Henryk Tauber

Henryk (Tauber) Fuchsbrunner (8 July 1917^[1] – 2000) was a Polish Jewish prisoner at Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp during the Holocaust, who gave detailed testimony at the end of World War II. Tauber was actually his mother's maiden name. His parents were married by a rabbi and never filed for a civil license due to quotas on the number of Jewish marriages in Galicia then under Austrian rule. Henryks father's name was Abraham Fuchsbrunner and Fuchsbrunner was the name that he was known by. Henryk Fuchsbrunner shortened his name to Henry Fuchs after he arrived in the United States in 1952.

Fuchsbrunner was one of five children. He lived with his extended family in Chrzanów in south Poland before the outbreak of war,

After several deportations, he arrived at the Kraków Ghetto. After avoiding capture by the German and Polish authorities for over 3 years, Fuchsbrunner was arrested in November 1942 and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Shortly after arriving at Auschwitz, he was selected for work in the Sonderkommando at the crematoria of the camp, where his specialised job of stoking the ovens with corpses probably ensured his survival.^[2]

Sonderkommando at Auschwitz

The Sonderkommando were generally Jewish prisoners hand chosen because of their health and age to work within the Krematoria in Auschwitz Birkenau. They were separated from the general population and put to work in one of the 5 Krematoria that existed between Jan 1943 and roughly January 1945 when the death marches east began. The work included dragging the already dead prisoners from the chambers after zyklon b was administered by the Nazi chemists to the ovens within the Krematoria, preparing them on rollers to be administered into the ovens, and stoking the ovens for burning. The work was gruesome and many sonderkommando did not make it past the first day. Once a prisoner was marked as a sonderkommando he was barred from leaving the krematoria and lived within, never given the opportunity to mix with the Auschwitz-Birkenau general population so as not to alarm the rest as to what transpired within the Krematoria. Each Krematoria was manned by SS rather than by Ukrainian or regular army. The average Sonderkommando lived roughly three months prior to their own extermination or death to illness.

Fuchsbrunner's participation in the Krematoria uprising Fuchsbrunner participated in the Krematoria uprising of 1944 where 3 of 23 SS soldiers were killed and a further 12 were wounded. Another source (Dragon) testified that Fuchsbrunner participated in the killing of no less than 5 SS guards stationed in Krematoria II before the uprising was put down. Fuchsbrunner later attained an assignment outside the krematoria before being returned to his position as stoker in Krematoria IV in late October 1944. He escaped again and for good 3 months later in January 1945.^[3]

Escape

When the camp began to be evacuated by death marches in January 1945, Fuchsbrunner escaped near Pszczyna.^[4] Fuchsbrunner is believed to have been among the, if not the, longest known surviving member of the Sonderkommando, having been forced to join in January 1943.

Fuchsbrunner's escape in January 1945 is written about in Gideon Grei'f's book, We Wept Without Tears. Fuchsbrunner and two other Sonderkommando inmates, brothers Shlomo and Abraham Dragon, escaped during a death march and subsequently commandeered a farmhouse taking 2 prisoners until their escape was made possible into the Russian zone.^[5]

On 24 May 1945, Fuchsbruner gave evidence at a Polish judicial enquiry in Auschwitz under Judge Jan Sehn.^[6] He was the only witness to give a precise and detailed description of the equipment and working of the crematoria and gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau.^[7] Pressac describes Fuchsbrunner's testimony as "head and shoulders" above any other given on the workings of the death camps and 95% accurate. In his May 1945 testimony, Fuchsbrunner was one of the first to mention the now infamous "Angel of Death" Josef Mengele, in his descriptions of the mass killings and administration of Zyklon B in the Auschwitz Krematoria.

His testimony, as well as his ability to survive for so long in the Sonderkommando - nearly 2 years when the average span of a Sonderkommando was about 3 months - is considered exceptional in every sense. Fuchs' is described by Pressac in his book Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers as a modest man who shied from the limelight and who gave testimony as objectively as possible, even on the brink of what the human mind could handle.

After the war, Fuchsbrunner's was able to free his brother Bendit Fuchsbrunner from the Soviet Union, where he was held since his escape to Russia from Poland during the first days of the German invasion. The two lived in Munich for seven years where they opened a leather business Die Brüder Fuchsbrunner Leder Herstellung. After selling the business, they arrived via the Liberté, a French flagged ship to the United States in 1952.

Fuchsbrunner died on January 3, 2000 at the age of 82; he was survived by his wife and 3 children.

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