Among the accounts and memoirs by former prisoners that are meticulously assembled and preserved in the Archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim, the notes by members of the Sonderkommando - special work-detail made up of Jews whom the SS forced to remove corpses from the gas chambers and then burn them - hold a special place. Those manuscripts lay concealed next to the ruins of crematoria in Birkenau until they were discovered after the war.
Their authors were: Langfus or Lejb, Salmen Gradowski, Chaim Herman, Marcel Nadjary, an anonymous prisoner, and Salmen Lewental. Only one of them, Nadjary, survived the war.
Those memoirs offer a shocking testimony to the crimes committed against the Jews by the SS.
LANGUAGE: DE. 'Inmitten des Grauenvollen Verbrechens. Handschriften von Mitgliedern des Sonderkommandos'
Publisher: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 1996
287 p., 14.5 x 20.5 cm, illustrations, documents, paperback
ISBN: 83-85047-57-3
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Scholarly and general studies 
