Shlomo Venezia

Shlomo Venezia was born in Thessaloniki in 1923. A member of the Italian-speaking Jewish community of Thessaloniki, he was deported in April 1944 at the age of 21 to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he became part of the Sonderkommando, of which he was one of the few survivors. These "special units" were tasked by the SS with emptying the gas chambers and burning the bodies of the victims before they themselves were killed after a few months of "service." By the end of the war, only a few dozen survivors remained, and very few spoke about this period, often only in fragments. Shlomo Venezia was one of the few people who could recount his entire story, this journey into the depths of an earthly hell. He died in Rome on October 1, 2012, at the age of 88.