Marcel Nadjari

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Marcel Nadjari , also Nadjary ( Greek Εμμανουήλ / Μαρσέλ Νατζαρή / Νατζαρής , born on January 1, 1917 in Thessaloniki ; died on July 31, 1971 in New York ), was a Greek electrician or businessman . He was deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp by the Nazi regime and forced to work in the special detachment near the gas chambers and in the crematoria of the extermination camp. He was one of the few survivors of the Sonderkommandos.

Presumably in November 1944, he handwritten a 12-page description of the atrocities in Greek, which he buried in a thermos bottle near Crematorium III. The document was found in 1980, but essential passages could not be deciphered. In 2017, Pavel Polian and Aleksandr Nikitjaev succeeded in making the contemporary witness document almost completely visible and legible.

Life

Little is known about Marcel Nadjari. Because of his Jewish origins, he was arrested by the Nazi German occupying power in Athens and deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on April 2, 1944 . There he received the prisoner number 182,669 and was assigned to the Jewish special command in Crematorium III. Statement by Nadjary: “On April 2nd, 1944, after eleven agonizing months in the concentration camp in Chaidari, we left Athens in a locked freight car. Arrival in Auschwitz on April 11, 1944, of 2,500 Greek Jews, 1,872 are immediately murdered in the gas chamber. ”100 of the arriving Greeks were assigned to the special command.

Activity in the special command

The tragedy "that my eyes saw is indescribable."

The work of the members of the Sonderkommando consisted first of all of helping the frail and handicapped newcomers to undress. "[...] most of them did not know the reason ... I told the truth to the people I saw that their fate was sealed." This was strictly forbidden and, if discovered, would have led to his immediate murder . “After they were all naked, they went on to death row.” There, the Germans had put pipes on the ceiling that looked like showers, “With whips in hand, the Germans forced them to move closer and closer together so that as many as possible could fit inside. a real sardine can made by people ”. The door was then hermetically sealed. "The gas cans always came in the car of the German Red Cross with two SS men."

Cremation of corpses by the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, picture by Alberto Errera

Half an hour after the gassing, the doors were opened “and our work began”. The members of the Sonderkommando had to drag the often interlocking corpses of the murdered men, women and children out of the gas chamber and take them to the elevator that took them to the room with the ovens, “where they burned without the aid of fuel because of the fat they had to have. One person only yielded half an okka ash, which the Germans forced us to chop up ”. However, corpses were also cremated outside the crematoria. The ashes had to be pressed through a coarse sieve and then picked up by a car and poured into the river that flows by nearby, “and so they removed all traces”.

Probably in November 1944 he wrote his twelve-page report, put it in a thermos and buried it near Crematorium III. He was firmly convinced that Auschwitz could not survive. He asked his friend, Misko, to whom his testimonial was addressed, to say, should anyone be asked about him: The Nadjari family had "been murdered by the cultivated Germans". He shouldn't be sad about his death, "but that I won't be able to take revenge."

The report concludes: "My last words will be: Long live Greece."

Time after that

In the turmoil of the extensive dissolution of the Auschwitz concentration camp before it was captured by the Red Army , Nadjari managed to join the other prisoners. He survived a death march to the Mauthausen concentration camp , where he arrived on January 25, 1945. On February 16, 1945 he was transferred to Gusen . It was not until the beginning of May 1945 that US Army units liberated Mauthausen and the von Gusen camps .

In 1947 he married and in 1951 he moved to New York. He died in 1971.

In 1947 he wrote a report on his time in the Sonderkommando.

Original documents from the Sonderkommando

Photographs and texts that were created by witnesses to the Nazi crimes during the Holocaust are particularly important documents for historical processing. Another Greek, the officer Alberto Errera , succeeded in taking photographs shortly before his escape and murder. From 1945 to 1980, a total of 19 manuscripts were found by members of the Sonderkommando that had been buried near the crematorium ruins. They come from Załmen Gradowski , Leyb Langfus and Załmen Lewental (all three in Yiddish), Chaim Herman (in French) and Marcel Nadjari (in Greek). Only Nadjari survived the Holocaust.

