and organize and is very, fraught and then take all of that, I suspect, and multiply it by, you know, a thousand. you're talking about creating photographs in Auschwitz. Um, so maybe with that introduction, you can talk a little about, about the sonic command of photographs.

Dominic (01:06:44.748)
Yeah, so, I mean, exactly as you say, right, these manuscripts, I they have particular authors, but there's ways in which it's worth thinking about them as collective efforts. Because all of the resources that are used, or many of the resources that say that we use, are ones that are supplied collectively. Even something like, okay, having a bunk where you have enough light to be able to see the manuscript is something that had to be organized, right?

and materials that are used and the materials used to preserve them and the fact of burying them. That's also true of the Zonac Mono photographs, that there is a person who I think now we've got a pretty plausible case. know who is the person who pressed the button, as it were, on the camera. But it was a collective effort as well as setting up a situation in which it was possible to do this.

to bring the camera in and to get the film out as well. So these are, as you say, they're well-known photographs and they were available for people to see from very soon after the liberation of Auschwitz. They were published in a Polish magazine in 1945, some of them, two of them.

and appear a lot in...

in pictorial in the pictorial record of the Holocaust. But the circumstances in which they were taken are partly known and partly less well known. So they were taken by members of the Zonda Commando in probably something like August 1944. The person who took them, I think we've got a very

Dominic (01:08:46.606)
A very convincing case now that this is a person who is a Greek member of the Zonda Commando called Alberto Herrera, who went sometimes under the name of Aleko or Alex. So people remember there was this person, a Greek Jew called Alex, but there were people who knew him also say, yes, we knew that he took this photograph. Some of that testimony is a little bit late, but it's convincing, I think, enough for me to say that. But there were other people who were involved in that, as I say,

getting the camera there and being able to get the film out as well. the taking in August 1944. There were four photographs and they show

two different kinds of things. Two of them are taken from within one of the crematorium buildings through a doorway, and they show bodies, dead bodies lying on the ground, members of the Zonderkommando standing around them or stepping over them, clearly making efforts not to step on them. And behind them is smoke rising from a pit.

which is where the bodies are going to be burnt.

The other two are exterior shots. They were taken outdoors. There's some suggestions of how it might have been. They were taken from indoors, but that doesn't work with the low angle that they've got. They're taken outdoors. So they show trees, the trees around one of the crematoria. One of them doesn't really show much more than that. You see the sky through the trees. And the other one is that you see in the corner of that photograph,

Dominic (01:10:40.25)
both of these are taken at quite skewed angles, clearly indicating the difficulties there were in taking these photographs. In the corner of that photograph, you see a group of women who are undressing or undressed, standing. In some cases, it looks like they're walking forward. So they're about to enter the crematorium building, the gas chamber where they will be murdered. And there are

of one or two figures of the Zonda Commando standing among them as well. So these were taken on obviously, as you said, in very risky circumstances in which if the person taking them had been caught, or the people working with him had been caught, they clearly would have been killed. So none of them is what you might call quote unquote, a good photograph right there.

the two taken outside are at very skewed angles, and one of them doesn't really seem to show anything. And the two that are taken from inside are taken a fair way away from the doorway. So there's a lot of black space around this doorway, around the image of the dead bodies in the smoke. So what happened generally with the ways that these were shown was that they were shown

without cropped in ways that you could see the information that's in the content that was in them, as in how it was documenting the process of mass murder. People about to enter the gas chambers who've undressed and the bodies of people who've been murdered in the gas chamber who are about to be burnt. What has happened more recently, basically in this century, is that scholars looking at these

photographs and I suppose particularly this is the work of Georges Didier-Huberman, a French art historian, philosopher, wrote in 2001 an essay about these photographs in which he said, need to look at them as they were taken because they tell us more than just what was happening in the process of mass murder. It tells us about the people who resisted that by trying to document it.

