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.
