I’ve never talked about this until now; it’s such a weight, it’s so heartrending, that I find it difficult to speak of those visions of the gas chamber. You could find people whose eyes hung out of their sockets because of the struggles the organism had undergone. Others were bleeding from everywhere, or were soiled by their own excrement, or that of other people. Because of the effect that their fear and the gas had on them, the victims often evacuated everything they had in their bodies. Some bodies were all red, others very pale, as everyone reacted differently. But they had all suffered in death. People often imagine that the gas was thrown in, and there you were, the victims died. But what a death it was! … You found them gripping each other – everyone had desperately sought a little air. The gas was thrown onto the floor and gave off acid from underneath, so everyone tried to find some air, even if each one needed to climb on top of another until the last one died. I personally think – I can’t be sure but I think – that several people died even before the gas was thrown in. They were crammed in so tightly against one another that the smallest and weakest were inevitably suffocated. At a certain moment, under that pressure, that anguish, you become selfish and there’s only one thing you can think of: how to save yourself. That was the effect the gas had. The sight that lay before us when we opened the door was terrible; nobody can even imagine what it was like.
“Crematorium III fully operational,” David Olère, 1945. Wash and China ink on paper. Ghetto Fighters Museum, Galilee, Israel
During the first days, in spite of the hunger that was tormenting my belly, I found it hard to touch the hunk of bread we were given. The stench stuck to my hands; I felt sullied by those deaths. With time, little by little, we had to get used to everything. It became a kind of routine that we couldn’t think about.
“In the undressing room,” David Olère, 1946. Wash and China ink on paper. Ghetto Fighters Museum, Galilee, Israel
Can you describe in detail what happened when each new convoy arrived?
Every time a new convoy arrived, people went in through the big door of the Crematorium and were directed towards the underground staircase that led to the undressing room. There were so many of them that we saw the queue stretching out like a long snake. As the first of them were entering, the last were still a hundred yards or so behind. After the selection on the ramp, the women, children, and old men were sent in first, then the other men arrived. In the undressing room, there were coat hooks with numbers all along the wall, as well as little wooden planks on which people could sit to get undressed. To deceive them more effectively, the Germans told people to pay particular attention to the numbers, so that they’d be able to find their things more easily when they came out of the “shower.” After a time, they also added an instruction to use the laces to tie shoes in pairs. In fact, this was to facilitate the process of sorting out when the things arrived at the Kanadakommando. These instructions were generally given by the SS standing guard, but it sometimes happened that a man in the Sonderkommando could speak the language of the deportees and transmit these instructions to them directly. To calm people down and ensure they’d go through more quickly, without making any fuss, the Germans also promised them they’d have a meal just after “disinfection.” Many of the women hurried up so as to be first in line and get it all over with as quickly as possible – especially as the children were terrified and clung to their mothers. For them, even more than for the others, everything must have been strange, eerie, dark, cold.
Once they had taken off their clothes, the women went into the gas chamber and waited, thinking that they were in a shower, with the shower heads hanging over them. They couldn’t know where they really were. A woman would sometimes be seized by doubt when no water came out and went to see one of the two Germans outside the door. She was immediately beaten and forced to go back in; that took away any desire she might have to ask questions.
Then the men, too, were finally pushed into the gas chamber. The Germans thought that if they made thirty or so strong men go in last, they would be able, with their force, to push the others right in. And indeed, herded by the rain of blows as if they were so many animals, their only option was to push hard to get into the room to avoid the beating. That’s why I think that many of them were dead or dying even before the gas was released. The German whose job it was to control the whole process often enjoyed making these people, who were about to die, suffer a bit more. While waiting for the arrival of the SS man who was going to release the gas, he amused himself by switching the light on and off to frighten them a little more. When he switched off the light, you could hear a different sound emerging from the gas chamber; the people seemed to be suffocating with anguish, they’d realized they were going to die. Then he’d switch the light back on and you heard a sort of sigh of relief, as if the people thought the operation had been canceled.
“In the gas chamber,” David Olère, 1950. Wash and China ink on paper. Private collection
Then, finally, the German bringing the gas would arrive. It took two prisoners from the Sonderkommando to help him lift up the external trapdoor, above the gas chamber, then he introduced Zyklon B through the opening. The lid was made of very heavy cement. The German would never have bothered to lift it up himself, as it needed two of us. Sometimes it was me, sometimes others. I’ve never said this before, since it’s painful to admit that we had to lift the lid and put it back, once the gas had been introduced. But that’s how it was.
Did the SS man wear a gas mask?
No, I never saw a German wearing one, neither when pouring the gas in nor when opening the door. I know many people have claimed they did wear them. That may have been the case in other crematoria, but in any case not in mine. There was no point, since the operation was very rapid. The cover was just opened, the gas thrown in, and the cover closed again. But the German merely threw the gas in; it wasn’t even he who opened or closed.
