Biography

Brother of Morris Venezia and cousin of Dario Gabbai and Jakob Gabbai. They were all deported with their families and arrived in Auschwitz on 11 April 1944. Then were all selected for the 'Sonderkommando' in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Together with them he witnessed the 'Sonderkommando' uprising in Auschwitz-Birkenau on 7 October 1944. He was later liberated by the US Army.

[arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in 1944] When I turned around to try to find my mother, she wasn't there anymore. I never saw her again. She wasn't there, and neither were my two little sisters, Marica and Marta. ["Inside the Gas Chambers: Eight Months in the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz", Schlomo Venezia 2007]

[on the process of mass murder through gassing in Auschwitz-Birkenau] Once they had taken off their clothes, the women went into the gas chamber and waited, thinking that they were in a shower. They couldn't know where they really were. (...) Finally, the German bringing the gas would arrive; it took two prisoners from the Sonderkommando to help him lift up the external trapdoor, above the gas chamber; then he introduced Zyklon B through the opening. The lid was made of very heavy cement. The German would never have bothered to lift it up himself, as it needed two of us. Sometimes, it was me, sometimes others. (...) Once the gas had been thrown in, it lasted about 10 to 12 minutes, then finally you couldn't hear anything, not a living soul. (...) When the job of cutting the hair and pulling out the gold teeth had been completed, two people came to take the bodies and to load them onto the hoist that sent them up to the ground floor of the building, and the crematorium ovens. ["Inside the Gas Chambers: Eight Months in the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz", Schlomo Venezia 2007]

Since then I've never had a normal life. Everything takes me back to the camp. Whatever I do, whatever I see, my mind keeps harking back to the same place. It's as if the 'work' I was forced to do there had never really left my head. Nobody ever really gets out of the crematorium. ["Inside the Gas Chambers: Eight Months in the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz", Schlomo Venezia 2007]