The Auschwitz Sonderkommando: Testimonies, Histories, Representations

Description

This book is the first to bring together analyses of the full range of post-war testimony given by survivors of the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Auschwitz Sonderkommando were slave labourers in the gas chambers and crematoria, forced to process and dispose of the bodies of those who were murdered. They have been central to a number of key topics in post-war debates about the Shoah: collaboration, moral compromise and survival, resistance, representation, and the possibility of bearing witness. Their testimony however has mostly met with a reluctance to engage in depth with it. Moving from testimonies produced within the event, the Scrolls of Auschwitz and the Sonderkommando photographs, to testimonies given at trials and for video archives, and to the paintings of David Olère and the film Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, this book demonstrates the importance of their witnessing in the post-war memory of the Holocaust, and provides vital new insights into the questions of representation, memory, gender, and the Shoah. Front Matter ....Pages i-vii Introduction: Figuring the Sonderkommando in History (Nicholas Chare, Dominic Williams)....Pages 1-24 Acts of Deposition: Gender and Testimony in the Scrolls of Auschwitz (Nicholas Chare, Dominic Williams)....Pages 25-70 Tragic Pictures: The Sonderkommando and Their Photographs (Nicholas Chare, Dominic Williams)....Pages 71-100 The Trials of Witnessing: Legal Testimony and the Sonderkommando (Nicholas Chare, Dominic Williams)....Pages 101-128 Figure Studies from the Grey Zone: David Olère (Nicholas Chare, Dominic Williams)....Pages 129-169 Matters of Video Testimony (Nicholas Chare, Dominic Williams)....Pages 171-217 The Voice of Bronze: Filip Müller and Shoah (Nicholas Chare, Dominic Williams)....Pages 219-247 Back Matter ....Pages 249-278