The Holocaust Historiography Project

Karolinskij, Samij

Samij Karolinskij was a former Auschwitz inmate who claimed to have seen a gas chamber once. He was interrogated by a Soviet investigator on 22 February 1945 in Auschwitz, but there is little of essence to this deposition. Karolinskij was cutting up wood for the cremation furnaces and the fires, but entered a crematorium only once during a downpour, when he was allegedly permitted to find shelter from the rain in the gas chamber. There he met inmates of the Sonderkommando, who told him about the crematorium while allegedly being completely unsupervised by any guards. Such an event could have happened only if the inmates in that building were involved in completely innocuous activities. (See Mattogno 2021d, pp. 235f.)