Chapter 9. The Religious Life of Sonderkommando Members inside the Killing Installations in Auschwitz-Birkenau

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. List of Figures and Tables viii
4. Foreword ix
5. Acknowledgements xiv
6. Note on Transliteration xv
7. Introduction. Testimonies of Resistance 1
8. Part I. Historical and Ethical Questions of Representation
9. Chapter 1. Knowing Cruelty: The Negation of Death and Burial in SS Violence 33
10. Chapter 2. What Makes the Grey Zone Grey? Blurring Factual and Ethical Judgements of the Sonderkommando 69
11. Part II. Witnessing from the Heart of Hell
12. Chapter 3. Farewell Letter from the Crematorium: On the Authorship of the First Recorded ‘Sonderkommando-Manuscript’ and the Discovery of the Original Letter 91
13. Chapter 4. To Read the Illegible: Techniques of Multispectral Imaging and the Manuscripts of the Jewish Sonderkommando of Auschwitz-Birkenau 102
14. Chapter 5. ‘Like a True Greek’: The Last Will and Testimony of Marcel Natzari 106
15. Chapter 6. Disinterred Words: The Letters of Herman Strasfogel and Marcel Nadjary 111
16. Chapter 7. The Letter of Herman Strasfogel 131
17. Chapter 8. The Letter of Marcel Nadjary 138
18. Chapter 9. The Religious Life of Sonderkommando Members inside the Killing Installations in Auschwitz-Birkenau 143
19. Part III. Retrospective Representations
20. Chapter 10. Doubly Cursed: The Sonderkommando in the Documents of the International Tracing Service 159
21. Chapter 11. Enduring Witness: David Olère’s Visual Testimony 182
22. Chapter 12. The Sonderkommando and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum 193
23. Chapter 13. Early and Late Testimonies of the Sonderkommando Survivors 215
24. Chapter 14. From Special Operations Executive to Sonderkommando: Sebastian Faulks and the Anxiety of Invention 230
25. Chapter 15. Out of the Plan, Out of the Plane 2: Stripping, Fourth Letter to Gerhard Richter 247
26. Chapter 16. Greeks in the Birkenau Sonderkommando: Representation and Reality 265
27. Part IV. Cinema and the Sonderkommando
28. Chapter 17. ‘We Did Something’: Framing Resistance in Cinematic Depictions of the Sonderkommando 287
29. Chapter 18. ‘We Can’t Know What We’re Capable Of ’: Approaching the ‘Grey Zone’ in Holocaust Film 307
30. Chapter 19. The Sonderkommando on Screen 332
31. Afterword. Tracing Topographies of Memory and Mourning 346
32. Index 369