As both the testimony from witnesses today and the buried letters make clear, the Sonderkommando were involved in the killing process at almost every stage, but that involvement was at its greatest when smaller numbers of people were delivered to the crematorium to be murdered. In such cases the gas chambers were too large to kill “efficiently,” so a more traditional method was used. “There were times when the transports were fifty people” says Dario, “and we had to take them, bring them one by one by the ears, and the SS [men] will shoot them in the back.” He remembers there would be “a lot of blood” when this happened.
Paradoxically, while the Sonderkommando were forced to witness such appalling events during their work day, their accommodation was, in the context of how the other prisoners lived in Auschwitz, comparatively good. Morris and Dario slept at the top of the crematorium in beds that were less dirty and lice-ridden than those in the normal barracks. Here, in the evening, they would sit and talk about their past lives, and sometimes even sing Greek songs. The food was better than that found elsewhere in the camp, and even vodka was occasionally available. This life was possible because the Sonderkommando had access to valuables in just the same way as did the prisoners who worked in “Canada.” There were several opportunities during the killing process to “organize” goods for themselves. They were charged with gathering the clothes left in the undressing room, and often found hidden food or valuables—shoes were a favorite hiding place for diamonds or gold. Additionally, in a shameful searching procedure to find jewelry, they were ordered to examine all the orifices of the people who had been gassed.
The valuables were supposed to be handed over to the Kapos, who would then in turn deliver them to the SS. But, just as with the prisoners in “Canada,” it was possible for the Sonderkommando to conceal some of the stolen goods and trade them on the thriving Auschwitz black market, either by negotiating with other prisoners who came, for a variety of reasons, into the crematorium compound as part of their duties—like the Auschwitz firemen—or by dealing directly with the SS. In this way, the Sonderkommando could supplement the meager rations they officially received with delicacies like salami, cigarettes, or alcohol.
Miklos Nyiszli, a prison doctor employed in the Sonderkommando, recalled the sight of the food available: “The table was piled high with choice and varied dishes, everything a deported people could carry with them into the uncertain future: all sorts of preserves, jellies, several kinds of salami, cakes and chocolate.”14 He remembered that “the table awaiting us was covered with a heavy silk brocade tablecloth; fine initialed porcelain dishes; and place settings of silver: more objects that had once belonged to the deportees.”
Of course, eating like this did virtually nothing to compensate for the horror of the Sonderkommando’s life. And it would be easy to imagine—especially after hearing Dario Gabbai talk of how he closed his mind and acted like “a robot”—that the emotions of the Sonderkommando were utterly deadened by their sickening routine. But one revealing incident in the lives of Morris and Dario shows that this was not the case, and that there existed a spark of human spirit that the Nazis could not extinguish.
One day, in the summer of 1944, Morris and Dario saw one of their cousins among a group of sick prisoners arriving at the crematorium to be shot. They knew there was nothing they could do to save him—the crematoria were surrounded by high fences—but Morris wanted to do something to make his last moments easier: “I ran up to him and asked, ‘Are you hungry?’ Of course everybody was hungry. Everybody was dying for food. So he says to me, ‘I’m very, very hungry.’”
Seeing his cousin in front of him, weak from starvation, Morris decided to take a risk. When the Kapo wasn’t looking he ran upstairs to his room, got a can of meat, opened it, and rushed back down to give it to his cousin: “And in one minute he swallowed it—he was so hungry. And then he got killed.” Rushing off to surreptitiously get a relative a last meal on this earth may not sound like a heroic act, but considering this in the context of the lives of the Sonderkommando—who endured lives of the utmost emotional stress, lives of horror equal to anything history has to offer—it surely deserves to be considered as such.
Meanwhile, by the end of the first week in July 1944, nearly 440,000 people had been sent to Auschwitz from Hungary—the vast majority murdered on arrival. The story Eichmann told after the war—that he had been keen to see the Brand mission succeed—is totally discredited by this damning statistic. For the trains started rolling to Auschwitz before Joel Brand had even left Budapest, and they carried on relentlessly as he tried to interest the Allies in the Nazis’ proposal.
