In the throes of WWII, an arm of the nazi regime was
created called the Sonderkommando. This group of individuals were prime
specimens for the work that they were tasked to do. They were handpicked by the
Nazi command because of their stature, strength and traits often reflected on
other groups of enforcers such as the Gestapo and of course the Totenkopf
(Death’s Head) Division of the SS. They were steely in their work and the
execution of their duties was documented to be highly efficient and notoriously
cruel – true Nazis. Howver what you might not know is these infamous arms of
the Nazi regime were not Germans, Poles, Ukrainian or Italian: they were Jews.
The Sonderkommando executed inhuman acts on their own
people. Their motive? To stay alive. To gain approval from their Nazi captors
and to live for one more day. These were the ones who met the people coming in
off the trains directly to file them into the gas chambers while the prison
orchestra played light and happy tunes on the sod that covered the chambers.
These were the ones who told the people to hang their clothes on hooks and remember
the number on the hook so they could find them later after they had been
‘processed’. These were the ones who donned their gas masks and loaded the dead
bodies onto the garrets and transported the dead to the furnaces. These were
the ones who filed through all the items of the dead collected off the hooks.
These were the ones who shoved the naked, dead bodies of the
people into the ever burning hot white furnaces. They breathed the smoke of
their own people and were covered in their ash.
These were the ones who loaded the ash from the furnaces and
spread it out on fields to cover the dark acts of which they were involved.
Why is this relevant for this blog on the subject of
dysfunctional groups? It is not from the perch leadership of such groups
operate, it is in the trenches through the chosen few: the Sonderkommandos. There
is no direct contact or damage, only the edict and the choice of those who
fulfill their wishes. It is a father, a mother, a sister, a brother, a
son-in-law, a daughter-in-law, a son, a daughter. In the dark realms it is not
the foreign but the familiar who closes the door of the chamber and listens to
the hellish screams of loved ones gradually fading into the past into only
memory. The reward is approval and to live another day in favor from their
leader and some ethereal promise tinkling on the breeze of mournful winds that
God is pleased. What really drives them is survival and fear. Fear that one day
they will be trundled into the chamber by a friend, a colleague, a son, a
daughter all the while spouting ‘all is well, we’ll see you in a moment but for
now listen to our leader’. In the aftermath of such times, there are only
bodies to be cleaned out, processed…and burned from memory.
What haunts these Sonderkommandos is not the act itself but
the time wasted in indecision due to fear. The frozen will that is checked that
they may be the next to come before a tribunal and be swept from their place. What
haunts them is the coming end. The world will not understand their actions just
as much as those Jews who threw their own into the furnaces and buried their
ash measured in tonnage. No, the pang felt is a future unsure and a sense of pending
reckoning and finally judgment. Due to the treachery in which they partook,
there is no respite. One cannot take back the acts done in the name of the
leader and I am being kind here. Ultimately the acts performed were in the name
of Christ of which is diametric to His heart and His intent.
There is a story perhaps fable from the death camps. There was
a young girl who survived the gas chamber and it was the Sonderkommandos that
found her and tried to hide her. In an act of penance or the self-disgust or
self-hate, they looked to her for their redemption back into the human race. When
the German Commander found this girl, she was brought before them to witness The
Sonderkommandos being shot one by one by those whom they served. It is said
that during this ordeal, upon completion of the executions, the young girl saw
her chance to run out of the gate and skip away. It was not to be, she was shot
to death and taken, processed and burned by the new crop of Sonderkommandos. I
cannot say what may have gone through her mind those last moments before death.
All she wanted was to escape the madness and the twisted reality she had
directly encountered. She was almost driven by the nature of self preservation
to escape. This is what sped the encounter with death she would no doubt experience
shortly.
Some of us could no longer take the madness and the twisted
reality so we ran, when we looked back who we saw holding the pistol was the
face of a son, a daughter, a son-in-law, a daughter-in-law, a father, a mother. We were shot through the heart. It was these that carried us to be processed and burned from their memory.
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