In Memoriam: Filip Müller

Abstract

No one who has heard Filip Müller's voice can forget it. That voice was immortalized in the recording (released in 2004) of the first Frankfurt Auschwitz trial and in Claude Lanzmann's 1985 original documentary film, Shoah. In Lanzmann's masterpiece, Müller monumentalized the tragic murder of women and children in the Theresienstadt family camp on March 8–9, 1944. His moving fit of weeping and his futile request that the filmmaker turn off the camera was one of the most unforgettable and evocative scenes in the entire film—a scene that prompted a number of people to devote their attention to the Auschwitz factory of death. Filip Müller and his moving 1979 report Sonderbehandlung: Drei Jahre in den Krematorien und Gaskammern von Auschwitz (Special Treatment: Three Years in the Crematoria and Gas Chambers of Auschwitz, published in the United States as Eyewitness Auschwitz) have shaped generations of Auschwitz researchers. This was the first German-published memoir of an eyewitness who had experienced mass killings in the Auschwitz-Birkenau crematoria and gas chambers—in this case, over a period of 19 months—as a prisoner in the Jewish Sonderkommando and Krematoriumskommando. It is also the only report by a surviving former prisoner of the Sonderkommando to cover his entire experience in the camp system—32 months for Müller—and the first literary attempt at an overview of the history of the Sonderkommando. In terms of content, Müller's work is in no way inferior to those of other well-known chroniclers such as Salmen Gradowski, Salmen Lewenthal, and Lejb Langfuss.