Auschwitz survivor publishes memoir

Shlomo Venezia, a slave laborer at Auschwitz in 1944, survived the horror and went on to make a life for himself in Rome. His memoirs, Sonderkommando Auschwitz, have just been published. Here are a few excerpts from a Bloomberg interview with Venezia:

For eight months in 1944, he loaded the corpses of his fellow Jews into the Nazi ovens -- 12 hours a day, seven days a week, cadaver after cadaver until it became a mechanical task, like feeding a heating furnace with cords of wood.

``Men are animals,'' Venezia says, recalling in a conversation in his Rome clothing shop how he hardened himself. ``They resist things you can't ever imagine.''

[...]

He recalls, for example, the day he met his father's emaciated cousin in an undressing room at the gas chambers. Venezia offered him the only solace possible, he writes -- some sardines and a lie that the Zyklon B would kill him quickly.

``It was just terrible to have to lie, but there was no way around it,'' Venezia explains. ``I tried in some way to make the horrible situation easier.''