Salmen Gradowski

Salmen Gradowski or Chaim Zalman Gradowski (born in 1908 or 1909 in Suwałki ; died on October 7, 1944 in Auschwitz-Birkenau ) was a Polish Jew prisoner in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp . He was assigned to the Sonderkommandos that had to accompany the inmates during the murder in the gas chambers . With the help of other inmates, he wrote down his experiences in secret diaries .

Life

Gradowski was born as the son of Sarah and Shmuel Gradowski, who trained as a rabbi and worked as a cantor . He and his two brothers Moyshl and Avrom Boar attended the Yeshiva of Lomza ; his two brothers taught at a yeshivot in Suwalki , while Salmen moved to his father's clothing store. Due to the good libraries there and the discussions of literary texts in the Jewish community , he was able to pursue his interest in literature intensively. With the Yiddish writer David Sfar, his wife's brother-in-law and the only survivor of the family, he had a lively exchange about literature before the war began, and Gradowski remembered Gradowski as someone who dreamed of a life as a writer. As the most politically active of his brothers, he was interested in Zionism early on . In the early 1930s he married Sonja Sara Złotojabłko from the town of Lunna , where they fled after the German Wehrmacht invaded Suwałki in early September 1939. In the summer of 1941 the Wehrmacht occupied Lunna, and on November 2 a ghetto was established in which Gradowski, as part of the Judenrat, was responsible for sanitary and health matters. Exactly one year later, all ghetto residents in the region were taken to the Kiełbasin assembly camp near Grodno, where he had worked as a doctor in the Grodno ghetto .

In December 1942 Gradowski was deported on a train with 1,000 people to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where 769 deportees were immediately murdered - including all of his family members. First he was assigned to the special commandos in gas bunkers I and II, then in the crematorium. His texts, which were found after the liberation of the camp, were written in Auschwitz-Birkenau. He was probably killed as the leader of a resistance group made up of members of the Sonderkommando in the uprising on October 7, 1944. They reached the destruction of a crematorium.

Secret diary

In order to record his experiences in the extermination camp and the impressions of his fellow inmates for posterity, he compiled various collections of texts with the help of a few other inmates who provided paper and wax to seal the vessels. He hid these in different parts of the camp. As an assistant to the Extraordinary State Commission of the Soviet Union , Shlomo Dragon , a former member of the Sonderkommando, was able to recover the first manuscript on March 5, 1945 in the area of ​​Crematorium III. The two manuscripts consist of four units and deal with different topics as well as a letter. Gradowski's first notebook, probably written at the beginning of 1943, describes the transport of prisoners on the trains to Auschwitz. The second is written in a more literary language and deals with the events in the two weeks between February 24 and March 8, 1944, during which thousands of Jews and most of the Sonderkommando were murdered.

The writings written in Yiddish existed separately from one another for a long time and were only published collectively much later. Gradowski had signed the texts in encrypted form; with the help of Gematria , Chaim Wollnermann was later able to decode the signature, assign it to him and find relatives in New York, as Gradowski wished. In addition to detailed descriptions of the prisoners' everyday life and inner life in the face of the extermination, the writings are above all a unique document of lending literary expression to the extent of the horror. Last but not least, they are to be seen as an expression of the inner resistance of the doomed Gradowski. Aurélia Kalisky dedicates a detailed examination of the odyssey of the surviving writings and the position of the work in the context of the silent heroes in the 2019 edition in German, which for the first time contains all of his texts.

literature

• Ernst Klee : Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices and victims and what became of them. A dictionary of persons. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2013, ISBN 978-3-10-039333-3 , p. 147.
• Zalmen Gradowski: I am in the heart of hell. Manuscripts of a prisoner from the Sonderkommando recovered in Auschwitz . Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Oświęcim 2017, ISBN 978-83-7704-239-7 .
• Pavel Polian: Letters from Hell. The records of the Auschwitz Jewish Sonderkommando . Translated from the Russian by Roman Richter, edited by Andreas Kilian. Wbg Theiss, Darmstadt 2019, ISBN 978-3-8062-3916-4 .
• Salmen Gradowski: The separation. Records of a member of the detail . Edited by Aurélia Kalisky with the assistance of Andreas Kilian. Jewish publishing house in Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-633-54280-2 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b} Salmen Gradowski: The separation . Ed .: Aurélia Kalisky, Andreas Kilian. 1st edition. Jewish publishing house in Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2019.
2. ^ Ernst Klee: Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices and victims and what became of them. A dictionary of persons. Frankfurt am Main 2013, p. 147
3. ^ Find the manuscripts. Retrieved February 13, 2020 .