Auschwitz Slave Recalls Loading Corpses in Ovens, Murdered Baby
Shlomo Venezia was a slave laborer in the crematoriums at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
For eight months in 1944, he loaded the corpses of his fellow Jews into the Nazi ovens -- 12 hours a day, seven days a week, cadaver after cadaver until it became a mechanical task, like feeding a heating furnace with cords of wood.
"Men are animals,'' Venezia says, recalling in a conversation in his Rome clothing shop how he hardened himself. "They resist things you can't ever imagine.''
In his memoir, ``Sonderkommando Auschwitz,'' Venezia provides an unflinching account of the barbarous banality of the Nazi death machine. Originally published in French as an interview with a journalist, a new Italian version of Venezia's story is written as a continuous narrative, offering page after page of grim insights.
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For eight months in 1944, he loaded the corpses of his fellow Jews into the Nazi ovens -- 12 hours a day, seven days a week, cadaver after cadaver until it became a mechanical task, like feeding a heating furnace with cords of wood.
"Men are animals,'' Venezia says, recalling in a conversation in his Rome clothing shop how he hardened himself. "They resist things you can't ever imagine.''
In his memoir, ``Sonderkommando Auschwitz,'' Venezia provides an unflinching account of the barbarous banality of the Nazi death machine. Originally published in French as an interview with a journalist, a new Italian version of Venezia's story is written as a continuous narrative, offering page after page of grim insights.