the undressing rooms at Auschwitz were larger than the gas chambers

I was re-reading a previous blog post that I wrote about the great escape from an Auschwitz gas chamber by Irene Zisblatt, one of the Holocaust survivors featured in Spielberg’s “The Last Days,” when I realized that I had made a terrible mistake. In writing my previous post, I had assumed that Irene would have gotten stuck in the undressing room door, not in the gas chamber door. Now I realize that Irene’s story makes sense. She would not have gotten stuck in the undressing room door because the undressing rooms of both Krema II and Krema III had a greater capacity than the gas chambers in these buildings.

Ruins of Krema III show the undressing room in the foreground and the ruins of the gas chamber on the right

Zisblatt’s story is that she was flung out of the gas chamber in Krema III after she got stuck in the door because the room was too full, and then she was saved when she was tossed over a 10 ft. barbed wire fence, by a Sonderkommando, into an open railroad car that was headed to the Neuengamme camp in Germany.

Old photo of Krema III surrounded by a 10 ft. fence

Note how close the railroad tracks are to the Krema III gas chamber building, shown in the photo above.