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Leon Cohen: ‘‘We Were Dehumanized, We Were Robots’’

The portrait of a handsome young man rests atop the television set in Leon Cohen’s room (see photo). The man who sat in the large armchair across from me was a faint shadow of that portrait. By the time I got to know him, Leon Cohen, the dashing fellow from Salonika, was a broken man. He walked with great difficulty; his health was precarious. Life had become a burden. He died a few months later.

Leon Cohen was not fluent in Hebrew. I conversed with him in English and a bit of French. Cohen was a worldly man. Had the Holocaust not occurred, he would probably have become wealthy and influential. His first wife, the daughter of Yehoshua Perahia, a wealthy Jewish banker from Salonika, lives in Athens today.

As a member of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Leon Cohen was given a horrific job: to rip gold teeth from the mouths of Jewish corpses. Day in and day out, he had to force apart dead people’s jaws, which had been firmly pressed together, and search for gold inside the mouths. I do not know if this was the hardest job in the crematorium, but I suspect that tearing out pieces of the bodies of our slaughtered fellow Jews was especially depressing. Leon never forgot those days. His description was realistic and hair-raising. I still have visions of how he calculated with his fingers how many kilograms of gold he had prised from the bodies each day.

Greif, Gideon. We Wept Without Tears : Interviews with Jewish Survivors of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando, Yale University Press, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=3419874. Created from usyd on 2020-10-03 09:50:43.

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Fate did not smile on him in his last years, either. He was embittered, lonely, and destitute in his senescence. One of his most beloved relatives shunned him and returned to Athens. His health deteriorated. He received no reparations from Germany, evidently due to bureaucratic foot dragging or negligence. His facial features attested to his virtues and qualities: extreme honesty, decency, humanness, and avoidance of condescension and narcissism. Leon Cohen, I felt, was considerate of everyone but himself. This is definitely how he behaved in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Before the Holocaust, Leon Cohen was a merchant, who provided supplies to the Greek army. While still in his teens, he was already wealthy and an owner of property. The Germans plundered all his family’s holdings in Salo- nika but could not deprive him of his pride and high-mindedness.

I will never forget the emotional impact of my few hours in Leon Cohen’s company. He hosted me cordially at each of our three meetings. Only in the last few months of his life, when he felt very ill, did he apologize: ‘‘I’ll get better soon. Then I’ll be glad to meet with you again.’’ He was bedridden when I last interviewed him; he would not get up again. Even so, he made an effort to answer my questions and recount the period of his life that he had spent in Auschwitz. Thank you, dear Leon. May this chapter serve as your memorial.

Mr. Cohen, I’d like to talk with you about your stay in Auschwitz-Birkenau, about the time that you served in the Sonderkommando. But first I’d like you to describe your childhood in Greece. Where were you born?

I was born on January 15, 1910, in Salonika. There I went to the Leon Gatenyo business school, a French-German institution. After I graduated, I looked for work. First I worked at the international fair that took place in Salonika back then. Later on, I worked for an enterprise that sold records and radio sets. Decca began to operate in Greece just then. Later on, I was drafted into the Greek army.

Did you receive a traditional education at home, or was it secular? It was not particularly Jewish. The only thing related to Judaism that I still

remember was the Hebrew lessons that we had once a week. The teacher taught the basic words: ani [I], ata [you], hu [he], anahnu [we]—really basic Hebrew. In contrast, I was given a superb French education, because the teacher was the principal and founder of the Chevalier de la Liaison Française school. He taught us the finest French literature.

What did your parents do for a living? My father was a well-off, successful merchant. He imported goods from

Germany and Austria. He was also a retailer in the private market. He had commercial relations with small merchants in Brussels. He had a business with fifteen employees. He spent six months on business trips outside of Greece.

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Did you have brothers and sisters? Yes, there were four of us. Apart from me, two survived the Holocaust—my

brother Robert, who’s living in Lyons, and my older sister Agnes, who lived in Paris from 1947 on and died several years ago. My younger sister Margot, who was pregnant at the time, was captured by the Germans and sent to the Baron Hirsch ghetto.∞ Later, they sent her with our mother to Auschwitz- Birkenau. The fetus was torn out of her womb before she could give birth and this led to her death, too. My father was lucky: he died of natural causes a year after the Germans entered Salonika.

How old were you when the Germans came to Salonika? What memories do you have of the first period of the occupation?

I was thirty then. Before the occupation began, I was an official supplier for the Greek Ministry of Defense. I supplied the ministry with goods of various kinds—a wide range of products apart from munitions. I had an agent in Germany, a man named Franz Jessen. He helped me to import important merchandise for the army. I ran a successful business and had many important connections. Doors opened for me wherever I went. Greece and Germany collaborated during the occupation; they did brisk business together.

What did you do in Salonika in the months leading up to the occupation? I was drafted into the Greek army a few months before the Germans came.

Don’t forget that Italy and Greece were at war in the winter of 1940/41. Three months before the war, I made a large arms deal for the army. Back then, Greece was ruled by Metaxas, a dictator who’d managed to unify the nation. When the war broke out, the Greeks rose up in absolute unison to defend their homeland. The Jews were among them, of course.

Do you remember your first encounter with the Germans? I definitely do. I was sitting in my office when the Germans came in and

asked to have a conversation with me. They said they knew I was a supplier for the Greek army. I confirmed that and then they ordered me to supply the shipyard. They said they’d be in charge of the Defense Ministry from then on. I told them I’d do as they said; I didn’t have a choice. In the meantime, I spoke on the phone with a friend named Barotzi who worked with Greek customs, and I told him about the Germans’ demand. I explained to him that I did not want to serve as a supplier to the Germans and asked if he’d be willing to take on this function himself. He answered, ‘‘Yes, why not? But I’ve got no money.’’ I put him at ease and told him that he’d surely find someone who would finance the procurements.

The decrees against the Jewish population became harsher and harsher. In the summer of 1942, thousands of young Jewish men, including myself, were summoned to the Platia Eleftherias [Liberty Square], where Greek soldiers

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tortured us for hours under the scorching sun. The Germans stood all around, lapping it up, giggling, and taking pictures. I didn’t have to be there all the time, since I had a document confirming that I was working for the Germans at the shipyard.

