Greek Jew & Hollywood actor Dario Gabbi
(who forgot he was an Auschwitz-Birkenau
Sonderkommando
until the early 1990s), had
to cremate his own family at
Auschwitz-Birkenau. But not
his brother
Yakob Gabbi, as he was a
Auschwitz Sonderkommando as well, though
he too forgot that fact until
the 1990s. Nor did Dario
Gabbi cremate his cousins; Morris
Venezia and Shlomo Venezia, as they also
were Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommandos,
even though they both forgot that until
the 1990s.
Miraculously, all four of these closely
related, similarly forgetful, Auschwitz-
Birkenau Sonderkommandos survived the
Ho£ocaust. Praise the Jewish god.
Another Greek Jew; Mario Modiano, who
hid from the Gestapo when they were
rounding up Jews on behalf of Zionists,
spoke about how his friend Dario
Gabbi
cremated his family (not his brother,
nor their two cousins) at Auschwitz:
After I left the army I worked for the Joint [11] – the American Joint Distribution Committee, in their offices on Mitropoleos Street in Athens. I made many friends there. One of the very dear ones is Dario Gabbai who had returned from Auschwitz-Birkenau. He was in the Sonderkommando [Jews that the Germans used in the extermination camps to throw the corpses into the ovens] and had some very frightening experiences to tell. He had put into the oven of the crematoria his own family. Only one of his brothers survived. Today he lives in Los Angeles. His testimony figured prominently in Spielberg's documentary about the Hungarian Jews [The Last Days, 1998]. Dario, who was captured in Athens in 1943, served in the crematoria towards the end of the war and this saved him. The Germans used young Jews to shove the bodies of the gassed Jews into the ovens, but they would shoot them every three months so there would be no witnesses. Dario managed to flee by mixing with the other survivors from Auschwitz when the Germans evacuated the camp and led the survivors to a death march [12] westwards.
Country: Greece, City: Athens
Interviewer: Milena Molho
Date of interview: November 2005
Henryk
Mandelbaum, another Auschwitz-Birkenau
Sonderkommando
spoke of a Sonderkommando,
who was killed by other Sonderkommandos,
as he'd assured his own
mother that she was
just going to take a shower
Sources
Thanks to Eager who posts comments on
furtherglory's blog
for teaching me of this piece of
Holocaust Aggadah
Eric Hunt's Last Days of
the Big Lie
[ Sonderkommando tales start at 1:28:40 ]
thanks for the tipoff re: furtherglory, wandered over and found a nice comment from who+dares+wings elaborating something I'd been after from him.
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