A poignant reminder of the ways enslaved Jews and others were forced to destroy their families and fellow prisoners

In The Holocaust Odyssey, Rebecca Fromer leads us through the experiences of Danny Bennahmias, a Greek Jew of Italian citizenship whose forced labor as a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz included the disentangling of hundreds of thousands of gassed men, women, and children. The book is the result of a diligent collaboration. As it unfolds, it becomes a poignant reminder of the manner in which enslaved Jews and others were forced to destroy their families and fellow prisoners. It is a story of human decency, the spark of which remains against all odds.
 

Rebecca Camhi Fromer is co-founder of the Judah L. Magnes Museum and a writer in Berkeley, California.
 
Steven B. Bowman is professor and Acting Director of Judaic Studies, University of Cincinnati.
 

“Beautifully written . . . a welcome addition to the study of human degradation in the Nazi concentration camps. What makes this book especially important is that it is the eyewitness story of Daniel Bennahmias, who was a member of the Sonderkommando—people relegated to the most horrible duty of any concentration camp inmates, that of removing freshly gassed bodies from the gas chambers at Auschwitz, where four gas chambers often exterminated 10,000 people per day.”
—International Society for Yad Vashem
 

“The horrors that a young Sephardic Jew named Daniel Bennahmias was forced to endure seem incomprehensible . . . his story and the saga of the others in the special command have long been shrouded in mystery. The work of the Sonderkommando was a closely guarded secret.”
—Jewish Bulletin
 

“Bennahmias’s brief, harrowing memoir is about remembering and forgetting as much as it is about experience. . . . [W]e come to understand the Holocaust as it was: outside such human constructs as our familiar value systems and meaning-making language.”
—Academic Library Book Review