When was your next face-to-face encounter with the Germans? It happened in 1942, when I was sent to the German prison in Salonika. I

managed to escape and returned to my office, and together with another associate I put my business back together. Thus, for our security we managed to deposit a little money in our account with Union Bank, the largest Jewish bank in Salonika. I sent unsigned checks to the bank and in the afternoon I visited the bank personally and signed them. There, in the bank, I met my first wife. The fact that she was the daughter of Yehoshua Perahia, the owner and general manager of the bank, was something I found out much later. She was amazingly beautiful and very young. Her father was not especially keen on our marriage, but love overcame everything and we got married on Sunday, Janu- ary 15, 1943, in Beit Shaul, the great synagogue of Salonika. The Germans sent the Jews of Salonika to Auschwitz two months later.

At first we were sent to a ghetto near my home in the lower city of Salonika. From there, we escaped to a more distant ghetto, where we thought that it would take the Germans longer to arrest the Jews and send them to the con- centration camps. When we found out that the Germans were deporting Jews from this ghetto, too, we decided to escape to the ghetto in the King George quarter, near my sister-in-law’s home, where only Jews lived before the war. By then, my father-in-law no longer owned the bank. The Germans had also expropriated his house, an opulent five-room place on the seashore. In the ghetto, ten people shared a small, cramped apartment. A good friend of my father-in-law, Nikos Hadziyanakis, insisted that we escape from the ghetto. No one in the family apart from my wife and me wanted to do that. They thought that escaping would put all of us in danger.

I had two good friends, both of them Christian. One of them was Barotzi, whom I’ve already mentioned; he worked for the customs authorities. The other one was named Tzambazi. They forged documents for us showing we were Greeks. My name was changed to Leonidas Kokinakis and my wife became Amalia Kokinaki. My in-laws’ new Greek name was Peridis. One evening, my two Christian friends visited us in a state of great agitation and said that we had to pack our things right then and flee from the ghetto. They’d found out that the Germans intended to start transporting the Jews to the concentration camps the next day. Only my wife and I were prepared to escape; all the others refused. After the war, I found out that my sister-in-law, who’d been taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau, told a friend in the barracks shortly

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before she died of starvation, ‘‘What a terrible shame it is that we didn’t listen to Niko. If only I’d listened to him and escaped from the ghetto.’’

Our friends had put together a plan: we were supposed to pretend that we were drunk. We took two bottles of ouzo and removed the yellow star from our clothing. I put on a hat and my wife put on a kerchief. Then we began to sing Greek folk songs loudly and burst into wild laughter. As we passed the Germans’ main command headquarters, we walked deliberately singing and laughing. We even gave the Germans some of the booze. They said, ‘‘Danke schön, danke schön!’’ [‘‘Thank you very much, thank you very much!’’]

Our friends led us to a house in one of the poorest quarters in Salonika, and after we spent a few days there we went on to Sidirokas, a village outside Salonika. By then, no Jew could stay safely anywhere for more than a few days. The village was near the border of the Italian occupation zone. We spent at least a week there. The owner of the house where we’d found shelter knew a railroad technician who worked in the Italian zone. We made plans to escape with him in a military transport on a train to Larissa≤ and Athens. The land- lord told the technician that we had gotten married against the wishes of the bride’s parents and were eloping. The technician was willing help us by con- cealing us in his private locker, for a subvention, of course.

The trip took two days. We were crammed in the locker. We couldn’t leave it for any purpose; otherwise, the soldiers on the train would discover us. A high- ranking Italian officer who was on the train found out about us, and we assumed that it was all over for us. However, to our great surprise, the officer chatted with us amiably and warned us not to break the security rules. We had no doubt that he knew who we were. When we said good-bye, he wished us all the best and kissed my wife on the cheek.

We got off the train at a small location not far from Athens and continued by taxi. In Athens, we went to 50 Aharnon Street, to the home of Dionissis Kolokotsas, who before the war had been an agent for my company in south- ern Greece. Although he had not known that we were coming, Kolokotsas let us into his apartment without hesitating. A few days later, we moved to the Patissia quarter of Athens, where we rented a small house. A month later, with the help of Nikos Hadziyanakis and a few employees of the Italian embassy in Athens, where my father-in-law had good friends, we were joined by my father-in-law’s family. We had to give them false identities, since Perahia was fluent in Greek, both in speaking and in writing, but he looked unmistakably Jewish and his wife, my mother-in-law, spoke only French and Ladino.

In our next hideout, I told the owner, a man from Crete, that my mother-in- law was a deaf-mute and my father-in-law was a refugee from Asia Minor. To complete the camouflage, we posted pictures of Mary in our room and were

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even visited by the local bishop. In the meantime, I’d found out that Nikos had rescued my in-laws in Salonika on many occasions, including one just before the Germans came to arrest them.

One day about three months later, I visited the barbershop, as I did each and every day to hear the news and get a little fresh air. Inglessis, the barber, was a collaborator—I didn’t know it at the time—and he denounced me to the Germans. My father-in-law had wanted to come with me that day but for- tunately he stayed home. This traitor, who knew that my father-in-law was a wealthy banker, tried one day to entrap him by means of my wife. His scheme didn’t work out well, however. By chance, one of my Greek friends was at the barbershop that morning. Right after I was arrested he called a good friend of his, a manufacturer named George Ladas, who rushed over the house where my wife and her parents were hiding, told them I’d been arrested, and urged them to get out fast.

Once again, they hesitated and he had to remove them, almost by force, to a safe apartment in a wealthy quarter of Athens that belonged to the family of a good friend of my wife’s. There they were greeted with unsurpassable good will and warmth. My wife and in-laws could have spent the whole war there. But my father-in-law, a considerate person by nature, didn’t want to be a burden to anyone and to exploit the generosity of these friends. He preferred to move to a different hideout. So my wife and in-laws moved to an isolated house in the Kalithia area, far from downtown Athens, and shared a room in the landlord’s apartment.

One day, my wife had problems with her ears and went to a Greek doctor named Athanassios Papathanassopoulous for treatment. Papathanassopou- lous, like his father, was a Freemason and therefore was willing to help her and her parents. He took them to his clinic and, with the help of two other doctors, concealed them in various homes. My wife rode out the war in the home of the doctor’s mother and my in-laws did the same in another apartment. The doc- tor made sure they were able to get together in the evening. All three doctors took care of my wife and her parents devotedly.

