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The Holocaust and the Neo-Nazi Mythomania
© 1978, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation
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certainly did not enter the imagination of even the
mad among the Jews.
The four following accounts were uncovered in the
course of the excavations effected on the territory of Birkenau where, before
dying, their authors, all members of the Sonderkommandos, buried them at
different periods. All of these missives from beyond the tomb present a very
great documentary interest, but as sources of information concerning our
subject – the gas chambers – their importance, as we shall see, is
uneven.
The oldest find was made in February 1945, shortly after the
liberation of the camps of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. It is a letter in
French dated November 6, 1944, that a certain Chaim Herman wrote for his wife
and his daughter (22). This letter was
found buried in a bottle near a crematorium at Birkenau. The author, of Polish
origin, indicated that he was deported from Drancy on March 2, 1943; and his
name does in fact appear on the deportation list n° 49 of March 2, 1943.
This husband and father was worried about the dangers which menaced his family
who remained in France and wrote that he himself could only count on a miracle
to survive. Nevertheless, he obviously avoided unduly traumatizing his wife and
his daughter by the description of his misfortunes and limited himself only to
saying that upon the arrival of his convoy a hundred persons were selected to
remain in the camp and the rest went sent "to the gases and then to the ovens"
(" . ..der Rest kam ins Gas und dann in die Ofen"). The author was attached to
the Sonderkommando as a bearer of corpses.
A little later, March 5,
1945, an aluminum bottle was dug up on the grounds of Crematorium II at
Birkenau. It contained a letter dated September 6, 1944, signed by a certain
Salmen Gradowski and a notebook the pages of which were covered with the same
writing as the letter and the text of which stops in the middle of a sentence
(22). Gradowski was a Jew of Polish origin
who was deported to Birkenau in the beginning of January 1943 with six members
of his family, all of whom were dead after the selection upon arrival. He
described with precision and details the extreme difficulty of the conditions
of the long journey as well as the selection, the meaning of which completely
escaped those concerned. He himself was part of the Sonderkommando, and he
mentioned the four modern crematoriums.
Much richer in information
concerning the gas chambers at Birkenau is the text dug up in the summer of
1952 on the grounds of Crematory II. It is a notebook twenty one pages of which
are covered with text. The first four are devoted to events of the camp of
Belzec, whereas the seventeen others relate to Auschwitz. The whole was written
in 1943-44 at Birkenau. The last date figuring in the text is November 26,
1944. The author of this highly readable account is unknown, but it is evident
that he had been at Auschwitz for a long time and that he was part of a
Sonderkommando (22). The author described
not without
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The Holocaust and the Neo-Nazi Mythomania
© 1978, The
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