The Horrors Of The Sonderkommando, By Primo Levi

“Nobody can know for how long and under what trials his soul can resist before yielding or breaking.” This quote from Primo Levi eloquently describes how it is impossible to know how people would have reacted during the Holocaust and how much pain they could stand. Among the millions of Jewish people killed, there was a special unit of prisoners, the Sonderkommando, that were forced to witness and aid in the extermination of their people. At the time many people thought the Sonderkommando were accomplices in the murder and that they willingly participated in the acts, however, they were just as tortured as the people who were killed. The Sonderkommando had to engage in horrific acts in the extermination camps such as cremating the bodies or burying them in mass graves which berated them till the point that they were shells of their former selves, but they never stopped fighting.

When the Germans declared their dominance over the Jewish race and put them into ghettos and concentration camps it became very evident to them that if they were going

Some of the men were stationed in the undressing room while others were working at the crematoriums. None of these men were prepared to see the happenings at any point in the extermination camp. Each station had its own trials, emotionally and physically, that the Sonderkommando had to go through everyday. The first group was put in the undressing room and this might seem like the best place to be but truly it was one of the hardest. These men had to watch people from their homes come through and not be able to warn them about what was about to happen in fear that a mass hysteria would ensue. Once they continued onto the gas chambers, this group also had to collect all of the clothes that were left behind. They also were the last ones to see many of these people alive which taxed on them