What happened to you after the Germans arrested you? The German agents took me to a pharmacy on the street corner and then to

Gestapo headquarters on September 3 Street. They pointed a handgun at my forehead, ordered me to shut up, and drove me to a small lockup where they beat and tortured me. At eleven that night, a man with a long beard and dark glasses came and said, ‘‘You’re a piece of filth.’’ ‘‘What did I do?’’ I asked him. ‘‘You’re not telling us where you father-in-law is hiding,’’ he replied. I an- swered, ‘‘I don’t know the address, but if you want, I’ll lead you there.’’ He said, ‘‘What do you mean by that? Either you’re lying or you’re a fool.’’

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They shoved me into a little car and we drove to my home. No one was there, of course. The Germans looted the house and then they brought me in front of a German officer, who began to beat me. I stood my ground and said that I didn’t know where my father-in-law was hiding. They took me to a room, where I heard someone say to me, ‘‘If you want to work for us, you’ll be able to make a lot of money.’’ But I was thinking only of escape. Just then, the officer who’d arrested me in Salonika entered the room. He remembered me and knew that I had escaped.

They took me from there to Haidar, the central prison for people who’d been sentenced to death or banished to camps. They led me to a cellar where other Jewish prisoners were already being held. I stayed there until Passover. In the meantime, the Germans had begun to arrest Jews with the assistance of Jewish collaborators such as the Recanati brothers. There were sixty Jewish prisoners in the cellar. We were there for months.

The Germans continued to round up Jews in Athens. They ordered the chief rabbi of Athens≥ to present them with a list of the names and addresses of members of his congregation. He was clever enough to tell them that he could- n’t give them the list that very day. He asked them to give him a week to do it. They gave him five days. He took advantage of the time to urge the Jews to escape. Many Jews in Athens managed to get out because of the chief rabbi’s warning.

How did the Germans entrap the Jews of Athens? The Germans gave the order for notices to be posted at the entrance of the

synagogue, saying that before Passover the Jews could obtain there ten kilo- grams of matzo, some oil, and some sugar. Early on the morning before Pass- over, lots of Jews gathered there. The Germans came with twenty trucks. That’s how they trapped the unsuspecting Jews.∂ They drove them from there to the central railroad station, Stanos Larissis.

Did the Germans tell you that you’d be sent from there to Auschwitz? No, we weren’t told explicitly where we would be heading. They confused

and misled us. But I remember that Mr. Nehama’s daughter∑ turned to me in the railroad car and said, ‘‘Don’t worry, Leon!’’ and I answered, ‘‘What do you mean, ‘Don’t worry?’ We’re going to our deaths!’’

How did you know this? We knew it from rumors that had spread in the ghetto. I can’t point to the

source of the rumors but people were speaking about the terrible fate that the Germans were preparing for them.

When did the transport set out? I don’t remember the exact date. But I think we arrived [at Auschwitz] in

late November.

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Do you remember how you were received? Definitely. Dr. Mengele was waiting for us there.∏ He was a young man, in his

thirties. Next to him stood a woman, evidently his main assistant, and two enormous German shepherd dogs. He began a selection: ‘‘Links, rechts, links, rechts’’ [‘‘left, right, left, right’’]. The young men were made to gather on one side; the women, children, and old people were gathered on the other. I was grouped with the young men. After standing for a long time, we were ordered to sit down. A Jew from Salonika named Salvator was there; he had a German wife. He was one of the first who’d come to Auschwitz. He asked how we were.π

How were you selected for the Sonderkommando? We were taken to Birkenau that very day. In Auschwitz, the main camp,

there was a small crematorium. In fact, the extermination camp in the fullest sense of the term was Birkenau. There they led us to a barracks; I don’t remember its number. They quarantined us there. Afterwards, we had the numbers tattooed onto our arms.

Would you allow me to glance at the number on your arm? Sure, go right ahead. Look—one hundred eighty-two thousand four hun-

dred ninety-two. That was my number in Birkenau. It was my ‘‘new name.’’ In the quarantine block, five men slept on one bunk. A few days later, some friends warned us not to join the Sonderkommando. They said that if we were forced to work there, we’d be murdered after a few months. Whoever went to the Sonderkommando had almost no chance of surviving. The Germans had no interest in preserving the lives of the eyewitnesses to their crimes.

Who warned you about the Sonderkommando? Jews who worked near the crematoria and saw what was going on. One of

them was a Jewish doctor. Did they explain what the term ‘‘Sonderkommando’’ meant? Yes, of course, in minute detail. They told us that whoever was assigned to

the Sonderkommando would never get out of there alive. We spent a month in the quarantine barracks. One day, a German visited the

barracks with a Jewish doctor who was to ‘‘examine’’ the prisoners. Since I was fluent in German, my comrades chose me to be the interpreter. I walked over to the doctors and asked them not to take us for the Sonderkommando.

A few days later a young German, a French speaker about thirty years old, came over. He spoke with the Blockälteste. The next day he approached me and asked, ‘‘You speak French, don’t you?’’ I told him that I did and asked him what he wanted from me. Then he told me that he needed two hundred strong men to do loading work at the train station. I told them that the Greek Jews in the barracks, about two hundred men in all, could do the work. They were fit for any kind of hard work.

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Obviously I believed him; I really did think he was referring to ordinary physical labor. I thought that if we demonstrated to the Germans our strength and our ability to get things done, they’d treat us well. How naïve we were back then! The man said he’d be back the next day and left. We had to get ready to march out. When I returned to my Greek friends and told them about what the young German had demanded, they asked me what kind of work we’d have to do. I calmed them and told them that we’d stay together and that we’d be fed.

The man returned the next day and said, ‘‘All the Greeks—follow me!’’ There were about 150 of us. It was exactly a month after we’d been quaran- tined. When we left the barracks, the German asked, ‘‘You know how to sing? Why aren’t you singing something?’’ So we burst into song. There were always songs that we loved to sing together—Greek folk songs, patriotic songs, or other songs. We were still in a positive frame of mind.