Nadjari's contemporary witness document

On October 24, 1980, Lesław Dyrcz, a student at the Brynek Forestry Vocational School, discovered a thermos bottle buried about a foot deep in the ground near the blasted crematorium III of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The find was handed over to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and was subsequently scientifically recorded, published in Russian in 2013 and in German for the first time in 2017.

Quote

In the document that has survived, Nadjari answers a question that was later asked to all members of the Sonderkommando:

“When you read what work I did here, you will say; how could I ... or anyone else do this job and burn their fellow believers ... many times I've thought of going in with them to break up. But vengeance has always kept me from that; I wanted and want to live to avenge the deaths of dad and mom and that of my beloved little sister Nelli. "

- Marcel Nadjari

memories

  • Marcel Natzari: χρονικό 1941–1945 [Chronicle 1941–1945]. Introduction Fragiski Abatzopoulou. Editing by Eleni Elegmitou. Thessaloniki: Etz Achaim Foundation, 1991
  • Marcel Nadjary: Manuscripts 1944–1947. From Thessaloniki to the Auschwitz Special Command. Alexandria, Athens 2018 [Greek]. ISBN 978-960-221-768-9 .

To the testimonial

  • Pavel Polian : Reading the unread. The records of Marcel Nadjari, member of the Jewish Sonderkommando from Auschwitz-Birkenau, and their indexing, in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , 65 (2017), H. 4, S. 597-618, picture material for the article provided by Aleksandr Nikitjaev (Tula, Russia)
  • Andreas Kilian: "The dramas that my eyes saw are indescribable". Re-deciphering the “indescribable” - the publication of Marcel Nadjary's letter and its significance for Auschwitz research. In: Mitteilungsblatt der Lagergemeinschaft Auschwitz, Freundeskreis der Auschwitz, 37th year, no. 2 (2017), pp. 26-29.
  • Pavel Polian: Letters from Hell. The records of the Auschwitz Jewish Sonderkommando. Translated from the Russian by Roman Richter, edited by Andreas Kilian, Darmstadt 2019. ISBN 978-3806239164 .
  • Nicholas Chare / Dominic Williams (Ed.): Testimonies of Resistance: Representations of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando. Berghahn Books, New York - Oxford 2019. ISBN 978-1789203417 .

Reports on Polian / Nikitjaev

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Reinhard Tenhumberg: Jüdisches Sonderkommando ; Nadjary Marcel , in: Täter und Mitläufer / Documents , website, accessed on October 16, 2017
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j Klaus Wiegrefe: Half an Okka ash. In: Der Spiegel (Hamburg), 40 (2017), September 30, 2017, p. 51
  3. ↑ a b Auschwitz-Birkenau: The Pines of Birkenau , September 27, 2005, accessed on October 16, 2017
  4. ↑ Nicholas Chare , Dominic Williams : Matters of Testimony , Interpreting the Scrolls of Auschwitz, Berghahn Books 2016, p. 18
  5. ↑ In the first publications of the largely illegible report, it was assumed that page 10 was missing. See Stanford University Press Blog: MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE, The buried manuscript of a Greek Jewish inmate of Auschwitz. , accessed on October 16, 2017. Based on research by Polian / Nikitjaev, it can be assumed that there are only twelve pages and that there was a numbering error.
  6. ↑ Christian Staas : "To my love ones" , Die Zeit (Hamburg), November 1, 2017
  7. ^ Stanford University Press Blog, see above
  8. ↑ Pavel Polian : Reading the unread. The records of Marcel Nadjari, member of the Jewish special command of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and their development . In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , 65 (2017), no. 4, pp. 597–618.
personal data
SURNAME Nadjari, Marcel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Nadjary, Marcel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Greek electrician or merchant of the Jewish faith
DATE OF BIRTH January 1, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Thessaloniki , Greece
DATE OF DEATH July 31, 1971
Place of death New York City