Shlomo Dragon

Shlomo Dragon , also Szlama Dragon , (born March 19, 1922 in Żuromin ; † October 2001 in Ramat Gan ) was a Polish survivor of the special command of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp . He was one of the 100 or so Jewish survivors of this Sonderkommando.

Life

Dragon, who had two brothers and a sister, ended his school career at the age of 13 because he had to work as a tailor in his parents' shop in Zuromin. After the attack on Poland , Shlomo and his older brother Abraham Dragon had to do forced labor and were finally sent to the Warsaw ghetto with their family . Both smuggled food into the Warsaw ghetto at high risk. Shlomo Dragon was discovered, arrested and, under abuse, questioned by the Gestapo for two days . After that, both brothers managed to move to the Plonsk ghetto and also to bring their family, except for the sick father, from the Warsaw ghetto. The Germans' call to move the Jewish population to the East was followed by the Dragons and ended up in the Mława Ghetto . From there, Abraham and Shlomo Dragon were deported to Auschwitz on December 5, 1942 , where they arrived on December 6, 1942. They were selected by Gerhard Palitzsch , Ludwig Plagge and a camp doctor with 404 other men from the transport of 2,500 people and sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Shlomo Dragon received the prisoner number 80.359 and his brother Abraham the number 80.360.

special command unit

Together with his brother Abraham and others, he was selected from this group by Otto Moll on December 9, 1942 under the pretext of working in a rubber factory for the Sonderkommando. Initially, Shlomo Dragon was employed there, among other things, as a corpse bearer in the crematoria and gas chambers and, most recently, in the room service of the barracks of the Sonderkommando.

On October 7, 1944, he was involved in the Sonderkommando uprising, which was suppressed by the SS . Then 451 of the prisoners involved in the uprising were shot. However, Shlomo Dragon was able to hide. He belonged to the resistance movement in the Sonderkommando and managed the self-made grenades, which he did not release at the beginning of the uprising. Dragon was able to survive as investigations were carried out to evacuate the resistance organization in the Sonderkommando. At this point, the resistance organization stopped its conspiratorial actions. This investigation was unsuccessful because the interrogation of the remaining detainees in the Sonderkommando did not produce any results and no incriminating materials were found. From October 1944, Dragon was used to dismantle the crematoria.

After the evacuation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in January 1945, Dragon managed to escape on the death march near Pszczyna together with the special commando inmate Henryk Tauber . He reported to the Soviet investigative commission as an eyewitness and in February 1945 led its members to crematorium No. III, where members of the Sonderkommando had buried their “secret manuscripts”. On May 10, 11 and 17, 1945, he recorded his experiences in front of a Polish commission of inquiry.

After the end of the war

Shlomo Dragon and his brother Abraham later came to the Frankfurt Displaced Persons Camp Zeilsheim and worked as a jewelry dealer in the Frankfurt train station district for several years before they left for Israel . Shlomo, who remained unmarried, lived with his brother Abraham and his wife. Together with the historian Gideon Greif , he returned to Auschwitz concentration camp in 1993 with his brother and two other survivors of the Sonderkommando. The statements of the survivors of the Sonderkommando were documented by historians from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum . Like other survivors of the Sonderkommando, Dragon did not speak out of shame about his membership of the Sonderkommando. Only later did he comment, also in the context of a book publication:

“We did not shed the blood. The Germans did ... They forced us to join the Sonderkommandos. The fact that we were forced to do terrible work doesn't change the fact that we were the victims, not the monsters. "

Dragon died in Ramat Gan in October 2001 after a long illness.

literature

• Protocol of the interrogation of Szlama Dragon on May 10, 11 and 17, 1945 in Oświęcim, in: Franciszek Piper : The number of victims of Auschwitz . Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum 1993, ISBN 83-85047-17-4
• Andrzej Strzelecki: Final phase of KL Auschwitz. Evacuation, liquidation and liberation of the camp , Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum 1995, ISBN 83-85047-48-4
• Gideon Greif : We wept without tears ... eyewitness reports from the Jewish 'Sonderkommando' in Auschwitz . Böhlau, Cologne 1995; again Fischer TB, Frankfurt 1999 (Hebrew edition; Yad Vashem , Jerusalem 1999; Polish edition: ZIH, Warsaw 2002; English edition: Yale University Press , New Haven 2003)
• Gideon Greif, Itamar Levin: Uprising in Auschwitz. The revolt of the Jewish "Sonderkommando" on October 7, 1944. Translated from the Hebrew by Beatrice Greif. Böhlau, Cologne 2015

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Gideon Greif: Biography Shlomo Dragon ( Memento of the original from January 10, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on www.sonderkommando-studien.de 
2. ^ ^{A b c} Minutes of the interrogation of Szlama Dragon on May 10, 11 and 17, 1945 in Oświęcim, in: Franciszek Piper: The number of victims of Auschwitz . State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau 1993, pp. 203f.
3. ↑ Andreas Kilian: The “Sonderkommando Uprising” in Auschwitz-Birkenau on www.shoa.de
4. ↑ Quoted from Ronit Roccas: "We did the dirty work of the Shoah" - Auschwitz special command , Haaretz, May 2, 2000
5. ↑ On pp. 47–51, the volume contains an interview (in fragments) that the former prisoner Jakov Silberberg from the Sonderkommando granted and that is not included in "We wept tears ..."