He led us through the camp until we came to Block 13.∫ The Germans opened the door to the barracks and ordered us to go in. We all went in. Inside, there were already some other prisoners. They asked us, ‘‘Why have you come here?’’ We told them that we’d come to help them with their work at the train station. One of them responded, ‘‘You idiots! This is the Sonderkommando. What train are you dreaming about?’’ I was so shocked and afraid that I froze on the spot. The prisoner said, ‘‘They tricked you. Believe me, this is the Sonderkommando.’’ So they’d deceived us into joining the Sonderkommando. Later on, the prisoner turned out to be our Blockälteste, George.

Did you men protest when you heard about this? Did you try to reverse this grisly decree?

Protest? To whom? After we reached the barracks, the Germans locked the door on us and that was that.

From then on, then, you were part of the Sonderkommando. Yes, that’s how it happened. They divided the 150 Greeks among the four

crematoria and the Sonderkommando chapter in our lives began. When did you begin to work? That very night. When we reached our ‘‘workplace,’’ the Germans divided

us into groups, five men in each group. When someone in my group saw what the work consisted of—cremating dead Jews—he threw himself into the flames. He couldn’t bear the thought of having to cremate the bodies of his Jewish brethren.

Can you reconstruct the beginning of your work with the Sonderkom- mando?

On the first night in the barracks, the veteran crematorium prisoners told us

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about the work we’d have to do. But those stories paled in comparison to the reality.

We were stunned but few of us considered suicide. That was too easy a solution. The next morning, we walked to the camp. The Germans didn’t take us to the cremation facilities but rather to the cremation pits.Ω I saw several wagons next to the pits, and nearby was a building with a small gate. Later on, I found out that people were being gassed to death there. I waited outside for about half an hour and then we were ordered to open the doors.

The bodies fell out in one great mass and we began to load them onto the wagons. They were small open wagons, the kind that you find in coal mines, much smaller than railroad cars. We took the corpses to the pits. A layer of women’s and children’s corpses was placed in the pits, and on top of them was a layer of wood. Then a layer of men’s corpses was put in, and so on, until the pit—which was at least three meters deep—was filled. Then the Germans poured gasoline into the pit. A bright flame rose from the mixture of bodies and wood.

What did you feel when you saw so many bodies, perhaps for the first time in your life?

What can I tell you? It was terrifying. I can’t describe it in words. Just terrible.

So you worked at the cremation pits at first. That’s right. And later on? Later on they assigned me to work at the crematoria themselves. First, I was

taken to Crematorium III [IV].∞≠

How long did you stay there? Three days. I had to leave after I had a run-in with the Blockälteste. That

brought me to Crematorium II [III], where I stayed until the end. Can you describe the building? Yes. It was a very long building. In the basement were the undressing hall

and, behind it, the gas chamber, which looked like a shower room in every respect. To get to the undressing hall, you had to go down fifteen steps.

Can you describe the chamber? Yes. It was very long. I think it was more than fifty meters long and six

meters wide. How many people could the chamber hold? Lots. Hundreds of people. After they undressed, they were taken straight to

the gas chamber. Were the Sonderkommando men in the undressing hall all the time?

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Yes. One group of Sonderkommando prisoners waited for the victims in the undressing hall. Their job was to calm the people down when they showed signs of agitation, which they did now and then. The whole process was supposed to take place quietly, without excitement and riots. The Germans couldn’t tolerate that.

How many Sonderkommando prisoners were in the undressing hall? About fifteen. Did you warn the Jews that they were in a trap and that in a few moments

they’d be gassed to death in the room next door? Are you out of your mind?! To tell people such a thing? How could I tell

people that they were about to be murdered? It was impossible to tell anyone this terrible truth. You have to realize that the system was too sophisticated for us to interfere in any way. The people were doomed to die and we couldn’t do a thing about it. The Germans lied in the cruelest ways. We had no choice but to do as we were told. What else could we do? What could we have changed even if we had warned the people? No one had a chance of survival, neither heads of families nor their family members. No one survived. Escape was impossible. I repeat—impossible.

Was there no point in the process leading up to the murder that you could warn the victims? Couldn’t you have told them that they were walking to their death?

Absolutely not. We were never left alone, even for a moment. The Germans circulated there all the time. They were the ones who’d ordered us to mislead the victims. Anyone who’d dared to tell the Jews the truth would have been murdered straight away. That is exactly what the Germans were afraid of: that chaos would erupt, a riot would break out, and the quiet process would be disrupted.

Just the same, did the Sonderkommando prisoners ever speak briefly with the victims?

Yes. In the short time they had left, people asked various questions, such as, ‘‘Where will we be sent after the disinfection? What plans do the Germans have for us?’’—simple questions from people who have no idea what’s going to happen to them a few minutes later.

Were they always the same questions? Always: ‘‘Where will they take us afterwards?’’ ‘‘What’s next?’’ Questions

that anyone would ask. We answered that they’d be disinfected and then they’d get their clothes and possessions back and be put to work. We gave answers like those and others. I think we had no choice but to answer that way, because the idea was to dispel their fear of the unknown.

Do you think that the victims believed the Sonderkommando prisoners?

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I think most of them believed us. At least, that was my impression. Do you remember a case where somebody doubted the answers or noticed

something amiss? No. Few of them imagined that they were about to die in such a cruel and

imminent way. The young people were wary, but generally speaking, the peo- ple believed what they were told—at least outwardly.

Can you remember any difference between the behavior of religious Jews and that of non-religious Jews when they were ordered to undress?

In my opinion, there was no difference. How long did the people stay in the undressing hall? About twenty minutes, sometimes half an hour. Did you have to goad them to undress faster? No, usually it wasn’t necessary. After the orders were given, we had to make

sure that the atmosphere in the room was tranquil. We had to make the victims feel confident and make sure not to frighten them. That was the policy; it was meant to ensure that they’d walk into the gas chamber, which was camou- flaged by means of fake showerheads, quietly and calmly. In the same context, I have to say that whenever the undressing didn’t take place quickly enough, the Germans prodded them to move faster by saying, ‘‘Los, los! Schnell, schnell!’’ [‘‘Move it, move it! Fast, fast!’’].∞∞

First the women and children undressed and went on to the gas chamber. Then it was the men’s turn. The door of the gas chamber was opened again and the men were pushed in.