Once the gas had been thrown in, it lasted about ten to twelve minutes, then finally you couldn’t hear anything anymore, not a living soul. A German came to check that everyone was really dead by looking through a peephole placed in the thick door (it had iron bars on the inside to prevent the victims from trying to smash the glass). When he was sure that everyone was well and truly dead, he opened the door and came out right away, after starting the ventilation system. For twenty minutes, you could hear a loud throbbing noise, like a machine breathing in air. Then, finally, we could go in and start to bring the corpses out of the gas chamber. A terrible, acrid smell filled the room. We couldn’t distinguish between what came from the specific smell of the gas and what came from the smell of the people and the human excrement.
What were you supposed to do, exactly?
I was given scissors and had to cut off the women’s hair. I just cut off the longest hair, and didn’t touch the men. Especially useful were the long tresses, easy to cut off and transport. Both hands were needed to cut with those big pairs of scissors. Then the hair was picked up and put into a big sack. At regular intervals, a truck came to pick up the sacks of hair that had been set to one side so as to convey them to a place in town where they were stored.
“Our hair, our teeth, and our ashes,” David Olère, 1946. Wash and China ink on paper. Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel
When the job of cutting the hair and pulling out the gold teeth had been completed, two people came to take the bodies and to load them onto the hoist that sent them up to the ground floor of the building, and the Crematorium ovens. All the rest, the undressing room and the gas chamber, was underground. Depending on whether the people were big, small, fat, or thin, it was possible to load between seven and ten people onto the hoist. On the floor above, two people collected the bodies and sent the lift back down. The hoist didn’t have any door; a wall blocked the one side, but when they reached floor level, the corpses were unloaded on the other side. The bodies were then dragged and laid out in front of the ovens, two by two.
In front of every
muffle, three men were waiting to place the bodies in the oven. The bodies were laid out head to foot on a kind of stretcher. Two men, either side of the stretcher, lifted it with the help of a long piece of wood slipped underneath it. The third man, facing the ovens, held the handles that were used to push the stretcher into the furnace. They had to slip the bodies in and pull the stretcher out quickly, before the iron grew too hot. The men in the Sonderkommando had got into the habit of pouring water onto the stretcher before disposing of the bodies, otherwise these remained stuck to the red-hot iron. In cases such as that, the work became very difficult, since the bodies had to be pulled out with a fork and pieces of skin remained attached. When this happened, the whole process was slowed down and the Germans could accuse us of sabotage. So we had to move quickly and skillfully.
In David Olère’s drawings, you can see a strip of water in front of the ovens …
This was mainly used to transport the bodies more easily between the hoist and the ovens. Water was thrown into this channel and the bodies slipped along relatively easily. Not like in Bunker 2, where our feet, and the bodies too, got bogged down in the mud. To bring the bodies out of the gas chamber, there was no need to water the ground, since it was already sufficiently moist with everything – and I mean absolutely everything: blood, excrement, urine, vomit, everything…. Sometimes we slipped up in it.
I said that in general, I cut the hair, but I sometimes worked in the gas chamber, to help out a friend who was exhausted. My work was a little less demanding and I agreed to swap over with him, to give him time to rest or get a bit of fresh air. The worst of it was at the beginning, when we had to pull out the first bodies, since we didn’t have anything to help us. The bodies were so entangled and twisted together – legs here, heads there. The bodies lay in a pile more than three feet high, sometimes four feet or more.
“In the oven room,” David Olère, 1945. Wash and China ink on paper. Ghetto Fighters Museum, Galilee, Israel
Once the room had been emptied, it had to be thoroughly cleaned, since the walls and the floor were all dirty, and it was impossible to get new people in without their panicking at the sight of the traces of blood and all the rest on the walls and on the ground. We first had to clean the floor, wait for it to dry and then whitewash the walls. The ventilator continued to clean the air. Thus, everything was ready for the arrival of a new group. Even if people saw the floor was wet when they came in, this didn’t strike them as being suspicious, since they’d been told that they’d be going into the shower to be disinfected.
So, all traces were effaced in the gas chamber. And in the ovens, what happened with the ashes, once the bodies had been burned?
The ashes had to be eliminated too, so as to leave no trace. In fact, certain bones, those of the pelvis, for instance, didn’t burn very well, either in the ovens or, indeed, in the ditches. That’s why the thickest bones had to be taken out and ground up separately, before being mixed with the ashes. The operation took place in the Crematorium yard, behind the building. In Crematorium III, for example, the place where the bones were ground was in the corner next to the hospital and the Gypsy camp. Once the ashes had all been ground up, they were transported on the back of a little wagon. At regular intervals, a truck came to collect them so they could be thrown into the river. Sometimes I would swap places with one of the men who had to grind up the bones. This enabled me to get a bit of fresh air and escape from the oppressive, fetid atmosphere of the Crematorium.
Did the process of gassing and cremation ever stop?
