Maximilian Schön

This photo shows my brother-in-law Maximilian Schön in a Czechoslovak army uniform. Maximilian joined up during the First Republic, and after finishing army service worked as a vulcanizer. The photo was taken in Michalovce in the 1930s. My brother-in-law Maximilian, or Mishi, a healthy, strong fellow, got into the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz, which means that he carried the dead from the gas chambers to the crematoria and put them onto the grates. One day he got my oldest sister, his sister-in-law, Malvinka, to cart over. Then he had to cart over his dead brother, Eugen. One day he got his own wife, Sarika, to take over. That finished him off, as two people told me independently of each other. The Sonderkommando were preparing to bring in explosives and blow up the crematorium sky-high. But one fellow prisoner, a Pole, betrayed them. The Germans burned that Pole alive. They said that anyone who betrays his own will betray them as well. On the basis of the Pole's testimony they then hung my brother-in-law and the others.