A couple of months before Auschwitz was liberated in January 1945, a Jewish prisoner secretly wrote a letter outlining the horrors he had witnessed there. He placed it in a thermos, the thermos in a leather pouch, and he buried it.
Now, for the first time, Marcel Nadjari’s words have been published in full.
Historian Pavel Polian told Deutsche Welle the letter is one of nine buried documents found at the concentration camp. He described them as “the most central documents of the Holocaust.”
The documents were written by Nadjari and four fellow members of the “Sonderkommando” unit, which was tasked with moving bodies from the gas chamber to the crematorium.
Nadjari’s letter, found in 1980, was written in his native Greek and is mostly illegible....