When his plane landed in Turkey on May 19, Brand immediately contacted the Turkish branch of the Jewish Agency, representatives of the Jewish community in Palestine, at the Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul. There he hurriedly explained to them Eichmann’s proposal, and revealed that, in his opinion, it was unlikely that the British would ever deliver trucks to the Germans. But Brand thought that scarcely mattered, as long as the Allies came up with some kind of counter-proposal to keep the Nazis talking. Brand was distressed, however, that not one senior in the Jewish movement was available to meet him and that sending a cable to Jerusalem was considered impossible—messengers would have to deliver the news personally to Palestine. It was to be the beginning of a lengthy process of disillusionment for Joel Brand.
It was not until May 26 that the head of the Jewish Agency in Palestine notified a British diplomat, Sir Harold MacMichael, of the Nazis’ proposals. But it only took the British a matter of moments to reject the Brand mission, seeing it as an attempt to split the Western Allies from the Soviets. The British War Cabinet Committee on the Reception and Accommodation of Refugees met on May 30 and reached the conclusion that Eichmann’s proposal was simply crude blackmail and could not be accepted. The Americans just as quickly came to the same view and, keen that Stalin be informed as soon as possible, notified Moscow of the Nazis’ proposal on June 9. The Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister duly responded on the 19th that his government did not consider it “permissible”15 to carry on any discussions with the Germans on this subject.
In the meantime, Brand and his traveling companion, Bandi Grosz, found themselves in the custody of the British—and it was the unappealing figure of Grosz that now attracted greatest attention. In mid-June, Grosz was interrogated in Cairo by British intelligence officers and the story that he told was a surprising one. He claimed that Brand’s mission was only a camouflage for his own. Under the direct orders of Himmler, Grosz had been sent to facilitate a meeting in a neutral country between high-ranking British and American officers and two or three senior figures from the SD—Himmler’s own intelligence service. The purpose of the assignation was to discuss a separate peace treaty with the Western Allies so that—together—they could all fight the Soviet Union.
In the murky world that Grosz moved in—it transpired that he was at least a “triple” agent working for, and betraying, anyone who paid him—it is impossible to be absolutely certain about the motivations behind the offer he laid before the British in Cairo. The proposal did come from Himmler,16 however, and the Reichsführer SS clearly thought it in his interests to “fly this particular kite.” There was enough of a buffer, in the form of Clages and others, between him and Grosz for the offer to be deniable should it become public. Equally, if the Western Allies did make any attempt to proceed with the proposal, then Himmler had the intriguing option of either leaking the information himself to sow discontent between Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union, or actually trying to pursue the deal to fruition.
Of course, the British and Americans never gave serious consideration to Grosz’s offer and, from today’s perspective, it seems incredible that it was ever made. But it does reveal the mentality of leading figures in the Nazi party, particularly Himmler, at this crucial time in the conflict. Himmler obviously knew that the war was going badly for Germany, and that must have formed a large part of hi
s thinking in suggesting this deal.
But a strong ideological component was involved, too. Simply put, Himmler—in common with virtually all the members of the Nazi party—had almost certainly never understood why Britain and the United States had tied themselves to Stalin. The Nazi dream had always been for an alliance with Britain against the Soviet Union. Hitler’s vision had been for Germany to be the dominant power on mainland Europe and Britain to be the world’s dominant sea power, via the British Empire.
In 1940, however, Winston Churchill had smashed any possibility of an Anglo–Nazi partnership. So deeply felt was the sense of outrage at this upset in foreign policy that it still rankled with former Nazis after the war. Some years ago, one former member of the SS greeted me, when I arrived to interview him, with the words “How could it ever have happened?” Thinking that he was referring to the extermination of the Jews, I replied that I was glad he felt so badly about the crime. “I don’t mean that,” he said. “I mean how could it have ever happened that Britain and Germany ended up fighting each other? It’s a tragedy. You lost your Empire, my country was devastated, and Stalin conquered eastern Europe.”
