by Nicholas Chare & Dominic Williams

Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams are the authors of Matters of Testimony: Interpreting the Scrolls of Auschwitz and recently published an article about the book on Slate’s blog, The Vault.
 
The Hungarian director László Nemes was moved by writings known as the Scrolls of Auschwitz to create the award-winning film Son of Saul. The Scrolls of Auschwitz comprise a variety of documents composed by members of the Sonderkommando, or Special Squad, a group of predominantly Jewish prisoners who were tasked with running the crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau. These writings were buried in the grounds of the crematoria in 1944. Between 1945 and 1980, eight caches of documents by five known authors were recovered. The writings have retrospectively become known as the Scrolls of Auschwitz, as this is how the historian Ber Mark’s book Megiles Oyshvits, which transcribes several of the manuscripts, was translated into English in 1985.

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