EYEWITNESS AUSCHWITZ: THREE YEARS IN THE GAS CHAMBERS (Sonderbehandlung: Drei Jahre in den Krematorien und Gaskammern von Auschwitz)

Memoir by Filip Müller, 1979

Filip Müller's testimony Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers (1979; in some editions Auschwitz Inferno: The Testimony of a Sonderkommando ) is one of the bleakest and sparest of all Holocaust memoirs. Müller worked in the Sonderkommando, the special units that were most closely involved with the extermination of the victims of the Holocaust. He was one of the few survivors of these units, as they were systematically murdered by the Nazis in an attempt to avoid the secret of the camps getting out.

Unlike many testimonies, this text begins in the camps and ends, literally, at the moment of liberation. On being told that he is free, he struggled from his hiding place, "stretched out on a woodland ground and fell asleep." This concentration on the "three years in the Gas chamber"—we find out little of Müller before or after this period—makes the book all the bleaker and focuses the reader's attention less on Müller and his story and more on the horrors of the camp.

One of the recurring themes in this memoir is the role of the kapos and the SS men and commanders. Even more than in the camps as a whole, the kapos in the Sonderkommando, because of their tasks and the proximity of the SS, were brutalized and brutal. Müller discusses those who were just and those who were unjust. One, for example, Fischl, manages to get the favor of a commanding SS man by "pretending to be brute." In fact, "he never once jeopardised our health or well-being, let alone our lives." The role of the kapos and the SS, their rivalries, and the prices of these rivalries, however, take up no small part of this book. Many famous Auschwitz stories are here too: for example, the beautiful woman who fascinates the SS guards seductively and then shoots SS man Schillinger. In addition to the day to day defiance through survival, there are some accounts of resistance in the book, described in the same reporting style with little extra elaboration.

Most harrowing are the accounts of those who are going to die. Müller gives a number of detailed and unstinting accounts of the whole murderous process, from disembarkation through to the chambers to, finally, the crematoriums. Müller often tells of how the SS tried (and usually succeeded) in tricking their victims. One consignment from Czechoslovakia began to sing, first the Czechoslovak national anthem and then the Hebrew song "Hatikvah": "And all this time the SS men never stopped their brutal beatings." Müller writes that "I proudly identified" with the Czechoslovak victims. This incident brings on a deep despair, and he tries to join them in the gas chamber. "I managed to mingle with the pushing and shoving crowd." A young woman, however, speaks to him: "We must die, but you still have a chance to save your life. You have to return to the camp and tell everyone about out last hours … perhaps you'll survive this terrible tragedy and then you must tell everybody what has happened to you." He leaves the chamber and is then beaten by an SS man, Kurschuss, who says, "We decide how long you stay alive and when you die, and not you."

Müller begins to accumulate information and to help with attempts to tell the world about Auschwitz. He steals a label from a Zyklon-B cylinder and two days "before his escape I handed the label to Alfred Wetzler to enable him to produce it as another piece of evidence of the systematic extermination of Jews." (The story of Wetzler's escape is told in I Cannot Forgive by Rudolf Vrba and Walter Rosenberg, who escaped with him.) Müller is also involved in the doomed revolt of the Sonderkommando : however, as the SS regained control, he managed to hide and survive. Later he is involved in death marches and frantic movement around the collapsing Reich.

—Robert Eaglestone