Dominic (01:13:04.172)
So the fact that you have all this black space around the doorway tells us that this person has to hide as he's taking the photograph. The fact that you have the camera angle skewed and he's only able to record part in part of the frame. The women who are who are undressed tells us that he's taking this in haste in concealment.

possibly feeling afraid, quite plausibly feeling afraid. So in circumstances where, you know, he may have fumbled the camera and taken a picture of the sky rather than the picture of what he wanted to take a photo of. So Dizzy Überman's reading, I think, is very powerful and is very plausible. And I think makes

a lot of sense. And so I think that's why we're seeing a lot more often those photographs shown in the form in which they were initially produced. So it's worth saying that those photographs were… what we have of them is essentially copies of copies. So the film was smuggled out while the camp was in operation. There was a note attached them by members of the Camp Resistance.

from within, not from the Zonda Commando, but from within the main camp of Beer Canal, in which it described what was in them and saying, we need more film.

we might be able to take more photographs. And then they were produced as prints and then copied by just basically taking photographs of the original prints. And that essentially is what we have now. So we don't have, we certainly don't have the negatives. So then we don't have the contact prints. We've just got photocopies of them.

Waitman Beorn (01:15:04.473)
Well, and it's worth pointing out one of the reasons why, you know, the work of Didi Huberman and this idea of sort of showing the uncropped images. And I'm looking now literally at the Yad Vashem web page about these photographs and it's using, it's using cropped images. You know, and one of the reasons I think is particularly when it comes to the one image of the burning is that if it's cropped, it could just as easily be a perpetrator photograph.

Dominic (01:15:17.23)
Hmm.

Waitman Beorn (01:15:33.402)
You know, and so one of the things that the uncropped version shows is precisely, as you point out, that it gives you that context that this is not taken by somebody with the leisurely ability to sort of stand there and take a photograph because they're the perpetrators. I mean, I think that that reinforces your point of like why it's significant to have the uncropped images because otherwise we might think, you know, that this is not actually the act of resistance that it is.

Dominic (01:15:51.179)
Right, right,

Dominic (01:16:04.352)
Yes, think that's absolutely fair point. But it gives the impression when it's cropped, of being taken at a much closer distance, as opposed to from some distance away. then an example of that would be in the TV series Holocaust. There's a moment where the

fictional perpetrator who we're following is showing photographs of the extermination process. This whole thing is a fictional account of what happened, but he's showing photographs of the extermination process to his bosses and saying, okay, this is how is that gassing takes place. And he includes in that what's shown in this TV series is on the command of photographs, right?

So taken as if, you used as if this was something that perpetrators had recorded, because in the cropped version, it fits into that logic exactly as you say.

Waitman Beorn (01:17:09.369)
Well, I have one last question before we go to our final question, which is some of these Sonderkommando people, many of the ones that we're talking about did not clearly survive. Many of them were killed after the failed revolt in October 44, but some of them did. Can you talk a little about just a very little about the how they survived and what

what role these people had in sort of creating Holocaust memory and understanding after the war.

Dominic (01:17:46.935)
Right, yes. mean, members of the Zonderkommando obviously were, I mean, we've said that they weren't sort of liquidated in the kind of systematic way that people believe, but clearly they were a group of people that the SS did not want to survive Auschwitz. And so there were mass killings of them after the revolt and at the point when the crematoria were being dismantled, but some of them were kept on.

at the end after that. And some of them were able to survive essentially because the evacuation process was was messy and wasn't particularly well organized. So what tended to happen was the ways in which they were able to survive was mixing themselves in with other prisoners, the other prisoner population. So there are accounts that survivors of the Zonda Commando say where members of the camp guards are saying, the Zonda Commando stepped forward.

And of course, they realized that this was not a good idea to do that and didn't do that. And so it's by doing that and in the same way that other prisoners survived in the kind of some of them taken on death marches and able to drop out at points, escape at points, some of them taken to other camps and liberated there. This is what happened to them.

Now as far as how did, what role their testimony played.

