Shlomo Venezia was one of the first Jews to climb out of the freight car when it came to the end of the line at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland on April 11, 1944, his mother crammed behind him. Two blows from a German guard’s baton struck him in the back of the neck.
Mr. Venezia’s book offers a harrowingly matter-of-fact account of his experience at Auschwitz.
“When I turned around to try to find my mother, she wasn’t there anymore,” he recalled. “I never saw her again, she wasn’t there, and neither were my two little sisters, Marica and Marta.”
Mr. Venezia, an Italian Jew who died at 88 on Oct. 1 in Rome, would enter what Primo Levi, the writer and fellow Auschwitz survivor, called “the gray zone,” where terrorized victims survived on the fringe of collaboration. A sturdy 20-year-old, he was ordered into the Sonderkommando, a unit of prisoners forced to direct thousands of other victims of the Nazis into the gas chambers and to bear their bodies into the crematories.
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