Lewental, Salmen

The story of Salmen Lewental resembles that of the manuscript allegedly written by a certain Leib Langfus. In this case, two containers were found in 1961 and 1962, respectively, both near the ruins of Crematorium III at Birkenau. The first find contained a diary of an unknown author kept in the Lodz Ghetto, plus six pages of comments on it by Lewental, who claims to have found the diary in Auschwitz. However, Lewental’s comments say nothing about any ongoing extermination activity, which is peculiar, especially in light of the second find, which presumably reports in detail about such activities. This consists of two set of manuscript from different authors, one by Lewental, the other one from an unknown author.

Since the manuscript of this second find was badly damaged, deciphering it was partly impossible, and partly required a lot of interpolations to bridge illegible passages. As a result, different translators have prepared divergent translations and interpretations, which drastically reduces the source value of these texts. From what is claimed about the texts’ contents, we can glean the following oddities:

• His transport of 2,300 Jews arrived at Auschwitz on 10 or 12 December 1942 with only 500 of them deemed fit for admission, while the rest was allegedly killed in a gas chamber. The train of this transport is said to have come via the rail line passing by Małkinia, which is right next to the Treblinka Camp. If the majority of these Jews indeed had been slated for extermination, then why were they hauled all across Poland, if most of them could have been dispatched right there at Treblinka?
• Although the passage describing a gassing scene is severely damaged, and only parts of it are barely legible, the scant information given of the makeshift gassing facility outside the Birkenau Camp resembles Langfus’s description. Like Langfus, the building described had only one gas-introduction opening, hence only one chamber, whereas the orthodoxy insists that the facilities in question each had several gas chambers and gas-introduction ports.
• Since not all victims could fit into the gas chamber, just as Langfus had claimed, some allegedly had to wait in a hut, although at that time there were allegedly two gassing bunkers in operation, each with several chambers, so plenty of capacity and no need to wait.
• Lewental, like Langfus, claims that there was only one pit for the cremation of the victims’ bodies, when in fact there were many, if we take other witnesses’ claims and the current orthodox narrative for granted. Furthermore, the pit was presumably 800 meters away from the gas chambers, which is highly unlikely.
• The gassing procedure allegedly lasted only “a few minutes.” Considering that there was no way of forcing the swift evaporation and dissipation of the gas in these makeshift facilities, this is highly improbable.
• Lewental then explains that he was admitted to the camp and deployed with various labor units, even one at the Buna–Monowitz Camp, and that he was transferred to the Birkenau Son­der­kom­man­do only on 25 January 1943. If that is so, how could he have become an eyewitness to the above-reviewed gassing of the 1,800 non-admitted Jews of his transport on 12 December 1942? The author must have made it up.
• Lewental, like Langfus, uses the term “bunker” for the makeshift gassing facility outside the Birkenau Camp. However, that term has not been used by any wartime source or witness, and was invented only toward the end of the war, meaning that this text was probably written long after the Auschwitz Camp was occupied by the Soviets (see Mattogno 2016f).
• A separate essay contains a dramatized description of the gassing of 3,000 registered female inmates in Crematorium III “at the beginning of 1944,” by throwing Zyklon B through “small upper doors.” There is no trace of such an event, and not even orthodox historians claim otherwise.
• Lewental claims that “we shall then have to burn a million of Hungarian Jews” and later that “half a million Hungarian Jews were burned in the meantime,” which are not only more than were ever deported, but moreover air photos refute the claim that massive open-air incinerations took place during the deportation of Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz.
• Lewental claims that the Son­der­kom­man­do members informed the Auschwitz resistance in detail of what was going on, but complains that they were not credited for having helped the resistance. This reveals this manuscript as a postwar fraud, because the resistance, throughout the war, disseminated the most-outrageous false and conflicting claims about Auschwitz, clearly showing that either they were not informed of what later was established to have happened (hence Lewental lied), or they ignored Lewental’s “facts,” and replaced them with lies (which is inconceivable), or nothing sinister was going on, and Lewental and his Son­der­kom­man­do friends reported nothing that could serve as atrocity propaganda. While we have a choice here, we have none for the next conundrum: How could Lewental know that he and his fellow Son­der­kom­man­do members were not credited for their cooperation to reveal the “truth”? That was only possible by reading what eventually reached the Polish government in exile in London, and what of it they published/archived. Lewental could have verified this only after his release/liberation, that is to say, after the war.

Just as the manuscript assigned to Langfus, this set of manuscripts evidently is also a postwar forgery.

(For details, see Mattogno 2021, pp. 119-217, 276-283.)