26. Existence in a Hell on Earth
If there is a hell, the Nazi extermination and concentration camps came as close to it as anything that has ever existed on Earth. In that infernal environment, the Sonderkommando dwelt in their own circle of misery. Compared to other prisoners, they were privileged. However, “privilege” was relative in such horrific settings. Their chief privilege was that they got to live, but it was a short-lived privilege. Every four months or so, the Sonderkommando were executed, and replaced by men from newly-arrived trains of victims marked for the gas chambers. The new Sonderkommando’s first task was to dispose of their predecessors’ corpses.
Next, they disposed of the bodies of those who had arrived on the trains with them, and been sent straight to their deaths in the gas chambers. They often included the corpses of their own families. Auschwitz was a complex of over forty Nazi concentration camps, chief among them the “main camp” or Auschwitz I, and Birkenau, also known as Auschwitz II. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners were exploited as slave labor, forced to toil in horrific conditions and often worked to death. Most arrivals, however, were sent straight to the gas chambers for extermination as soon as they disembarked from the trains.