Henryk Mandelbaum, one of the last survivors of a unit responsible for clearing corpses at the infamous Nazi death camp of Auschwitz in Poland has died at the age of 85. A Polish Jew, Mandelbaum spent the last months of the war working in the Auschwitz 'Sonderkommando' – a group of Jewish prisoners who the Nazis forced to empty the gas chambers after fellow Jews were gassed. Mandelbaum’s parents were among the more than 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, murdered in Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945. He was brought to the camp in April 1944 and immediately assigned by the Nazis to the Sonderkommando, where he witnessed the killing of an estimated 300,000 Hungarian Jews over the course of just two months.
"The world knew, but no one came to help us," he said in an interview at Auschwitz in June 2006 during a visit there by German-born Pope Benedict XVI. Mandelbaum spent decades teaching younger generations about what happened during the Holocaust. He gave guided tours of Auschwitz and spoke regularly to groups about his experience.
