sonderkommando

Robota smuggled explosives from the munitions factory where she worked to members of the underground and the sonderkommando (Jewish units who removed the gassed bodies for cremation), who planned to blow up the crematoria when the camp was evacuated as the Russians approached.

Rivka Kuper Liebeskind. 2009

But before they could act, on Oct. 7, the SS demanded 300 sonderkommando for "transfer" -- barely a euphemism -- and the victims decided to die fighting.

The Last Days Of Auschwitz 2008

For the sonderkommando, who never expected to survive the war, this was a call to action.

The Last Days Of Auschwitz 2008

There he could glimpse the gas chambers and came into contact with the sonderkommando, Jewish inmates whose job was to drag the bodies from the gas chambers to the crematoria.

Tom Teicholz: Remembering Rudolf Vrba's 5 Per Cent 2008

The sonderkommando fought the well-armed SS troops with knives, chains, stones and perhaps homemade grenades.

The Last Days Of Auschwitz 2008

All the sonderkommando expected to wind up in the crematoriums themselves eventually; it was part of the job.

The Last Days Of Auschwitz 2008

"When they got off the train, they had to strip in the dressing room," says Henryk Mandelbaum, who worked as a sonderkommando in the fall of 1944.

The Last Days Of Auschwitz 2008

One part of it worked: bales of human hair, destined for German carpet factories, had been stashed in the attic of Crematorium 4; the sonderkommando sprinkled them with gasoline and ignited them, setting ablaze the roof of the whole vast structure.

The Last Days Of Auschwitz 2008

Mandelbaum tells of one legendary sonderkommando who voluntarily walked into the gas chamber with his own family; and another, who encountered his mother and assured her until the last minute that she was only being taken to the showers.

The Last Days Of Auschwitz 2008

Another job which provided enough toeat was sonderkommando -- the Jewish prisoners who met the trains, escorted thecondemned to the gas chambers and then hauled their bodies to the crematoriums.

The Last Days Of Auschwitz 2008