Dominic (01:19:24.782)
I mean, again, it's it's more complicated than we sometimes talk about it, because one of the things that's often said is a lot of these people never wanted to talk about what happened to them because of this sense of shame. And there is a sense of shame that you see in the scrolls about which the writings that that were buried around the crematoria and either never talked about it or only talks about it towards the end of their lives. There are certainly survivors who that is true of.

a lot of those were people who were interviewed, particularly by the journalist and historian Gideon Greif. And that was the basis of a book that he published, We Wept Without Tears, which was published in Hebrew in the 1990s and then later in the 21st century, early 21st century in an English translation. And so

that kind of testimony is certainly exists. Things that people who felt they weren't able to talk about it. It was so painful. It was so difficult that they avoided talking about it for a long time. There are instances, though, of people who talk very soon after liberation. One example would be one of the most famous members on the command of Philip Muller, who

had been part of the Zonda Commando or part of the equivalent of the Zonda Commando before they had that name. And so he's sometimes talked about having been in the Zonda Commando for over three years. He had two periods of being in

He's one of those who wasn't recruited to it, you know, immediately on his arrival. But Muller, for example, gave testimony to two Czech survivors of Auschwitz, Otto Krauss and Erich Schoen, who later became Eric Kuhlke. So in their book, The Death Factory, that was originally published in Czech, there's a section where they talk about the Zongenkommando and they have the testimony of Muller as part of

Dominic (01:21:32.738)
So that's in the immediate years after the war. David Boda, who came and gave tape recordings with survivors, made tape recordings with survivors, again, in the immediate years after the war, recorded testimony from someone who said that he was in the Zonda Commando. They had problems a little bit communicating with each other. So exactly what he's talking about is a little bit hard to make

makes sense of, but he's certainly someone who's involved in burning bodies, which is one of the things that, for example, Christina Zywulska said was particularly horrifying to her. So he talked about that. And there are post-war trials held in Poland in 1947 to do with Auschwitz and to do with one of the commandants of Auschwitz the most.

famous commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hurs, in which members of the Sonderkommando, survivors of the Sonderkommando testified briefly. It's not key evidence in what's given against them, but there are survivors who testified, including Philip Muller, including the Polish member of the Sonderkommando, Henrik Mandelbaum. So there were people who were talking from early on. Muller also testified and other members of the Sonderkommando at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial.

in the early 1960s. And then famously, he testified in the film Shoah, Claude Lundsman interviewed him and he talked at length about what it is that he'd witnessed and what it is that he'd undergone. And in fact, Muller is a kind of opposite example of other members of the Zon-la-Kamana, that he was someone who talked from early on. But then after

being interviewed by Lonsmann, no longer wanted to talk about it, certainly not in public. So they've played a part. It's not always been absolutely central to...

Dominic (01:23:45.494)
representations of the Holocaust. mean, for example, the Eichmann trial, there's nobody's a survivor of the Auschwitz on the commando who testified there. were people who talked about them, but there was nobody from them who testified there.

Waitman Beorn (01:23:57.304)
I think it's something that comes through in the multiple books that you've written, Nicholas, is like when the Sonderkommanda shows up, and this is, I think this is true largely of Holocaust survivors in general in legal testimony, but even more so the Sonderkommanda, like they're there to sort of prove that the gas chambers happened and to sort of give specific details that show that the gas chambers happened, but

No one is particularly interested in what the experience was like for them or you know how they reacted to it. They're sort of literally kind of like a material witness to it, which is, again, like I said, I think that's probably true of a lot of survivors in legal situations, but even more so at the Sona Commando.

Dominic (01:24:37.463)
Yeah.

