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Perhaps the most famous texts by those who did not survive the Holocaust are those written by the Sonderkommando, or “special squad,” Jewish prisoners tasked with operating the gas chambers and crematoria where hundreds of thousands of their fellows Jews were murdered. Their texts are in many ways the ultimate refutation of Levi’s claim “that no one has ever come back to tell us about his death,” since the Sonderkommando both witnessed the deaths of tens of thousands of other Jews and because they themselves knew their own fate, many of them dying in the October 1944 Sonderkommando uprising. As such, these texts are challenging on the level of ethics (they themselves write of how they were accused by the Jews they gassed of prolonging their own lives at the expense of others) and aesthetics (fragmentary texts describing some of the most harrowing events in human history). This chapter seeks to weave these two aspects together, showing how over the course of their writing, Sonderkommando authors such as Herman Strasfogel, Leib Langfus, and Zalman Loewenthal developed a zero generation consciousness, that is, a realization that it was more ethical for them to die than to continue living, when murdering others was the price of that continued life. Their texts thus take on the tone of last testaments, final letters, and memoir, explaining how they came to this realization, and what actions this realization demanded of them (namely, to die in the Sonderkommando uprising). Though they knew the October 1944 uprising was hopeless, it was the culmination of a realization that, though they would not be survivors, they could be both witnesses and active agents in their own lives. Writing and burying their manuscripts (and, in the case of “Alex,” taking surreptitious photos and smuggling them out of the camps) allowed them to bear witness to the Holocaust as they experienced it, how they came to the decision to reclaim their personal agency through their own deaths, and how that decision is reflected both in the words they wrote and the fragile materiality of the texts themselves, crumbling manuscripts buried in rusted jars in the human ash pits behind the crematoria.

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Autobiography in Auschwitz: Buried Manuscripts as “Tragic Self-Portraits of the Sonderkommando”

  • 章节

  • 发表日期：

    2025年

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  • Adam J. Goldwyn

摘要

Perhaps the most famous texts by those who did not survive the Holocaust are those written by the Sonderkommando, or “special squad,” Jewish prisoners tasked with operating the gas chambers and crematoria where hundreds of thousands of their fellows Jews were murdered. Their texts are in many ways the ultimate refutation of Levi’s claim “that no one has ever come back to tell us about his death,” since the Sonderkommando both witnessed the deaths of tens of thousands of other Jews and because they themselves knew their own fate, many of them dying in the October 1944 Sonderkommando uprising. As such, these texts are challenging on the level of ethics (they themselves write of how they were accused by the Jews they gassed of prolonging their own lives at the expense of others) and aesthetics (fragmentary texts describing some of the most harrowing events in human history). This chapter seeks to weave these two aspects together, showing how over the course of their writing, Sonderkommando authors such as Herman Strasfogel, Leib Langfus, and Zalman Loewenthal developed a zero generation consciousness, that is, a realization that it was more ethical for them to die than to continue living, when murdering others was the price of that continued life. Their texts thus take on the tone of last testaments, final letters, and memoir, explaining how they came to this realization, and what actions this realization demanded of them (namely, to die in the Sonderkommando uprising). Though they knew the October 1944 uprising was hopeless, it was the culmination of a realization that, though they would not be survivors, they could be both witnesses and active agents in their own lives. Writing and burying their manuscripts (and, in the case of “Alex,” taking surreptitious photos and smuggling them out of the camps) allowed them to bear witness to the Holocaust as they experienced it, how they came to the decision to reclaim their personal agency through their own deaths, and how that decision is reflected both in the words they wrote and the fragile materiality of the texts themselves, crumbling manuscripts buried in rusted jars in the human ash pits behind the crematoria.