Henryk Mandelbaum was part of a small group of prisoners in the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz (Oswiecim) who were sent to clear the corpses of their fellow inmates from the floors of the gas chambers. Having hauled them out, they were forced to burn them in the four crematorium ovens. Later, as the pace of the killings quickened, they had to set them alight in ditches. With the penchant of totalitarian regimes to pervert language, they were given a military label and called Sonderkommandos (special units).

They were kept at it for 12 hours a day. At the height of the Nazi extermination fever, about 5,000 of Mandelbaum’s fellow Jews and other prisoners were gassed every working day. And it was the special duty of the Sonderkommandos to strip the corpses of wedding rings and other jewellery, and to extract gold tops from their teeth. For Mandelbaum the job was the more heartbreaking because his parents had been gassed at Auschwitz before his arrival there on April 22, 1944.

He had survived mass round-ups in the summer of l942 by going into hiding. While his family were transferred from the ghetto of Dombrowa Gornicza to the neighbouring one of Sosnowiec, Mandelbaum was able to escape. He was on the run for a year until betrayed by someone he had considered a friend. Because he was 21 and considered to be strong, he was recruited to the Sonderkommando within hours of his arrival at Auschwitz and made to live apart from most other prisoners.

Mandelbaum’s incarceration coincided with a major extension of the Auschwitz camp and its lethal pursuits. The railway that brought the deportees in their thousands was extended into the interior of the nearby Birkenau camp and ended near the entry to the five gas chambers. At the same time the size of the Sonderkommando was more than quadrupled from 200 to 900 to cope with the arrival and almost instant murder of 440,000 Hungarian Jews at the rate of about 10,000 a day.

“It was a death factory, unimaginable by any human standards, sheer hell,” Mandelbaum told the Polish film-maker Andrzej Wajda in a documentary made for the Spielberg Foundation in 2002. Within six months of his arrival in Auschwitz, the camp burst out into a rare revolt on October 4, 1944.

As a result most of the members of the Sonderkommando were forced into the gas chambers. Mandelbaum was an exception because he was still strong and in the eyes of his Nazi guards a seemingly tireless worker. When the Russians arrived to liberate the camp on January 27, 1945 Mandelabuam was one of the few original Sonderkommandos still alive.

In recent years he had plucked up courage to return to Auschwitz, tell the flood of visitors who flock there, particularly in the summer, of his experiences, and show them his Auschwitz number ,181,970, tattooed on his left lower arm. And on May 28, 2006, he was the only Jew among 32 survivors who met Pope Benedict XVI when he visited Auschwitz within weeks of his election as Supreme Pontiff.

Henryk Mandelbaum, Auschwitz survivor, was born in Olkusz, Poland, on December 15, 1922. He died in Bytom, Poland, on June 17, 2008, aged 85