No, we worked in two shifts, a day shift and a night shift, but the work was meant never to stop. It was a continuous, uninterrupted process. Just once we were forced to stop for two days because of a problem in the chimney. Because they had been overheated, some bricks had melted, which had obstructed the air passage. For the Germans, losing two days’ work was a real tragedy. A young Polish Jew, covered with sacks to protect himself against the soot and the heat, opened the base (the foundation) of the chimney so he could extract the bricks that were causing the problem. I noticed the bricks were glistening, encrusted with human grease. Because of this two-day interruption, resuming work on the last three hundred corpses was particularly hard. In the heat, they had decomposed. But they hadn’t stiffened, as happens with people who die a natural death: the gassed bodies disintegrated. I tried to pull a body out, but the skin came off in pieces and stuck to my hands. It was terrible.
So work resumed immediately when a new group arrived. And what did you do while the people were in the undressing room?
In general, I would rest until I had to start my “work.” But sometimes, too, I ended up in the room, helping out so that everything would happen as calmly as possible. There couldn’t be many of us, just a few. I don’t know whether we can call it “collaboration” when we were trying to reduce, to however small a degree, the suffering of people who were about to die. For example, I would help the elderly people to get undressed and I tried to stop people being hit.
Once, I saw a mother with her two daughters; they must have been about twelve. They didn’t get undressed; they just stood there, staring at the others, petrified. They came from Belgium, certainly from a well-off, elegant family. So they wouldn’t be beaten, I spoke to them in French – or, at least, in pidgin French. “Madame,” I told her, “hurry, because the German, he is coming, he will beat you, kill you.” I realized that she was ashamed of getting undressed in public. So I told her, “Look, everybody isn’t going to see you! Don’t you worry yourself,” and I stood in front of them, with my back turned to them, so they’d have a bit of privacy. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw they’d finally decided to get undressed. If the German had seen them, they’d certainly have been beaten. At least I made sure they were spared that. They went off with everybody else.
Did people try to ask you any questions?
No, not that I remember. They were completely dazed after their journey and focusing on what they had to do right now. Some just stood there, trying to understand what was going to happen. It took at least an hour or an hour and a half for them to get undressed. Sometimes as much as two hours. It depended on the people; the more elderly people there were, the longer it took. The first people who went into the gas chamber could be waiting there for more than an hour. Some women hurried in to get it over with more quickly. They thought the showers would be cleaner for the first in, but in the end, they suffered almost more than the others, as they waited there, naked.
Did things happen the same way when a group of prisoners selected inside the camp were sent to their deaths?
It was quite rare for those prisoners to be sent to our crematorium. Selections within the camp often took place on big Jewish holidays, especially Yom Kippur. When, in spite of everything, a group like that did arrive, it was worse than anything else. They already knew they were being sent to the gas chamber, to a certain death. Generally speaking, they had spent time in an isolated barrack, until the Germans thought there were enough of them to be sent to the gas chamber without wasting Zyklon B. The room was very big, and the more people who were crammed in, the less gas the Germans needed to kill their victims.
In general, those people were now so weak, sick, and resigned that they didn’t make very much fuss. In the camp jargon, those prisoners, reduced as they were to the extreme limit of their strength, just skin and bones, were called “Muselmänner” (Muslims). I think the word comes from the position they would assume when they collapsed from exhaustion during the interminable roll calls; they did everything they could so as not to fall down, and summoned up the last of their strength to stay upright, but when they finally lost the last of their strength, their knees crumpled under the weight of their bodies, and their heads were so heavy they flopped forward. They ended up on the ground, in the position of Muslims at prayer. When the kapo didn’t finish them off there and then, he noted their identity number for the next selection.
And what happened when these pri
soners arrived in the Crematorium?
They had to get undressed without making much fuss. When there weren’t too many of them, the Germans made them go directly through the service door that leads straight into the atrium. I remember that, on one occasion, a spontaneous little rebellion broke out among them. They refused to walk down the few steps and stayed in the entrance, blocking the way, so that nobody else could go down. But they didn’t have time to do much. Moll wasn’t far away, and he arrived just then, and started shouting. When he saw that wasn’t enough, he picked up an enormous pestle that was generally used to grind the bones. With all his strength, he brought it crashing down on the heads of those standing nearest to him. He certainly cracked their skulls open, he was so powerful. The others were terrified, and had no choice but to go in, even if they knew perfectly well where they were going.
And did those who were too weak and who were sent to the Crematorium in trucks suffer the same fate?
The ones who arrived by truck were more often than not the ones who had been left behind in the train carriages. Whenever a train arrived, all of the people who couldn’t walk any more, the sick, the handicapped, and the elderly, were loaded into the trucks and then unloaded in the Crematorium yard. But in general they tended to be sent to Crematoria IV or V, not very often to us in Crematorium III, nor II. When there wasn’t enough room in those other crematoria, in that case alone they were sent to ours. There usually weren’t more than about thirty of them. The trucks unloaded them onto a platform, like sand being poured out. The poor victims fell on top of one another. Those people who in normal times could hardly stand upright…. The pain of the fall and the humiliation must have been terrible. We had to help them get up and get undressed, and then take them inside the building, to a place where an SS man was waiting to execute them in cold blood, one by one.
Inside the Gas Chambers Page 8