Géza Röhrig

The actor had come to the Los Angeles Film Festival together with the film's director. After the screening, a member of the audience came up to Röhrig and asked him whether he would like to meet a real former member of the Sonderkommando. "There's one who lives several blocks from here," the man said. "Of course I want to meet him," Röhrig replied. Soon he was sitting with Dario Gabbai, who was deported with his family to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944. Of the appr. 2200 prisoners who were forced to work in the Auschwitz Sonderkommando, only about 90 to 110 survived the war. The Nazis usually killed most of them after a few months because they were eyewitnesses to the genocide, and would then replace them with new arrivals. Gabbai is believed to be the last remaining today. [Haaretz 2016].

But it wasn't God who rounded up the Jews and the Gypsies and the Soviet PoWs and the gays and the perfectly German mental patients and the perfectly German midgets and slaughtered them. We did it. The human family did it. I do not for one nanosecond like to pretend that God is off the hook. He could and should have stopped it at a much earlier stage. But I would not be able to get up from my bed in the morning, let alone pray, if I didn't fully believe that God somehow was there holding the hands of each and every Jew in the gas chamber - each and every Tutsi, Armenian, Kurd, Israeli, Palestinian who suffers unjustly. [2015]