Filip Müller

Filip Müller (born 1922, Sered, Czechoslovakia) was one of very few prisoners to have survived Auschwitz, the largest Nazi German extermination camp. He witnessed the exterminations and gassings of millions of Jews and lived to write one of the key documents of the Holocaust. Published in 1979, Müller's Eyewitness Auschwitz - Three Years in the Gas Chambers was his first-hand account of the events behind the walls in the Auschwitz camps.

He was brought up into a country with increasing Nazi propaganda, where it was not long until tens of thousands of Jews were deported out of Czechoslovakia into the Auschwitz camps in Poland. In April 1942, Filip Müller, who was only twenty years old, came with one of the earliest transports to Auschwitz and was given "Prisoner Number 29236". Assigned to work in the construction of crematoriums and installation of gas chambers, Müller witnessed "the families, the townships and the cities of Jewish people come", and was ordered burn the dead bodies in crematories. His extraordinary situation of cremating corpses was the only reason the Nazis kept him alive. Müller and other workers had no choice but to do what they were told, as there was no choice since the Nazis would never let them free to reveal the secrets of their mass gassings and cremations.

The arrivals of innocent men, women and children who entered Auschwitz each day was something that Müller could not have avoided, and yet he continued to pretend to them that they were somewhere safe as he led them to the gas chambers. His role after the mass gassings was to enter the chambers with other workers and strip bodies of their clothes. These clothes were then disinfected and any valuables found in them were given to SS officials.

After realizing what he was doing to the thousands of Jews each and every day for nearly three years, Müller admitted in his book that he did try to commit suicide by trying to enter the gas chambers himself. In his book, he recounted a story of how he saw a group of countrymen singing the Hatikvah and the Czech national anthem before they entered the gas chamber. He decided to join the group but before he entered the gas chamber, a woman said to him: "So you want to die? But that's senseless. Your death won't give us back our lives. That's no way. You must get out of here alive, you must bear witness to our suffering and to the injustice done to us." Despite the horrific actions that he had no alternative but to participate in, Müller realized that he had to stay alive because he and other workers were the only survivors that had to live and tell the real story behind the Holocaust.

Until January 1945, Müller worked as a prisoner in the Sonderkommando and was liberated in May 1945. Since 1969, Müller has lived in Western Europe.

Müller lived to testify at the Auschwitz Trial in Frankfurt in 1964, and his testimony was published as one chapter of The Death Factory, a Holocaust documentation in 1966.

Published works

Müller, Filip (1999) [1979]. 'Eyewitness Auschwitz - Three Years in the Gas Chambers. trans. Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. and Susanne Flatauer. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee & in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. p. 180. ISBN 1-56663-271-4. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |accessyear=, |origmonth=, |accessmonth=, |month=, |chapterurl=, and |origdate= (help)

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