User:Meister und Margarita/Marcel Nadjary

Marcel Nadjary (1 January 1917 in Thessaloniki, Greece — 31 July 1971 in New York City) was a Jewish-Greek electrician and survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp. He was a member of the Sonderkommando in Birkenau from May to November 1944. He was one of only three members of the Sonderkommando who wrote his memoirs after the war, along with Filip Müller and Leon Cohen.^[1]^[2]^[3] He took part in the preparation of the Sonderkommando uprising.

Nine years after his death, a 12-page-testimony, written by Nadjary in late 1944, was found hidden in a thermos liner, buried under the surface close to the Birkenau crematoriums. This document contained first hand informations about the atrocious crimes committed by the Germans.

Life[edit]

Nadjary's parents, Abraham Nadjary and Louna Pelesof, descend from old Jewish families from Constantinople. He had an older sister named Nelly. He grew up in the family home in Italias street of Thessaloniki. After completing middle school he went to the private French high school Altsech. His father ran a business that traded with fodder. After completing high school, Nadjary went to work in his fathers company. In 1937, he fulfilled his military service in the Greek army. Three years later, he was drafted to fight the axis powers at the Albanian front. After the Germans had occupied the North of Greece, he was one of the 1,500 Jews selected for forced labour in Menemeni. Thereafter he fled his native city and joined the Greek resistance movement until he was wounded. While seeking medical aid, he was caught by the Germans and arrested.^[4] In 1943, he was deported to Haidari concentration camp close to Athens where he spent dreadful eleven months.

On 2 April 1944, he was deported in a box wagon from Athens to Auschwitz concentration camp. The train arrived on 11 April and immediately after arrival, 1,872 of the 2,500 Greek Jews on this train were gassed in Birkenau. Nadjary was one of the 320 Greek men selected for labor. They were given the serial numbers from 182,440 to 182,759. His number was 182,669, it was tattooed on the left forearm. After nearly a month in the quarantine barracks of Birkenau, about 150 Greek Jews were selected to work at the so-called Sonderkommando, among them Nadjary. The inmates selected for this unit had to assist elderly and handicapped persons before the gassing, they had to pull out the corpses of the gas chambers, had to cut the hair of women and to remove the golden crowns from the dentitions and they had to finally burn the corpses, either in one of the crematoriums or in special ditches. The members of Sonderkommando were strictly separated from all other concentration camp inmates and they had a very low chance of survival as they knew everything about the German mass murder of the European Jews. Although Nadjary took part in the preparation of the Auschwitz uprising, that after several postponements spontaneously happened on 7 October 1944 and ended with the murder of 451 Sonderkommando members on the same day, he was spared from reprisals.^[5]

Nadjary gelingt es, sich einem Evakuierungsmarsch nach Mauthausen anzuschließen, wo er am 25. 01. 1945 eintrifft. On 16 February 1945 he was transferred to Gusen. In 1947 he married Died of an heart attack.

Documentation of the work of the Sonderkommando[edit]

Nadjary left two important documents, his memoirs (written after the fall of the Nazi regime and after his liberation) and the 12-page-testimony (written most probably in November 1944, hidden in the soul of Auschwitz and only discovered in October 1980, nine years after Nadjary's death).

Memoirs[edit]

12-page-testimony[edit]

am 24.10. 1980 entdeckt Lesław Dyrcz, ein Student der Forstlichen Berufsschule Brynek bei Arbeiten in der Nähe des gesprengten Krematoriums III in Auschwitz- Birkenau eine Flasche die etwa einen Fuß tief in den Boden vergraben war. Als er sie öffnete, sah er, daß sie viele Papierblätter mit Handschriften in einer Sprache enthielt, die ihm unbekannt war. Das Dokument entpuppte sich als ein 12-seitiger Brief, den der Gefangene des Sonderkommandos Marcel Nadjary, geschrieben hatte. Nadjary war einer der Gefangenen, die an das Sonderkommando geschickt wurden, das die vier Krematorien in Birkenau betrieb.

Nadjary geht von seinem Tod aus, schreibt aber: Ich wollte und ich will überleben, damit ich den Tod meines Papas, meiner Mama und meiner geliebten Schwester Nelli rächen kann. Er steckt den Bericht in eine Flasche und vergräbt diese in der Nähe des Krematoriums III. This was the last of the Sonderkommando manuscripts to be recovered, in 1980; of the other pages, some contain only scraps of phrases that can be deciphered, and others are entirely illegible. Nadjary, a Greek Jew from Salonica, took part in resistance to German occupation before being captured and transported to Auschwitz, arriving in April 1944. His text is very different from the manuscripts mentioned above. He writes a letter to named recipients left behind in Greece. He shows a fierce patriotism, exemplified by his writing "Greece" in capital letters. Unlike Langfus and Lewental, Polish Jews whose entire world had been destroyed, Nadjary shows some hope for Greece in the future, if not for his own survival. In fact, he was one of the rare survivors of the Sonderkommando, although he died before this letter was discovered. Even what little is decipherable of his text gives us an important sense of the variety of backgrounds of members of the Sonderkommando, who were drawn from Jews of many different nationalities.