What can you tell me about the gas chamber? I saw the gas chamber quite often. I entered it personally—after the gassing

was over, of course. It was an especially repugnant job. What did the gas chamber look like? Like a shower room. The showerheads looked real, the whole scene was

very realistic. Everyone who went in was convinced that they were about to take a shower and that the whole thing was for disinfection.

How many people could be pushed into the gas chamber? At Crematorium I [II]—as many as two thousand. What color were the walls of the gas chamber? Somewhere between gray and white. What was the floor of the gas chamber made of? The whole floor was concrete. In the corners there were channels for the

water to drain away, or so it seemed, so that the deception would be perfect. It must have been terribly cold there in the winter . . . In the winter, they put big iron stoves in the gas chamber so that the people

wouldn’t freeze when they went in.

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Did I understand you correctly? Did you say that the women and children went in first and waited there?

After the women and children undressed, they entered the gas chamber and waited behind a locked door. Then the men were brought in. Therefore, they were all together as they waited for the ‘‘shower’’ or the ‘‘disinfection.’’

Was there lighting in the gas chamber? Yes, the chamber had lighting. In the cold seasons, as I said, it even had heat.

That way, the women and children could wait there until the men came. What happened after the men joined the women and the children in the gas

chamber? We noticed some disquiet. Why? The reason, I think, was that the people sensed that something was wrong.

Maybe they’d asked the Germans and noticed that no water was coming out of the showerheads. Once I heard someone complain in this manner to the Ger- man who stood there. The German answered with fake innocence, ‘‘Really? No water? I’ll take it up with Fritz. Please wait!’’ A few minutes later, additional Germans came, locked the door, and it was all over.

Was the process always carried out in the same order? The women and children always came first, followed by the men. Some-

times long lines formed, since the transports brought thousands of Jews and clogged up all the crematoria.

What happened after all the people were crammed into the gas chamber? The SS men with their canisters of gas came. They opened the windows in

the ceiling of the room and poured in the gas, which looked like blue-green pebbles. This was always done, without exception, by the Germans and not by the Sonderkommando prisoners.

I remember that Sonderkommando men were called over on one occasion to open up the windows, which were covered with heavy concrete lids. Tubes led down from the openings into the gas chamber, and I took the opportunity to get a close look at the canisters of gas. The Germans who threw the gas in wore gas masks and took them off only after the lid had been closed.

After the gassing process began, did you hear voices or sounds from the gas chamber?

Of course. We heard loud screaming. Everyone screamed in the gas cham- ber, since they were totally desperate. Now they realized that death was ap- proaching, so they shouted for help. I can hear the screaming to this day. It will hound me for the rest of my life. It will never go away.

What did you feel as you heard the people screaming as they suffocated? I’ve got to tell you something that’s terrible but true: we’d become robots by

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then. We couldn’t expose ourselves to the intensity of the emotions that we experienced in the course of the work. Really, a human being cannot endure the emotions that were part and parcel of our work. Once we’d repressed the emotions and felt like ‘‘normal people,’’ we could treat everything that hap- pened as ‘‘work’’ that we had to do in accordance with the Germans’ orders. That’s how it was. We didn’t think about the horrifying aspect of our work and didn’t allow any emotions to intrude. We didn’t have any emotions what- soever. We stifled them before they could emerge.

What did you men do in the undressing hall while the people were suffocat- ing in the chamber next door?

We had to do lots of things. We gathered up the clothing that the people had left behind and we packed up the bundles that they’d brought from home. We had to put everything in one place so that it could be taken away.

But hadn’t the people been forced to leave all their belongings on the Ausch- witz railroad platform?

That’s right. Yes, those things were taken away by the ‘‘Kanada’’ Kom- mando. But people took a few things with them on their way to the gas chamber. The ‘‘Kanada’’ Kommando men gathered up the belongings and sorted them—shoes, eyeglasses, suitcase, and so on. They sent it all to a place in Birkenau that was also called ‘‘Kanada.’’ There the clothing was disinfected and everything else was sorted again so that anything useful would be sent to Germany.

Did the people also bring food with them? Yes, of course. This was important for us. They brought many kinds of food

that we could use. I still remember finding goose fat, among other things, in a transport of Hungarian Jews. Each transport brought foodstuffs that we could use. It wasn’t just food: I remember Hungarian Jews bringing a Torah scroll into the undressing hall.

What happened while the people were in the gas chamber? The Germans waited fifteen minutes and then looked in to make sure that

everyone had died. The moment they were sure that this had happened, they gave the order to start up the ventilation system in the gas chamber.

Where were you while the people were suffocating in the gas chamber? I was usually in the undressing hall. Did you also remove corpses from the gas chamber? No. That was done by a group that did that job and nothing else. What happened to the bodies after they were removed from the gas cham-

ber? An elevator took them up to the ground floor, over the gas chambers. Do you remember the elevator?

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It was a very simple elevator: a slab of sorts, open on all sides, a metal surface on which they loaded the corpses. It was an electric elevator. The bodies were placed on the loading surface and then the elevator went up.

How many bodies were loaded each time? Fifteen to twenty. As soon as the loading began, I went up to the ground

floor. That was my regular workplace. Could you get to the ground floor from inside the building? No, I used the stairs on the outside. How long did you work in each shift? Twelve hours—from six a.m. to six p.m. or six p.m. to six a.m. What did you have to do? Before they threw the bodies into the furnaces, I had to examine the mouths

of the people who’d been murdered and rip out their gold teeth. The Germans made one of the prisoners do this work so they wouldn’t lose the gold.

Were you equipped with appropriate tools for the job? Yes. I had two different pairs of pliers to pull out the teeth, not ordinary

pliers but real dentist’s pliers. The kind that are used in dental clinics? Yes. I must say that it was a terrible, ghastly job. The bodies gave off an

unbearable stench. Didn’t they have a sarcastic name for your job? They called me and the others who did similar jobs Dentisten [dental techni-

cians]. Who called you that? The Blockälteste, I think. It was a derisive name, wasn’t it? Yes, of course. The Germans also called me the ‘‘Greek dentist.’’ Where did you do your work? On the ground floor, about three meters from the furnaces. What happened after you finished the job? A signal to throw the corpses into the furnace was given. I had to signal the

people to throw the corpses in. The key word was ‘‘Einschieben!’’ [‘‘Push in!’’] Every action had its own name. The people in charge of stuffing corpses into the furnaces did their work skillfully. They picked up the corpses, placed them on a little stretcher, and pushed them through the furnace door that way.