This was no doubt a sentiment shared by Himmler in the late spring of 1944. Part of him would still have expected the Western Allies to act “rationally” and join forces with the Nazis to fight Stalin. This was to be a consistent train of thought among leading Nazis right through to the last moments of the war when, even after Hitler’s suicide, German generals attempted to surrender only to the Western Allies, not to the Red Army.
Nothing suggests, however, that Hitler shared Himmler’s desire for a separate peace with the Allies in the spring of 1944, and there is no evidence that he knew anything about Bandi Grosz’s mission. Hitler was enough of a political realist to understand that any peace treaty concluded from a position of great weakness would be untenable. The Brand mission thus marks the beginning of a split between Hitler and his “loyal” Heinrich—one that was to become more pronounced as the war drew to a close.
The Brand–Grosz mission may have been rejected by the Allies, but they also were careful never to communicate their negative response directly to the Nazis, so as to allow space for further local negotiation inside Hungary. In the face of silence from the British and Americans, Brand’s wife, aided by another member of the Relief and Rescue Committee, Rudolf Kasztner, tried to persuade Eichmann once again that he should demonstrate his own commitment to the “Jews for trucks” proposal by releasing some Hungarian Jews before any response was heard from the Allies. As they tried to negotiate with Eichmann, both Hansi Brand and Rudolf Kasztner were arrested by the Hungarian authorities, who were anxious to know what was going on. Once in custody, they were beaten by the Hungarians before the Germans intervened to have them released. Hansi Brand and Rudolf Kasztner revealed nothing, and still continued their attempts to convince Eichmann to make a gesture to the Allies.
Eventually, Eichmann and his SS colleagues agreed to allow a small number of Hungarian Jews to board a train which supposedly would take them out of the Reich. The primary motivation behind the action of the SS was straightforward—avarice. The price of a seat on the train started at 200 dollars (Eichmann’s proposal), rose to 2,000 dollars (a demand from Becher), and was eventually was set at 1,000 dollars. A committee, on which Kasztner sat, selected who should go on the train. The idea, according to Éva Speter,17 a Hungarian Jew who knew Kasztner, was that this should be a “Noah’s Ark—everything and everyone should be represented: youth organizations, illegal refugees, Orthodox people, scientists, Zionists.” This was, in many ways, a strange “Noah’s Ark,” however, one where personal connection could play a part in gaining admittance. For another class of people—which boarded the train in the hundreds—was comprised of Kasztner’s own friends and family from his hometown, Cluj. Éva Speter’s own father was on the committee that decided that Éva and her husband, son, uncle, and grandfather should get on the list.
Because many of those allowed onto the train could not pay the exorbitant fee demanded by the Nazis, some of the seats were sold off to wealthy Hungarians who subsidized the rest. This led to some seemingly arbitrary distinctions within families. For example, Éva Speter, her husband, and her son were not asked to pay for their seats, but her uncle and grandfather were. This decision appears all the more illogical because Éva’s husband (who was not paying for his space himself) was the one who stumped up the cash for the others: “My husband was pretty rich at the time and he gave the money to my uncle and my grandfather, and whatever money he had he gave it to Kasztner.”
Laszlo Devecseri18 was another Hungarian Jew who managed to get a seat on the train, and he was allowed aboard because he helped organize the collection camp on Columbus Street in Budapest where those selected for the train stayed pending its departure: “Naturally everybody heard about it [the train] and wanted to get on the list, but many people could not, because you’re talking about six hundred thousand Jews and only sixteen hundred could be taken by the train. Those who stayed made Kasztner a scapegoat.”
