Eyewitness Auschwitz

During the attempted extermination of the entire Jewish population, many Jewish prisoners were logical to assist in the killing of their own people. Sonderkommandos were a major part of this eradication. A sonderkommando aided in the disposal of the corpses that were victims to the gas chambers. Through the vivid testimony by Filip Muller, Eyewitness Auschwitz allows the reader to fully view the difficulties and graphic situations that occurred daily at Auschwitz. Filip Muller was born on January 3, 1922 in Sered, Czechoslovakia.In 1942 at the age of 20, he was deported to the death camp. He was one of the few Sonderkommandos to have survived Auschwitz. The memoir greatly details the resilience of the forgiving spirit, the choices individuals were faced with and decided to act upon and, the treatment of those who had succumbed. The personal choices that some made were extremely unmoral. Every twenty-four hour period we saw thousands and thousands of innocent people disappear up t he chimney. With our own eyes, we could truly fathom what it means to be a human being.There they came, men, women, children, all innocent. They suddenly vanished, and the world said nothing .. An example of an unmoral prisoner was the Kapo Mietek, who was swear to discipline the working prisoners. According to Muller, it was not necessary for Mietek to treat his fellow prisoners as human beings except rather beat them mercilessly to gain appreciation from the Nazi leaders. Another theme that Muller presents in his testimony is dehumanization of the camps victims.Approximately seventy percent of the prisoners that arrived at Auschwitz were immediately gassed. Their hair was shave and their bo break ups were exploited in order to find valuables for the Nazis economic gain. A memoir is by definition arecordofeventswrittenbyapersonhavingintimate knowledgeofthemand groundonpersonalobservation. While Filip Mullers testimony could be extremely accurate, it could as well as be extreme ly flawed. As a prisoner at a death camp-watching people die daily, it can weigh heavily on ones conscious.This in turn can shift ones memory and/or create an entire new memory that never happened. The severity of Mullers memoir could all be a figment of his imagination payable to the excited and physical stress and agony of being a prisoner although I extremely doubt that the harshness is compromised. Eyewitness Auschwitz is a key document of the Holocaust. It is published with an association of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which is highly renown. Eyewitness Auschwitz is a personal testimony of the hell that resided within the death camps.Filip Muller does an excellent line of merchandise of describing the daily activities of a Sonderkommando, which few lived to tell about. At times it is extremely difficult to read due to the graphic nature of the text. Muller discusses themes that the entire camp system was set on such as dehumanization and the immorality o f the soldiers as well as fellow prisoners. Filip Muller wrote a very effective book that reaches deep within the reader and wrenches on their emotions.