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There was a group of us. All Jews. All prisoners. We were forced by the threat of our own lives to aid in the disposition of the mass of bodies following the gas chambers.
Today marks three months I have been forced into this role. I find I am growing numb to it, but I remember the first day like it was yesterday, though I wish I could forget.
We stood outside the crematorium—a large brick building. The largest room was used for the gas chamber. Everything about it reeked of cold and death.
Before we could start, the SS officers waited for the gas to take effect, checking through a peephole to ensure everyone was well and truly dead before they started the ventilation system. A pulsing, throbbing, whirring noise of a machine breathing in and clearing the air. Once the noise died, we were instructed to go in and collect the corpses.
An instant punch of relief hit my gut, followed by shame. We were not waiting for our own deaths, as I had imagined. Instead, we were waiting for the extermination of others.
I shuffled inside, along with the other Jews hand-picked to help with this task, into a large room comprised of brick, stone, and plaster, unsure of what to expect.
My imagination couldn’t have done the horror justice. Piles of bodies lined the stone floor, making it impossible to see the ground. At the time, I had no idea how many. Hundreds perhaps?
A terrible, acrid smell filled the room, making it difficult to distinguish between the scent of the gas and the smell of the corpses combined with human excrement.
My eyes watered. I fought the urge to cover my nose as we were given instructions. Several Sonderkommando were put in charge of cutting the hair from the corpses and extracting gold teeth. The hair was rumored to be used for materials, such as thread and felt, while the gold was used as merely another way to fill the German officers’ pockets. Nazi cruelty, it seemed, knew no bounds.
Once they finished, two prisoners were charged with loading the bodies onto the hoist that sent them up to the ground floor of the building and the crematorium ovens, where I waited.
These men struggled with their task. The undressing room and the gas chamber were underground. Depending on their size, it was possible to load between seven and ten people on the hoist. If they were new arrivals, their bodies were larger and heavier, yet to be malnourished and so less fit at one time. The starving of prisoners, however, allowed many more bodies to be piled high, nothing but skin and bones.
On the floor above, I waited with another prisoner. We collected the bodies, then sent the lift back down for reloading.
I remember the sight of the first lift. The hoist had no door, but a wall blocked one side. When it arrived, a pile of flesh greeted us. I gagged, but I pushed my nausea aside, not wanting to get caught sick. We had a job to do, so I swallowed over the bile in my throat and got to work.
When I touched the wrists of the first body, I dry-heaved. Still warm, I struggled to move it, to use my weight to pull this nameless person off the hoist onto the floor in front of the ovens. As I worked, I dare not take in their faces, instead finding my job less painful to only look at the bodies as I worked.
We laid them out two by two, as other Jews in our group placed the dead head-to-foot on something resembling a stretcher. It took two men to lift each stretcher, while a third held the handles that would push the corpse into the furnace.
I would soon discover moving the bodies was not the worst job.
On this first day in the Sonderkommando, the men in charge of burning did not slip the dead into the fire fast enough. The iron became too hot, scorching their hands, and as the men worked, they found the corpses began to stick to the metal. I watched as the prisoners increasingly struggled with their work. The bodies began to pile up. The men began to use a fork-like device to pull them off the stretchers while their flesh stuck to the red-hot iron.
Sweat poured down their faces, and I found anger welling in my chest as they slowed. I could not continue pulling bodies from the hoist if they didn’t speed up, and when I noticed the SS. officer checking on our work, my heart plummeted to the floor.
They called him The Butcher of Auschwitz for a reason.
His face contorted in anger. He stared at the bodies in disgust and paused to watch the men struggle with the ovens. Afraid, I wanted to please him. I worked harder, faster, but this only exacerbated how behind the other men were.
All at once, the officer descended on them. He turned his blazing blue eyes from me to the men at the oven, his heels clicking on the floor as he approached them and backhanded the first man who toppled, nearly falling onto the searing iron stretcher—now empty but embedded with the flesh of his own people.
“What is the meaning of this?” His voice boomed, echoing off the brick walls. “Are you sabotaging this operation?”
The Butcher’s wild eyes darted to the other men in front of the oven, but he didn’t wait for an answer. He began beating all three men.
He picked up the giant fork-like device and clubbed the men with it. Their wails pierced my ears, but I was helpless to stop them, so I turned away. When he finished, they could barely move. They lied broken and bloody by his feet.
I have no idea what became of them. All I know is they were carted away by another officer, still breathing but barely. And when The Butcher turned his crazed gaze to me, I only knew one thing. I didn’t want to be them.
“You!” He pointed to me, along with the prisoner helping me. “You are in charge of the ovens.” Minutes later, three new prisoners appeared, one tasked with helping us with the ovens and two more to replace us at the hoist. We worked tirelessly, slipping the bodies inside the brick ovens before the iron grew too hot, using water to help prevent the skin from sticking and the fork when necessary.
We survived to live another day. This would not be the last time we worked those ovens. Sonderkommando was our new role, and as much as I hated myself for it, the job of disposing of bodies meant I would not be one of them. As long as I didn’t screw up. As long as I didn’t arouse suspicion.
On that first day, I tried to count the bodies. Over 1400 burned. In the last couple of months, I lost count. There were simply too many...
LETTERS, SECRETS, MURDER, long-lost family members, private investigators... So many pieces to the puzzle she didn’t understand. Nothing made sense, and yet Abigail was sure the pieces fit together. She was certain Lawson was the only other person who knew the truth, and no matter what the police thought, or the case notes said, no one would convince her his death didn’t have anything to do with it.
All of these thoughts swirled inside her head like a cyclone, sucking her in and pulling her down, taking her right back to the beginning.