Did you also give the ‘‘Einschieben’’ order? Yes. Sometimes I gave the order; sometimes the Germans gave it. It was

given automatically every half-hour. Why every half-hour? Because that’s how long it took to cremate the corpses. During that time,

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more corpses were taken to the ground floor and I had to continue pulling their teeth.

So you had only half an hour to pull out the gold teeth. No, less. Only ten minutes. How many corpses are you talking about? Let’s see. I have to count . . . Sixty to seventy-five corpses in ten minutes. How could you pull out teeth from so many bodies so quickly? It’s definitely possible. You pry the body’s mouth open, look in, and if there

aren’t any gold teeth you go onto the next body, and so on. Sometimes it went very fast.

Please tell me exactly how you did your work. The bodies were prostrate on the floor. First I had to open their mouths. I

had to use force to accomplish that. The mouths were tightly closed, so I had to force them open with the pliers. Whenever I noticed a gold tooth, I pulled it out with the second pair of pliers. I used dentist’s pliers to do this. The moment I noticed a gold tooth, I ripped it out with the pliers. We also pulled out false teeth.

The first time you had to do this, you must have thought that you wouldn’t be able to bear it.

Bear it or not, I had to do the work. It was repulsive but I did it. You’ve got to realize that there was no way to evade it. When I was at Birkenau, some- times there was a break between one transport and the next. During that time, we had to clean the furnaces. Once the Germans found two gold teeth in the ashes while the cleaning was going on. Do you know what they did to me? They flogged me ten times on the ass, using a strap that had pieces of metal embedded in it. They accused me of sabotage and said that I’d better not to do it again.

After you pulled the gold teeth, how long was it until the other Sonderkom- mando prisoners took the bodies to the furnaces?

Whenever I finished one row of bodies, the German gave the ‘‘Einschieben’’ order. That was the signal to put the bodies into the furnaces.

Who trained you for your work? I acquired my experience on the job. Believe me, I was nervous and very

tense at first. I thought I wouldn’t be able to do the job right and that the Germans wouldn’t forgive me if I made a mistake. In other words, I thought they’d kill me if I overlooked as much as a single gold tooth. But eventually I got so good at it that I could tell which body in which row had gold teeth, a bridge, or what have you. Over time, I became an expert.

What did you do after you’d accumulated a certain quantity of gold teeth? I collected them in little pouches in the sides of my boots. Then we called

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Schwartz, whom we’d nicknamed the ‘‘Minister of Finance’’ because it was his job to melt down the gold teeth, pour them into ingots that were two centime- ters wide and five to six centimeters long, and hand them to the Germans.

Who was Schwartz? A German? No, he was one of the Sonderkommando prisoners. He had a little labora-

tory. He cleaned the gold and separated it from what remained of the organic matter until only pure gold was left. Afterwards, he poured the ingots and gave them to the Germans. When I found an especially large gold tooth, I kept it for myself. After all, I had to live, too, didn’t I?

What did you do with the gold? I usually gave it to an SS man who visited me each night. He asked me what I

wanted and brought it to me the next day. I usually asked for spirits or special kinds of food. He took the gold, returned the next morning with a bag con- taining the things that I’d ordered, and said, ‘‘If you please, sir.’’

He called you ‘‘sir’’? Yes, or he called me ‘‘the Greek.’’ Didn’t he call you by your serial number? Absolutely not. Did this German come every day? Every day. Always the same German? Yes, always the same German. What standard of measurement did you use in these deals? It depended on the size of the pieces of gold that I found. Sometimes they

were little and sometimes they were larger. Whatever, he always did as I asked. For the most part, he brought chicken, spirits, cookies, and other delicacies.

I see that the Sonderkommando and the Germans conducted a lively com- merce of sorts. When did it begin?

It went on from the very start. Once one of the SS men visited me and asked if I had something for him. I gave him some gold. What else could I do?

Where you afraid of him? No. What more could he do to me? I was doomed to die in any case, if not

today, then tomorrow. That’s how it was there. After he took the gold, the German asked, ‘‘Do you want something good to eat? Or maybe some alcohol to drink?’’

Do you know how much gold we collected there in Auschwitz? According to my calculations, we produced tons of gold for the Germans, all from the slaughtered Jews.

Did the Sonderkommando prisoners and the Germans have an agreement about what could and could not be done?

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Yes. I’ll give you an example: when the Germans wanted something, they told us to steal it. We had to do it carefully. ‘‘Take care not to get caught! If they catch you, you’ll get shot.’’ We called it ‘‘organizing.’’ When the Germans wanted me to steal something from the victims’ belongings for them, they’d say, ‘‘Organize it for me.’’

How could you work with those bodies day after day? How did you endure it?

By the second day I was already working like an automaton, emotionlessly. Sometimes I had to help load bodies into the furnace and open the doors of the furnaces at the crematorium.

How was this done? I used my cap to open the doors of the furnaces. They were sizzling hot. Did you take part in loading bodies in your spare time only, or regularly? Only when I had spare time. That’s when they asked me to open the furnace

doors. When I wasn’t able to help out, one of the stretcher carriers opened the door. But sometimes the bodies were so heavy that they couldn’t open the furnace doors without my help. I just opened the doors; all the rest—loading the bodies into the furnace—was done by the others.

How many bodies were placed in the furnace? Three to five. It depended on the condition of the bodies. When they weren’t

fat, we managed to put four or five bodies into a furnace. The bodies were arranged in a pattern of three men and two women, since the women were fatter. Every half-hour, new bodies were placed in the five furnaces. Each furnace had three doors and the bodies were loaded through them. A special group of workers did the loading.

