During the Holocaust, Jewish prisoners worked the gas chambers. Are there any first hand accounts of this and how did these prisoner's become well adjusted after the war?

by xXxwiskersxXx
Kugelfang52

There are two accounts that I have read by Sonderkommando. Shlomo Venezia's Inside the Gas Chambers: Eight Months in the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz and Filip Muller's Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers. Both provide survivor testimony of the experiences of the Sonderkommando.

A Jewish doctor, Miklos Nyiszli, who was forced into work in the Auschwitz-Birkenau (The death camp portion of Auschwitz) wrote Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account. In it, he discusses working with or around the Sonderkommando. Although his job was different from theirs, his proximity to them makes it useful for understanding their task. Further, he offers a different viewpoint from the testimony of the sonderkommando themselves.

I have not read The Holocaust Odyssey of Daniel Bennahmias, Sonderkommando. It is the survivor's testimony as "coaxed" out by a Holocaust memoir specialist.

Gideon Grief interviewed Sonderkommando survivors and compiled them in We Wept Without Grief: Testimonies of the Jewish Sonderkommand from Auschwitz.

Primo Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz but not a sonderkommando, analyzed the moral ambiguities of Auschwitz in general and the sonderkommando in particular in his works Survival in Auschwitz and The Drowned and the Saved.