Dario Gabbai

David Dario Gabbai (September 2, 1922 – March 25, 2020) was a Greek-Italian Sephardi Jew and Holocaust survivor, notable for his role as a member of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz. He was deported to the camp in March 1944 and put to work in one of the crematoria at Birkenau, where he was forced to assist in burning the bodies of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews that were deported to the camp during the spring and summer of that year.

Gabbai remained at Auschwitz until its evacuation in January 1945. He was liberated from Ebensee concentration camp in Austria by the United States Army, and spoke publicly about what he witnessed and experienced during the Holocaust. He was the last of the known survivors of the Sonderkommando.

Deportation Gabbai was born in Thessaloniki to a Greek mother and an Italian father and was educated in Italian schools in Greece. At the age of 21 years old, Gabbai and his entire family were detained by the Nazis on March 24, 1944, and on April 1 they were sent to Auschwitz in cattle wagons. Ten days later, this transport arrived at the Judenrampe outside Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they faced the selection process. He and the three other young men were selected to be Sonderkommandos and quarantined in Block 13 (known as the Sonderkommando-Block) in the men's camp of Birkenau for approximately one month.

Sonderkommando work Gabbai was taken to Crematorium II. As a member of the Sonderkommando, he found himself the closest to the extermination process and states to be one of 35 Greek men selected for that role, and was with his cousins and brother the whole time.

Gabbai's duties included helping the men, women, and children selected for gassing to get undressed, moving their dead bodies out of the gas chamber onto an electric lift which would bring them up to the ground floor where the ovens were located, and loading the bodies into the oven portals. While helping those selected to get undressed, one of the Sonderkommando members' duties was to maintain the pretence that they would merely be showered. Gabbai said that there were instances where the victims knew that something was suspicious about their fate, that "something funny was going on", but nothing could be done. In one instance, Gabbai recognized two of his friends from Thessaloniki, explained to them the reality of what was going to happen and told them where to stand in the gas chamber so that they would be killed as quickly as possible. Gabbai heard children and their mothers crying and scratching the walls of the gas chamber as they died. He would also have to turn the bodies in the oven portals to ensure they burned evenly and grind up the bones that would not disintegrate from cremation. Gabbai states that it was snowing and the temperature was , and that many died en route; in addition, those who could no longer keep up would be shot. Auschwitz: The Nazis and the 'Final Solution', a 2005 BBC six-episode documentary film series, and also makes an appearance in the 1998 Steven Spielberg Holocaust documentary, "The Last Days".

Gabbai was also featured in a 2010 documentary film, Finding Nico, about the Greek-American actor, Nico Minardos. Gabbai and Minardos met while emigrating from Greece to the States after the war and became close friends and roommates in Los Angeles in the 1950s. Gabbai was reunited with Minardos while attending a special screening of the documentary at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital, where Minardos was convalescing after a stroke.

Gabbai died on March 25, 2020, in Los Angeles, at the age of 97.