All the workers in that group were very strong. They used a stretcher that looked like the kind used to carry sick people. It was made of metal. There were two handles in the front of the stretcher, on both sides. The moment the loading order was given, the bodies were placed on the stretcher. The workers grabbed the stretcher by its handles and opened the door of the furnace, where the temperature was high. Two men held the stretcher and lifted it to the furnace door. A third man pushed the bodies into the furnace from behind, using a metal pole. And then they closed the door.

Was it a time-consuming process? No. Sadly, it didn’t take long. We were really professional. It was all over

within five minutes. Every half-hour we had to load new bodies into the furnace. The whole thing happened automatically. Each cremation facility had several furnaces, so between fifty and seventy-five bodies could be cremated every half-hour. This went on twenty-four hours a day.

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You said that the men who loaded the bodies were very strong. How could somebody stay strong under the conditions of Auschwitz?

Unlike the other Auschwitz prisoners, we were not undernourished. We were the Sonderkommando; we had plenty of food. We searched among the things that the people had brought to Auschwitz and found all sorts of food. Sometimes we found real delicacies: salami, bacon, even caviar. All we had to do was reach out and gorge ourselves.

In other words, you had no nutrition problems? As long as the transports kept coming, the Sonderkommando prisoners had

no nutrition problems. How many hours did you work each day? Twelve hours, nonstop. After the shift was over, we had to shower because

we were absolutely filthy. We were given a piece of soap and were also allowed to change our clothes. In the summer, we went to the yard of the building and sat on the lawn. In the winter, we went to the rooms in the loft.

After the shift was over, were you able to do whatever you pleased? Yes, we could do whatever we pleased, as long as we didn’t leave the area of

the crematorium building, of course. What did you do after six p.m.? We talked and talked. I remember a man named Strassvogel. As we were

sitting in the yard during a break, he asked me to go to Paris after the liberation —should I be lucky enough—and look for his wife. After the liberation, I was on my way to the United States and had to make a stopover in Paris. There weren’t enough ships at the time and it wasn’t easy to get there. Be that as it may, I managed to track down his daughter. In her apartment I saw a photo portrait of her father. She asked me if we’d been friends in Auschwitz. ‘‘Yes,’’ I answered. She showed me around Paris and asked me to stay. But since I was already married, I couldn’t hang around there for long.

Where were your living quarters? Upstairs, on the second floor. We had real beds there. Was the room heated in the winter? It wasn’t necessary. The heat from the furnaces downstairs kept the whole

building warm. Did you sleep on bunks, like the other prisoners? No, we had real beds. Did you have roll calls there? Sure we did. Before we went out to work, we had to report every morning

for roll call. The order they gave was ‘‘Antreten!’’ [‘‘come over here!’’]. Every day you saw Jews going into the gas chamber and not coming out

again. How did you put up with the work?

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What would you do if you were in my shoes? Look, I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t behave differently. During that time we had no emotions. We were totally drained. We blocked up our hearts; we were dehumanized. We worked like machines. We were human beings devoid of human emotion. We were really animals, not people. It’s frightening but that’s how it was—a tragedy.

Being in contact with so many dead people could drive the most stable individual out of his mind. How did you maintain your sanity?

Well, as I already told you, none of us went insane in Auschwitz since we’d stopped being people. We’d become robots.

Did you ever consider suicide? No, I knew it wouldn’t help a soul. Once I spoke with an SS man who

worked with us. He was older than the others. He said, ‘‘Don’t worry. You’ll get out of here and go on living for a long time.’’ I asked him, ‘‘Are there many Jews remaining whom we’ll have to cremate?’’ He laughed and said, ‘‘Mark my words. You have a long life ahead of you. There are rumors that the Russians are approaching the gates of Auschwitz.’’

Did you interact with non-Jews in the camp? We interacted with some non-Jewish Poles who worked in the camp. Some-

times they helped us. We thought and hoped that they’d help us with the planned uprising.

Whose idea was the uprising? If I’m not mistaken, it was the idea of a Russian prisoner of war who worked

in the Sonderkommando of Crematorium I [II]. The idea was conceived in early 1944. The Russians had military experience that might be useful in an uprising.

How did you prepare for the uprising? As we organized the uprising, specific tasks were given to anyone who was

going to take part in it. We each knew what we had to do. Assignments were given not only to the Sonderkommando prisoners but also to other prisoners in Birkenau, such as members of the ‘‘Kanada’’ Kommando. The people who worked in the steam facilities were supposed to start a fire and touch off an explosion the moment the Germans came near. The Sonderkommando men were to kill as many SS men as possible. Each prisoner in every squad knew exactly what he was supposed to do and prepared for it. I remember the date that was originally chosen for the uprising—August 15, 1944.∞≤

A few days before that, some non-Jewish rebels from the main camp, Ausch- witz, came to us and said, ‘‘You’d better hold off. The Russians are at the gate.’’ So we, the prisoners of Birkenau, decided to postpone the uprising. At that time, there were fifty thousand prisoners in the women’s camp in addition to fifty thousand prisoners in the men’s camp.∞≥ When we were told about the

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Russians advance, the organizers of the uprising, none other than the Son- derkommando prisoners, decided to wait. In other words, the postponement was mainly due to the influence of the non-Jewish leaders of the uprising.∞∂

Kaminski, one of the leaders of the uprising, announced that there was no choice but to postpone the beginning of the action. Some time later, the Ger- mans began to suspect Kaminski of taking part in a resistance organization. He was taken to the ‘‘Kanada’’ area and tortured. He didn’t reveal a thing and didn’t denounce any of the comrades.∞∑

So the Germans knew that resistance activity was taking place. Apparently so. Maybe they’d obtained information of some kind. Did you also take part in the planned uprising? Definitely. Each of us had something to do. Did you have weapons? No, except for some hand grenades that had been brought from the camp.

My job was to set fire to the crematorium building where I worked, after the people in Crematorium I [II] gave the signal. Since we had nothing to start the fire with, it was decided that I’d set the mattresses on fire once I received the signal. So that was my job according to the plan.

Did the uprising take place as planned? Unfortunately, it did not, first of all because the others, the non-Jewish

resistance people in Auschwitz, did not cooperate with us. They stuck to the excuse that ‘‘Look, the Russians are coming; how stupid it would be to get murdered by the Germans just now, with liberation at hand.’’ They simply didn’t want to cooperate with us. In the end, we lost our patience because we didn’t see deliverance coming from their direction. Instead, we decided to prepare for the next opportune moment without expecting support from the people in Auschwitz.