Quote[edit]

While page 2 of the 12-pages-testimony of Marcel Nadjary is completely legible, much of the other pages was lost due ″to the ravages of time, leaving only a fragmented text full of spaces that can no longer be filled in.″^[4] Here a transcript from page 5:

. . . dramas they poured gasoline over them . . . shipment . . . we transported the corpses of those innocent . . . we transported in the ovens . . . one hundred . . . they put in the ovens those who still . . . combustible material . . . who have from one . . . but . . . who . . . they forced us to sift it and we passed it through a coarse sieve and then . . . in an automobile and they threw them in the river which flows near there . . . Vistula and thus . . . they obliterated every trace . . . the miseries that my eyes have seen are beyond description . . . my eyes. About 600,000 Jews from Hungary, Frenchmen, Poles . . . in this interval . . . about . . .

Memoirs[edit]

Marcel Nadjary, Χρονικό 1941–1945 [Chronicle], Ιδρυμα Ετσ - Αχα'ι'μ, Thessaloniki, 1991

External links[edit]

Auschwitz Sonderkommando Marcel Nadjary, remembrance video on Youtube
Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams: Jewish Prisoners at Auschwitz Tell the Story of Genocide, Slate, 6 Februar 2016 (with a reproduction of page 2 of the 12-page-testimony of Marcel Nadjary)

References[edit]

^ Filip Müller: Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers, Stein and Day, 1979.
^ Leon Cohen: From Greece to Birkenau, the crematoria workers' uprising, Salonika Jewry Research Center, 1996.
^ See Gideon Greif, We wept without tears, Yale University Press, 2005, p. 80 : Only four former members of this unit published memoirs : Marcel Nadjari, Leon Cohen, Filip Müller, and Miklos Nyiszli. Although Miklos Nyiszli was performing autopsies for Dr. Josef Mengele and was living with the members of the Sonderkommando, he did not take part in the gas chamber work. The other books about Sonderkommando members, such as Shlomo Venezia or Daniel Behnnamias, are testimonies or interviews, and not strictly speaking memoirs.
^ ^a ^b Stanford University Press blog: MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE, 22 August 2014, retrieved on 21 July 2017
^ There were several reasons for the fact that nearly all Sonderkommando members from crematorium were kept alive: The inmates working in crematorium III stuck to the original plan to start the uprising only on the following day, October 8^th. When they found out that the revolt in crematorium II resulted in bloodshed, their Kapo halted all resistance activities at no. III. Furthermore, the SS had circumvented crematorium III in order to prevent the spread of the revolt. Lastly, the Germans did not want to extinguish all Sonderkommando members and with them their know-how as they were still expecting some more transports.

Category:Holocaust survivors Category:Greek Jews Category:Auschwitz concentration camp survivors Category:Jews from Thessaloniki Category:Sonderkommando Category:Nazi concentration camp survivors Category:1917 births Category:1971 deaths

[1] Filip Müller: Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers, Stein and Day, 1979.

[2] Leon Cohen: From Greece to Birkenau, the crematoria workers' uprising, Salonika Jewry Research Center, 1996.

[3] See Gideon Greif, We wept without tears, Yale University Press, 2005, p. 80 : Only four former members of this unit published memoirs : Marcel Nadjari, Leon Cohen, Filip Müller, and Miklos Nyiszli. Although Miklos Nyiszli was performing autopsies for Dr. Josef Mengele and was living with the members of the Sonderkommando, he did not take part in the gas chamber work. The other books about Sonderkommando members, such as Shlomo Venezia or Daniel Behnnamias, are testimonies or interviews, and not strictly speaking memoirs.

[SUPblog-4] Stanford University Press blog: MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE, 22 August 2014, retrieved on 21 July 2017

[5] There were several reasons for the fact that nearly all Sonderkommando members from crematorium were kept alive: The inmates working in crematorium III stuck to the original plan to start the uprising only on the following day, October 8^th. When they found out that the revolt in crematorium II resulted in bloodshed, their Kapo halted all resistance activities at no. III. Furthermore, the SS had circumvented crematorium III in order to prevent the spread of the revolt. Lastly, the Germans did not want to extinguish all Sonderkommando members and with them their know-how as they were still expecting some more transports.

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