Lived experience and the Holocaust | Essay by Nikolaus Wachsmann

On 27 January 1945, Auschwitz concentration camp—a Nazi concentration camp where more than a million people were murdered—was liberated by the Red Army during the Vistula–Oder Offensive.

"Dear reader, I write these words in the moments of my greatest despair.” So begins a text by Zalmen Gradowski, composed in Auschwitz-Birkenau in spring 1944 and discovered after liberation, in a tin near the destroyed crematoria. Gradowski had been deported to the death camp in late 1942. His wife Sonia, his mother and two sisters were murdered within hours, together with hundreds of other Polish Jews on the same train. Gradowski belonged to a much smaller group selected for slave labour, and the SS soon sent him to the dreaded Sonderkommando: prisoners who had to assist in the mass murder of others."

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