On October 7, 1944, they informed us that the Germans intended to re- move the Sonderkommando men from Crematorium III [IV]. We knew what that meant: they were going to murder them. We figured that it was time for action. We got in touch with the various underground groups.∞∏

A little before 10:30, the Russian Sonderkommando prisoners gave all the resistance groups the word: we were to start the uprising that very day. Shortly before two, the Germans were supposed to liquidate a transport of Sonder- kommando prisoners from Crematorium III [IV]. So they turned up before- hand and ordered the men to report for head count. It was clear what the results of the head count would be.

When the Greeks in the Sonderkommando heard the order to report for head count, they gave the code to start the uprising. With that signal, the Sonderkommando uprising broke out. A few of our men attacked the Ger-

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mans, grabbed their weapons, and began to escape. Another group cut the barbed wire fence that surrounded the crematorium compound. Others set fire to the mattresses on the second floor, where the men had their living quarters. A few men raced to the nearby crematorium building. The Germans called for reinforcements and began to fire automatic weapons in every direction.

When the siren∞π went off in the camp, reinforcements poured in from all around. The whole crematorium went up in flames. I should mention one of the rebels at Crematorium III [IV]: Marcel Nadjari, a good man. In the mean- time, the men at Crematorium I [II] saw the flames bursting from Cremato- rium III [IV] and began to run away. They realized that the uprising was at its peak. By that time, they’d managed to throw their cruel Kapo into the fire.∞∫

Unfortunately, they were all captured in the forest nearby∞Ω and were executed right there. We—the men of the Crematorium II [III]—didn’t do a thing dur- ing the uprising≤≠ because we hadn’t received any instructions. We were wait- ing for someone to give us instructions, but we couldn’t establish contact with the other rebels due to the conditions that day.

After the uprising died down, the Germans assembled all the Sonderkom- mando prisoners who were still alive. They told us that since we hadn’t taken part in the uprising we wouldn’t be punished. That’s how the men of Cremato- rium II [III], myself included, survived. In the meantime, the Germans brought the bodies of our comrades from Crematorium I [II] who’d been shot for having dared to escape. They ordered us to cremate their bodies.

How long after the uprising did you continue to work in the Sonderkom- mando?

I worked in the Sonderkommando until January 1945. But in late October they’d received orders to stop the exterminations in the gas chambers.≤∞

How did you leave Auschwitz? The Germans wanted to raze Birkenau to the ground before they left. They

wanted to wipe out all traces of the crimes that had been committed there. To do this, they brought in a demolition expert and began to lay dynamite at the sites of the murders, the crematoria and the gas chambers. All the prisoners were ordered to dig pits in the crematorium compounds in order to prepare places for the dynamite. We also had to pile up the bricks from the smoke- stacks and the walls that had fallen in after the explosions. At that time, we returned to Block 13.

On January 16, 1945, there was a rumor that the Russians were at the gates of Auschwitz. I remember that we were ordered to assemble at an isolated barracks. We realized immediately that the Germans wanted an opportunity to wipe us out before they locked the gates of the camp and left the place behind. We were determined to act quickly to save our lives. The idea was to

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mingle among the other prisoners who were leaving Birkenau. All the pris- oners were ordered to move to Auschwitz. Each one took up as much food as he could. That’s how we marched as the Germans commanded.

Where did the Germans take the prisoners after they left Auschwitz? To Mauthausen. Did you return to your country of birth after the liberation? Yes, I returned to Salonika and spent some time there. Were you troubled by memories of Auschwitz after the liberation? Yes, it took me a long time to begin to recover. For six months after I’d left

Auschwitz, I couldn’t do a thing. I couldn’t close my eyes at night; I had nightmares all the time. I woke up at night screaming in agony at the sound of Jews crying out as they were being suffocated in the gas chambers. The screaming, the groaning, the prayers of those people. In my dreams, I heard the sound of the elevator that brought the corpses up to the furnaces.

I’d like to tell you something weird: in the initial period after my liberation, whenever people looked at me or whenever I talked to someone, I almost automatically looked at the speaker and examined his mouth. I wanted to see if he had gold teeth. Can you believe that? I’d become an automaton. When someone had false teeth, I could tell from far away.

How long did this last? At least a year. Auschwitz was the tragedy of my life! It wasn’t easy to

liberate myself from the experiences that I’d had there. At first, I couldn’t start life over. It was a lengthy process to return to life and ‘‘leave’’ Auschwitz behind me.

Did you tell anybody in your family about the work that you’d done in Auschwitz?

Only my wife and my mother-in-law. I couldn’t tell the rest of my family. Leon, are you still troubled by memories of Birkenau? Definitely. The memories keep coming back and I can’t do a thing about it.

It’s impossible to fight them. They return again and again and I can’t stop them. The memories and the long months that I’d spent there destroyed my health. My physical condition today is really bad. It pains me to say that no one shows any interest in my condition and no one is doing anything so that I can get the rights I’m entitled to as a Holocaust survivor.

When you saw how the Germans were murdering Jews in Birkenau contin- ually, did you believe that any Jews would survive the exterminations?

I hoped that some Jews would survive somewhere in the world. I was sure that the war would end at some point. I had a chance to converse a little with a man who’d been on one of the transports. I asked him, ‘‘Do you believe the Germans will ever have to atone for their crimes?’’ He answered, ‘‘What a

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‘‘We Were Dehumanized, We Were Robots’’ 309

naïve question. I’ll tell you something and don’t you forget it!: The situation is like a grocery store where the owner gives the customers credit. He writes down their debts in a ledger. One day, some ink may spill on his records and no one will be able to figure them out anymore. The debts will be wiped out forever. That’s how it’ll be with the Germans. They’ll do everything to cover up their crimes. In a few more years, hardly anything will be known about Auschwitz. Slowly Auschwitz will disappear from the public consciousness. The world won’t even be particularly interested in the fate of the Jews. The disaster will fade away. The Germans’ crimes will be forgotten. The whole thing will disappear.’’

That’s what a smart Jew said a few minutes before he was murdered by Zyklon B gas in Crematorium II [III].

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