Of all the jobs that Jewish slave labourers had to perform at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland, none perhaps was more despised than that of Sonderkommando — a member of the “special unit” that instructed men, women and children to undress for the gas chambers, and dragged their bodies to the crematories.
For almost three years, 2,000 Sonderkommandos did such work under threat of execution, while often incurring the contempt of fellow prisoners. Some even had to dispose of the corpses of their relatives and neighbours.
Because the Germans replaced Sonderkommandos every six months, only a hundred or so survived the war. They were eyewitnesses to the exterminations that Holocaust deniers challenge. The man who may have been the last of the Sonderkommandos, and who was certainly one of the most prominent, has now died.
Dario Gabbai, a Greek Jew who settled in California after the war and described the grim work he did in a handful of Holocaust documentaries — including The Last Days, which won an Academy Award for best documentary in 1999 — died on March 25 at a residence in Los Angeles. He was 97.