By Alissa Sandford
When liberated by the Americans on May 6, 1945, Dabrio Gabbai was 23 years old and weighed 67 pounds – about as much as the average third-grader. But what lay beneath his skin and bones was somebody else; someone who witnessed indescribable horrors in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland, where he and his two cousins were conscripted by Nazis into forced labor. The nightmare started the moment the railroad cars pulled up to Auschwitz and German soldiers trucked his parents and his younger brother, Samuel, to their gassing deaths, then rapidly intensified when he was put to work in the camp’s crematories, hauling thousands of the dead from gas chambers to the furnaces, then shoveling the ashes of men, women, and children into the nearby Vistula river.
The adage that ‘time heals’ seems laughable in the face of such atrocity, and clearly Gabbai has not exorcised the demons behind his nightmares. Visiting campus on a recent afternoon at the invitation of CMC Holocaust scholars John Roth and Jonathan Petropoulos, Gabbai rested his face in his hands twice while talking with students, and quietly cried as he described, from a piece of paper with his careful notations, the events that unfolded during the nine months in 1944-45 that he was a sonderkommando at Birkenau. “It’s very emotional for me to tell my story,” Gabbai later explains. “But I have to do it. I want to educate people if I can.”
Petropoulos identified the relevancy of having Gabbai – the subject of the British documentary, Auschwitz: The Final Witness, to campus. “We’ve been reading the most recent scholarship on the subject of the Holocaust,” Petropoulos said. “There’s been so much outstanding work in the last few years that John Roth and I wanted to take advantage of that.” The majority of students had watched Gabbai’s documentary in class as part of their studies, and took notes as their visitor recounted his powerful witness.
Gabbai was born in Thessalonica, Greece, in 1922, to a Greek mother and an Italian father, and attended Italian schools there. On Sept. 5, 1943, weeks before he turned 22, the Germans took over his country, and all Greek Jews were forced to register at the synagogues. Within months, they were crammed into railroad cars with only a Red Cross pack to sustain them for the 11-day journey to Auschwitz. When Gabbai and his family were unloaded, he remembers vividly a German officer holding up two fingers to indicate which passengers would be immediately gassed, and which would be put to work.
Enlisted as a sonderkommando, that day he watched the first of thousands of Jews – men, women, and children – disrobe before being herded into a shower room built for 500, and gassed. “They were packed like sardines,” Gabbai recalled, holding his elbows at his sides to demonstrate. Fifteen minutes later, when the doors were reopened, he and his cousins moved the bodies into the crematories. “The first thing I did when I saw all these people,” said Gabbai, rubbing his forehead, “was go into shock. And what still bothers me is that inside of me is someone else; someone who had to take the bodies out of the gas chambers to the ovens.”
He figured it was only a matter of time before he and his cousins suffered the same fate. Nazis were replacing the sonderkommandos every six months because “we knew how the final solution was done,” he said. “Our work was nothing short of a nightmare . . . We knew that our fates were sealed and our days were numbered.” While inmates were fed meager rations of broth, Gabbai and his cousins were better off for their labor. “We were strong enough to do the job,” he says. “People brought us food every day.”
About 600,000 Jews were murdered while at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and by the day of liberation, Gabbai and his cousins were among the small cluster of several thousand survivors. In early January 1945 an order came from Berlin to stop the gassings and the Nazis began blowing up any signs of evidence of the camps. Remaining Jews were led by the Germans on a death march toward Austria. Gabbai recalls that it was snowing, and the temperature was 23 degrees below zero. Those who couldn’t walk were shot. Gabbai recalls that he managed to stay warm by thinking of “Athens in the sunshine.”
Arriving in Austria, the inmates were put to work excavating mines, “lifting 200-pound boulders” with their frail bodies. Gabbai says it was the Germans’ intention to walk Jews into the caves, then blow them up with dynamite. “But they did not have that chance,” he says, briefly closing his eyes. Interned at Ebensee, an Austrian concentration camp, Gabbai awoke one morning to find the camp empty; the Nazi officers had fled. He and inmates rummaged through what little food was left, finding some potatoes. “I boiled the potatoes and ate every hour, on the hour.”
A few months later in May, Gabbai, his two cousins, and the other surviving Jews were liberated– their survival nothing short of a miracle.
Gabbai, 79, a retired textile manager, now lives lives in Brentwood, where he says he finds catharthis through regular physical exercise, and when speaking with Roth and Petropoulos after class, he is able to laugh and joke about every-day occurrences. He is excited, for instance, about his brand-new e-mail account, and shares the address with CMC students so they can stay in touch.
Gabbai says he was happy to visit the College because he wants younger generations to know what he saw; and never forget what he survived. Ironically, he watches movies about the Holocaust as a way of understanding the motivations behind what occurred. Asked how he felt about Germans today, Gabbai says, “I don’t hate anybody. I can’t. The only thing you can do is communicate, and educate. Nobody knows what tomorrow will bring.”
Before class is dismissed, Professor Petropoulos asks Gabbai how the final solution affected him spiritually. Tragedy has been known to either deepen a person’s faith, or conversely, weaken it.
Gabbai shakes his head at the question. The answer is that watching thousands of Jews die all but crushed his faith in god. “I believe in something, but ---” Gabbai says, his voice trailing.
Looking around at students he quickly adds, “We are on this earth to love each other.”