Dominic (01:24:42.062)
Yeah, Philip Menard, who we quote as said, know, they're brought in often as quote unquote, technical specialists. So I mean, and an example of that would be in the Krausen Kuhlke book, the Krausen Schoen book, The Death Factory. You know, you have a section that's called Men in the Camp, Women in the Camp, Men and Women in the Camp, The Machinery of Murder and Machinery of Death or something like that.

the testimony about the Zonda commander goes in machinery of death, right? Because that's what they're there to talk about. They're there to talk about the machines. And obviously some of the ways in which they're talked about is kind of being robots, it also kind of thinks about them as machines as well. Even though their testimony, as I've sort of said, we've tried to show in what we've written, is much richer than that and there's much more going on.

Waitman Beorn (01:25:25.528)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:25:36.93)
And I think that's a good, it's a good place for me to mention that, you know, we could have, we could go on for another hour and a half. and if you want to learn more, please check out, Dominic's and Nicholas's books. they're, very, readable, very, detailed about sort of these. This, this, this sort of subset of, of Holocaust survivors and the ways that they've, that they approached, you know, trying to document and resist, but also,

their larger sort of footprint, I suppose, on Holocaust memory. But before we you go, obviously, we have our question that we will ask again, which is, you you've already, I forget what your suggestion was last time, so that's okay. But we're not comparing, it doesn't have to be the same one. But what is one book, particularly on this topic, I suppose, that you might recommend for people that want to learn more, or are interested in reading?

Dominic (01:26:33.58)
mean,

Dominic (01:26:37.526)
think it has to be that a key book there is Gideon Grif's set of interviews with the Zondag Manor, We Wept Without Tears. There you have someone who is, I mean, no interviewer is perfect, but you know, I think, you know, someone who's managed to get these people to talk, who addresses them in quite a sympathetic and thoughtful way and gets them to say,

all sorts of very interesting things about what their experience were. I painful and challenging, of course, as well. But I think you get a kind of rounded sense of them as people and not just as these kind of people who can testify about the machinery. Yeah, I think that's that's still a very useful. mean, obviously, you mentioned that I think there's things that Nicholas and I have said that are useful, but that's

Dominic (01:27:35.736)
That's a...

what I'd suggest.

Waitman Beorn (01:30:19.353)
Okay, I'm back.

Waitman Beorn (01:30:24.336)
Can hear me?

Waitman Beorn (01:30:29.648)
Thank God I didn't lose the.

Dominic (01:30:30.498)
Yep.

Waitman Beorn (01:30:35.226)
Didn't it? Yeah, because it didn't have my recents and I was like, no. But it's we're still recording. I don't know. It's magical. But that's how this this that's what this platform is supposed to do. So do you want to just it's supposed to like not it's doing what it's supposed to do, which is to not not lose everything that we've done.

Dominic (01:31:01.454)
Go for that.

Waitman Beorn (01:31:01.508)
Yeah, so do you want us to go back and you can start with what you have to say is just the book because I don't know how much I got. So just do the book. Fair enough. So we can say I will have said I will have said it was one of the recommended you started out by saying what I have to what I have to say is getting griffes. Five, four, three, two, one, go.

Dominic (01:31:11.916)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I got a bit thrown when he disappeared.

Dominic (01:31:28.174)
So I think the book that I have to recommend is Gideon Grifes We Wept Without Tears.

Still the most extensive set of interviews with survivors of the Zonda Commando that's been published. I think Greif is a sympathetic and quite a thoughtful interviewer. And you get a sense from these interviews of much more than the survivors of the Zonda Commando, much more than just sort of the technical specialists that we were talking about. We get a sort of rounded.

portrait of them. There's other interviews that he's conducted. I think it would be great to see some of those published as well. But this is a book that I think if you're interested in the Zon-Nikwana, you have to read it.

Waitman Beorn (01:32:19.555)
Well, thank you so much, Dominic. And thanks to all of our listeners. Again, if you're finding this podcast thought provoking, engaging, et cetera, please leave us a comment. Like, subscribe, all those sort of social media things. And once again, Dominic, thank you so much for coming on and telling us about your research.

Dominic (01:32:43.714)
Thank you for having me.