Shlomo Venezia

Shlomo Venezia Dies at 88; Wrote of Auschwitz Horror By Dennis Hevesi Oct. 6, 2012

Shlomo Venezia was one of the first Jews to climb out of the freight car when it came to the end of the line at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland on April 11, 1944, his mother crammed behind him. Two blows from a German guard’s baton struck him in the back of the neck.

“When I turned around to try to find my mother, she wasn’t there anymore,” he recalled. “I never saw her again, she wasn’t there, and neither were my two little sisters, Marica and Marta.”

Mr. Venezia, an Italian Jew who died at 88 on Oct. 1 in Rome, would enter what Primo Levi, the writer and fellow Auschwitz survivor, called “the gray zone,” where terrorized victims survived on the fringe of collaboration. A sturdy 20-year-old, he was ordered into the Sonderkommando, a unit of prisoners forced to direct thousands of other victims of the Nazis into the gas chambers and to bear their bodies into the crematories.

For nearly 50 years he remained haunted and virtually silent about his role in the horror. “Not because I didn’t want to talk,” he said, “but because people didn’t want to listen, didn’t want to believe it.”

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That changed in the early 1990s, when right-wing extremism reared again in Italy and, Mr. Venezia said, “swastikas began to appear on walls.” He began to speak at conferences, to reporters, to schoolchildren — and most notably to Beatrice Prasquier, a journalist with whom, in 2007, he published “Inside the Gas Chambers: Eight Months in the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz.” The book offers a harrowingly matter-of-fact account in which he describes loading corpses into the ovens 12 hours a day, seven days a week.

ImageShlomo Venezia in 2007. Shlomo Venezia in 2007.Credit...Victor Sokolowicz/Bloomberg, via Getty Images Originally published in French as an oral history in the form of an interview with Ms. Prasquier, “Inside the Gas Chambers” has since been translated into nearly two dozen languages.

It offers page after page of horrific detail:

¶ “Once they had taken off their clothes, the women went into the gas chamber and waited, thinking that they were in a shower. They couldn’t know where they really were.”

¶ “Finally, the German bringing the gas would arrive; it took two prisoners from the Sonderkommando to help him lift up the external trapdoor, above the gas chamber; then he introduced Zyklon B through the opening. The lid was made of very heavy cement. The German would never have bothered to lift it up himself, as it needed two of us. Sometimes, it was me, sometimes others.”

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¶ “Once the gas had been thrown in, it lasted about 10 to 12 minutes, then finally you couldn’t hear anything, not a living soul.”

¶ “When the job of cutting the hair and pulling out the gold teeth had been completed, two people came to take the bodies and to load them onto the hoist that sent them up to the ground floor of the building, and the crematorium ovens.”

About 500,000 people, 90 percent of them Jews, were killed during Mr. Venezia’s nine months at Auschwitz, which ended on Jan. 18, 1945, when thousands of inmates were forced into a “death march” toward Germany. In all, about 2,900 prisoners served as sonderkommandos at the camp. There were about 950 during his internment, only 80 or 90 of whom were not themselves killed.

“We had turned into robots, obeying orders while trying not to think, so we could survive a few hours longer,” he said.

Image Mr. Venezia's book offers a harrowingly matter-of-fact account of his experience at Auschwitz. Mr. Venezia's book offers a harrowingly matter-of-fact account of his experience at Auschwitz.Credit...Courtesy of Polity Sonderkommando units operated at the Nazis’ five extermination camps, said Peter Black, the senior historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

“Because the number of survivors of these Sonderkommandos is so small, firsthand accounts like Mr. Venezia’s fill a gap in our knowledge,” Mr. Black said. “Undoubtedly, the reprieve they got was a mixed blessing in that, while they were permitted to live as long as they could work, their job was to work barehanded and separate intertwined bodies, some of whom may have been relatives or spouses.”

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“Some were haunted terribly about their survival,” he added, “and others took comfort in the fact that they did survive and were able to contribute to preserving the memory for future generations and encourage vigilance so that this never happens again.”

Shlomo Venezia was born on Dec. 29, 1923, in a poor Italian-Jewish community in Thessaloniki, Greece. Early in the war, occupying Italian authorities provided protection to his family. But on March 24, 1944, after the Germans took control, the Venezias were deported to Athens and then Auschwitz.

After the war, Mr. Venezia found work at a hotel on the Adriatic Coast. He and his wife, Marika, later owned a souvenir shop in Rome. He died at his home there. The cause was respiratory failure, said Umberto Gentiloni Silveri, who edited the memoir. Besides his wife, Mr. Venezia is survived by three sons, Mario, Alessandro and Alberto.

The last question that Mr. Venezia answered in his book was: “What was destroyed in you by that extreme experience?”

His response: “Life. Since then I’ve never had a normal life. Everything takes me back to the camp. Whatever I do, whatever I see, my mind keeps harking back to the same place. It’s as if the ‘work’ I was forced to do there had never really left my head. Nobody ever really gets out of the crematorium.”

Elisabetta Povoledo con tributed reporting from Rome.

• Reference: Biographical Summaries of Notable People - SmartCopy: Mar 30 2020, 14:57:41 UTC