Karvat, David

David Karvat was a Czech Jew who claimed to have been a member of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando for an entire (unspecified) year. In January 1947, he deposited an account in Italy about his alleged experiences. However, his description is both short and devoid of any details. He neither describes the gas chambers, the crematoria, the furnaces, nor the gassing or cremation procedure, although he claims to have worked there a full year. He does not even mention which of the four crematoria he worked in, or how many there were.

He claims that not all of the claimed 500-600 Italian victims whose gassing he purports to have experienced were gassed at once — which makes no sense, as the chambers presumably in existence could have easily accommodated the entire batch. Instead, they were split into two groups, one of which had to wait in a (non-existent) place separated by a wall and some buildings. The claimed criterion to select the victims is also purely fictitious: The SS killed young, strong men because they were immediately qualified as lazy in character and therefore unfit for work. However, Karvat knew better, because he had a buddy among the SS who told him the real reason: they were killed because they were Jews loyal to the Italian king — who was also a Jew — and who planned to overthrow Mussolini. None of it was real.

After experiencing this gassing, Karvat was… not killed as a year-long witness to mass murder, but merely transferred to a different job. That’s also why he could not tell more stories like this, despite his one-year membership in the Sonderkommando club.

Since he gave this interview to an Italian historian, the whole story, which focuses entirely on one transport of Italian Jews deported to Auschwitz, was not based on facts and memory, but evidently geared toward pleasing and satisfying the interviewer and his audience. (See Mattogno 2022e, pp. 180-182.)