How Documents Buried by Jewish Prisoners at Auschwitz Tell the Story of Genocide

Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams

The Scrolls of Auschwitz comprise a variety of documents written by members of the Sonderkommando, or Special Squad, a group of predominantly Jewish prisoners who were forced to work in the crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau. (Son of Saul, which has just been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, was inspired by the Scrolls.) These writings were buried in the grounds of the crematoria in 1944. Between 1945 and 1980, eight caches of documents by five known authors were discovered, mostly by chance; few who knew their whereabouts had survived. As our recently published book, Matters of Testimony: Interpreting the Scrolls of Auschwitz, shows, the documents buried at Auschwitz provide important new insights into the Sonderkommando and into Holocaust testimony in general.

The stories of the Sonderkommando from survivors of Auschwitz are mostly horrified and uncomprehending reactions to their abject status. They were often described as drunken brutes, who had betrayed their fellow Jews for the chance to live a few more months. More sympathetic writers still presented them as traumatized and devoid of emotion, and even survivors of the Special Squad often talked of only being able to endure their lot by giving up any inner life. The Scrolls of Auschwitz offer us the chance to hear the Sonderkommando’s own voices from what they themselves described as the heart of hell. Far from being the automata of legend, we can see them as feeling, thinking people.

The Holocaust is almost routinely now described as unrepresentable, with attempts to represent it still denigrated as betrayals of the victims’ experience. The Scrolls show us that some of these victims made every effort to communicate what they were witnessing as they were living through it.

The following examples of the documents give some idea of the range of writings the Sonderkommando produced.

Crematorium III

The grounds of Crematorium III, at the back of the Birkenau camp. Almost all of the Scrolls were discovered buried here. Where there are precise records of their location, they are all to the left of the ruins in the picture. The SS blew the crematoria buildings up before they evacuated the camp in January 1945.

List Oct 1944

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Penciled list in Polish. The list records the numbers of people killed in the crematoria in the month of October 1944. The list records: the date; how many people; whether they were men (“m.”), women (“kob.”) or children (“dzieci”); the place from which they came, and the crematorium in which they were killed. The Sonderkommando used a different numbering system from the one now used by the Auschwitz museum: “Kr. 1” is now called Crematorium II, and so on. Crematorium IV (Kr. 3 in the list’s system) is not mentioned as it was burned during the revolt of October 7, 1944. The shooting of 460 members of the Sonderkommando after the revolt is recorded on the right-hand side.

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