Rating: 
Summary: Not for Use as an Introduction to Auschwitz
Review: Without considerable background knowledge, the picture Muller paints is barely comprehensible. The objective strength of his testimony may be lost on a reader who is new to Holocaust literature; unless one has worked through the emotional degradation of Auschwitz, personal feelings will cloud the impact of Muller's evenly paced prose. His work is a blueprint of the day to day existence of the most long-lived inmates of an extermination camp. He does not dwell on the inherent sadism of the overseer or the indomitable spirit of the doomed. He reports on the developing mundanity of circumstances that could not conceivably ever become mundane. Yet it is this sense of pervasive routine that allowed not only the horrors to be perpetrated, but also the prisoners to survive. This is not a chronicle of heroics in the typical fashion of the oppressed overcoming the insurmountable foe. There is no glory that can be attached to the destruction of Auschwitz; indeed, it must not be destroyed, but remembered. The fact that it existed at all would be trivialized if the SS guards and their cohorts were envisioned as depraved and inhuman: their inhumanity then would be inevitable. Muller, intentionally or not, brings mass murder down to the level of discussing the weather or purchasing a newspaper; precisely the attitude required to coax pregnant women into a gas chamber or examining their corpses for hidden valuables afterward. Muller's testimony is a handbook on the mechanics of survival.
Rating:
Summary: Not for Use as an Introduction to Auschwitz
Review: Without considerable background knowledge, the picture Muller paints is barely comprehensible. The objective strength of his testimony may be lost on a reader who is new to Holocaust literature; unless one has worked through the emotional degradation of Auschwitz, personal feelings will cloud the impact of Muller's evenly paced prose. His work is a blueprint of the day to day existence of the most long-lived inmates of an extermination camp. He does not dwell on the inherent sadism of the overseer or the indomitable spirit of the doomed. He reports on the developing mundanity of circumstances that could not conceivably ever become mundane. Yet it is this sense of pervasive routine that allowed not only the horrors to be perpetrated, but also the prisoners to survive. This is not a chronicle of heroics in the typical fashion of the oppressed overcoming the insurmountable foe. There is no glory that can be attached to the destruction of Auschwitz; indeed, it must not be destroyed, but remembered. The fact that it existed at all would be trivialized if the SS guards and their cohorts were envisioned as depraved and inhuman: their inhumanity then would be inevitable. Muller, intentionally or not, brings mass murder down to the level of discussing the weather or purchasing a newspaper; precisely the attitude required to coax pregnant women into a gas chamber or examining their corpses for hidden valuables afterward. Muller's testimony is a handbook on the mechanics of survival.
Rating: 
Summary: A memoir is a memoir......
Review: [...] This book is an essential eyewitness view of life as a sonderkommando, and how the Nazi establishment in Auschwitz killed three and & half million people, all in a historically unprecidented short period of time. Muller describes the "shower" facade, and the mechanics of destroying that many bodies.David Irving, the notorious holocaust denier, contends that the Nazis could not have killed eleven million, simply because of the amount of coke/charcoal needed to burn that many bodies. How did that happen in Auschwitz? Muller describes how Master Sergeant Otto Moll (who was in charge of the gas chambers) had the prisoners build large pits to burn an anticipated influx of Hungarians. These pits included brick "channels," which funneled the melted body fat from the fire into large cauldrens. The melted fat was then dumped back on top of the bodies, to encourage the fire & save on coal, fuel oil, and fire wood. There are dozens--if not hundreds--of books about Auschwitz. Many are better written than "Eyewitness." Just off the top of my head, Borowski's collection of short stories "This Way for the Gas, Ladies & Gentlemen," Wiesel's "Night," Levi's "Survival"--they have better writing. But none of those books grasp the enormity of the sonderkommando experience, because none of those three were in the sonderkommandos like Muller. Similarly, Steiner's "Treblinka" is a more complete picture of the origin and evolution of the gas chambers. But Muller writes what he saw--what he lived--in a way that is unbearably moving. If you want to get a picture of Auschwitz, read this book--and Sara Nomberg-Przuytyk's "Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land." All that said--let me get down from my high horse. Simply because a book is a holocaust memoir does not automatically make the book worth reading. For example, I found Frister's "The Cap: The Price of a Life" to be completely unreadable. I enjoyed it, but many people will also not care for Glazar's "Trap with a Green Fence: Survival in Treblinka." In fact (taking a deep breath & cringing a little) aside from "Night," I am not wild about Wiesel. I think for historical analysis, Simon Wiesenthal is more informative, and from a moral philosophy perspective, nothing Wiesel wrote can touch Primo Levi's "The Drowned & the Saved." This is a long way of my saying that while this book is not Shakespeare in its language, it is very readable--and very moving. This book is an important part of the history of the 20th century, and not one that can be replaced....even by a book as good as "Survival in Auschwitz."
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