Nadjari, who ended up surviving the Holocaust was assigned to the “Sonderkommando” unit of prisoners that took bodies from the gas chambers and burned them in a crematorium.
If you read about the things we did, you'll say, how could anyone do that, burn their fellow Jews?” he wrote, adding “That's what I said at first, too, and thought many times.”
We all suffer things here that the human mind can not imagine. Underneath a garden, there are two endless basement rooms: one is meant for undressing, the other is a death chamber. People enter naked and when it is filled with about 3,000 people, it is closed and they are gassed.
The Greek inmate described how
prisoners were packed "like sardines" as the Germans used whips to move people closer together before they sealed the doors and let in the gas.
After half an hour, we would open the doors, and our work began, Nadjari wrote. The prisoners' job: delivering the corpses to the crematory ovens, where "a human being ends up as about 640 grams of ashes."
The rarity and historical importance of Nadjari's words, which are now almost entirely legible after originally being discovered in very poor condition, makes them very special, said Russian-born historian Pavel Polian.
Nadjari's message, published for the first time ever in German this month in a quarterly magazine by the Munich-based Institute of Contemporary History (IfZ), is one of nine separate documents found buried at Auschwitz, Polian told DW. The texts, written by a total of five members of the concentration camp's "Sonderkommando" unit, "are the most central documents of the Holocaust"