Kasztner was indeed to be heavily criticized after the war for his actions—not just in placing his own family on the train, but by not warning other Hungarian Jews of their impending fate. In Israel in 1954, Kasztner sued for libel a man named Malkiel Gruenwald who had accused him of being a “traitor” to the Jews, but the case quickly became an examination of Kasztner’s own behavior, and the judge eventually declared that he was guilty of “selling his soul to Satan.” It was a judgment that seemed harsh, given the pressures of the spring and summer of 1944, for Kasztner had previously demonstrated that he was committed to saving Jews by helping many escape from Slovakia. As for not warning the other Hungarian Jews, to attempt to do so would most likely have jeopardized any future negotiations with Eichmann and, according to one leading scholar of the period, Kasztner “was in no position to warn anyone.”19 This man, however, was by no means a perfect human being. He was not helped in his defense by his brash personality nor by the fact that he had conducted an affair with Hansi Brand while her husband was out of the country. He became a hate figure for some on the nationalist right in Israel and was murdered in 1957, just before the Israeli Supreme Court reversed much of the damning verdict against him pronounced at the original libel trial.
The train full of refugees finally pulled away from Budapest on June 30, 1944, after huge sums of money and other valuables had been handed over in suitcases to the SS (for, by now, Becher, Clages, and Eichmann were all involved in the extortion). There was, of course, still no guarantee that the 1,684 passengers were not going to travel the well-worn route to Auschwitz. “We were always afraid,” says Éva Speter, “and, of course, in the train we were afraid. We never knew what will be our future—but you don’t ever know your future, whether in five minutes there will be an earthquake. And that’s good.” But the train headed west, not north, and crossed into Austria, eventually reaching Linz.
In Linz, the train stopped because, the Nazis said, there was an opportunity for the Hungarian Jews to be medically examined and “disinfected.” This announcement spread enormous fear among everyone on the train, because the passengers suspected that this was the ruse that the Nazis used to send Jews to the gas chambers. “I remember I was standing naked before the doctor,” says Éva Speter, “and still looking very proud[ly], into his eyes, and I thought he should see how a proud Jewish woman is going to die.” She walked into the shower rooms, and from the taps came “fine warm water.” “It was a very relieving experience after we were ready to die there.”
Although the Kasztner train was not en route to a death camp, neither was it travelling out of the Reich as had been promised. Instead, it was heading for Germany, to the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen in Lower Saxony. Bergen-Belsen was to become infamous when the Allies liberated the camp in April 1945 and pictures of the appalling condition of the surviving prisoners were transmitted around the world. The Bergen-Belsen at which the Hung
arian Jews arrived, however, was very different. The camp had been opened in April 1943 charged with an unusual task: It was to house prisoners whom the Nazis thought at some later stage they might wish to deport from the Reich.
The situation at Bergen-Belsen was further complicated by the fragmentation of the camp into several sub-camps, with markedly different conditions existing between them. In the so-called “prisoners’ camp,” built for the 500 “ordinary” inmates who had originally constructed the camp, conditions were appalling, while in the “star camp” for “Austauschjuden” (“exchange Jews”) life—though still full of privation—was comparatively better. Here, families were able to stay together and prisoners were allowed to wear their own clothes. As a small boy, Shmuel Huppert20 was sent to Bergen-Belsen with his mother as a potential Austauschjuden. Because they were among the few Jews who held certificates from Palestine authorizing them to emigrate there, the Nazis considered them prime subjects for possible hostage exchange. Says Shmuel,The life was in a way reasonable. Reasonable in a sense that we got three blankets so we weren’t cold, and we got something to eat. It wasn’t plenty, but we could survive. We didn’t work—I learned to play chess in Bergen-Belsen and I play chess still today. But what was most important was the fact that we were together, that I was never separated from my mother.
The idea that the Nazis were considering releasing Jews to the West seems, at first glance, completely at odds with the policy of extermination. But it must be remembered that before the Nazis had developed the “Final Solution” their preferred method of dealing with their self-styled “Jewish problem” was to rob the Jews and then expel them, a policy practiced assiduously by Adolf Eichmann in the wake of the annexation of Austria in 1938. It was therefore in line with Hitler’s policy of “getting rid” of the Jews to try and ransom the richer ones for foreign currency. While nothing on the scale of the “million Jews for 10,000 trucks” deal had ever been attempted before, as far back as December 1942, Himmler had gained permission, in principle, from Hitler for individual Jews to be expelled from the Reich for money.
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