Telling, Describing, Representing Extermination. The Auschwitz Sonderkommando, their Testimony and their Legacy

International conference organized by the Centre Marc Bloch (Berlin) and the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (Berlin)

The Auschwitz Sonderkommando (›special squad‹) were forced labourers in the gas chambers of Birkenau, compelled to handle and dispose of the bodies of those who were murdered. Often branded as collaborators by other prisoners, the Sonderkommando were central eyewitnesses to the process of mass killing, even able to record what they witnessed and to represent their experience in photographs, documents and writings that they smuggled outside the camp or buried in the grounds of the crematoria.

The experience and history of the Sonderkommando have been central to a number of crucial topics in post-war debates about the Shoah. As the gas chamber became one of the most significant elements of Western imagination regarding the Holocaust, the proximity of the Sonderkommando members to the extermination process conferred a specific and singular status to their testimonies. The Sonderkommando are also key figures referred to in discussions of both collaboration and resistance, especially the conceptualization of what Primo Levi called the ›grey zone‹.

Yet the Sonderkommando have mostly met with a reluctance to think through their testimony and history. While a handful of historians have been undertaking important work on this group since before the turn of the millennium, it is only in the last few years that scholars and artists have begun to engage with the writings in any depth. A number of significant works of art on the Sonderkommando have also been made recently, such as Gerhard Richter’s Birkenau series (2014) and the film Son of Saul (2015).

This conference will respond to this increase in interest by considering the Sonderkommando. Our goals are to:

• Foster discussions of the Sonderkommando manuscripts themselves and consider how they have been edited, exhibited, translated and interpreted. How can the discreet, even almost silent or non-existent reception of these testimonies be interpreted? This conference aims to examine the different – political, ideological, but also disciplinary – modes of reception according to the different linguistic, cultural and geographical areas involved.
• We aim to respond to the Sonderkommando’s challenge to conceptions of Holocaust testimony in arts, philosophy, literature and history. We would like to reflect upon the singularity of the written and oral testimonies of Sonderkommando members, be it through the specific aesthetic forms some of them explored, or the reflection upon the subjective experience of the Catastrophe present in all testimonies. This will enable to ponder how testimony from and history of the Shoah, and the longstanding representational taboo on the gas chambers in particular, must be rethought in response to them.
• We want to consider the larger corpus of testimonies, historical studies and works of art on the Sonderkommando. Our purpose is to understand to what extent the understandings and misunderstandings of their experience in the crematoria and the moral judgment to which they were subjected has affected the interpretation of historians and Holocaust scholars and, on a wider scale, the representation of the Sonderkommando within cultural memory.

Image above: Yard of the Sonderkommando-block in Birkenau, © Andreas Kilian