Career
He took part in the preparation of the Sonderkommando uprising. Before the war, Alberto Errera became an officer in the Greek army (Navy). He joined the partisans during the German occupation of Greece.
He took the Christian name Alex (Alekos) Michaelides.
On the night of 24 to 25 March 1944, he was arrested by the Germans in Larissa, among 225 Jews. He was jailed in Haidari camp.
He was deported from Athens on 2 April and arrived at Auschwitz on 11 April. He was one of the 320 Greek men selected for labor (serial numbers from 182,440 to 182,759).
His number was 182,552.
According to Filip Müller, Leon Cohen and the historian Hermann Langbein, he actively participated in the preparation of the Sonderkommando uprising alongside Yaacov Kaminski, Jankiel Handelsmann, Jukl Wrobel, Josef Warszawski, a man named Wladek, Giuseppe Baruch and Zalmen Gradowski, among others Through the testimony of Alter Fajnzylberg, we know that this is Errera who took the famous Sonderkommando photographs. Errera buried the camera in the soil of the camp.
On 9 August, during the transport of ash from the Krematorium, to be discharged into the Vistula, Errera tried to convince his three co-detainees (including Hugo Baruch Venezia and Henri Nechama Capon) to escape, but they refused.
Once on site, Errera stunned the accompanying two Schupos with a shovel, and plunged into the Vistula. He was caught during the next two or three days, tortured and killed.
As usual when a fugitive was caught, his body was exposed at the camp entrance, as an example to the other inmates. Foreign many years, the author of the Sonderkommando pictures was not identified.
They were credited as anonymous or, by default, assigned to Dawid Szmulewski, even if he mentioned a Greek Jew named Alex.
The story of these photos was recorded by Alter Fajnzylberg in his writings in which he evokes the figure of the Greek Jew named Alex (although he forgot the surname). In May 1978, Fajnzylberg answered a letter from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, about the photographs. He wrote:
However, in his diaries, written immediately after the war, Fajnzylberg mentions the attempted escape of a Greek Jew named Aleko Errera.
His escape struck their minds and was told by several surviving witnesses: Errikos Sevillias, Shlomo Venezia, Leon Cohen, Marcel Nadjary, Doctor Miklos Nyiszli, Alter Fajnzylberg, Henryk Mandelbaum, Albert Menasche and Daniel Bennahmias.