Géza Röhrig

In February 2016, the New Yorker reported that before, during, and after filming Son of Saul, Géza Röhrig was employed as a shomer in a funeral home in Manhattan. In Jewish funereal ritual, a shomer is a person who sits with a body so that it is not left alone before a funeral; Röhrig's job also included participating in the ritual washing of the bodies before burial. The article said that when Röhrig started this job (in 2001), his salary was $10.00 an hour.

He published two collections of poems on the theme of the Shoah, "Hamvasztókönyv" (literally "Book of Incineration", 1995) and "Fogság" ("Captivity", 1997).

Géza Röhrig was born on May 11, 1967 in Budapest, Hungary.

The actor had come to the Los Angeles Film Festival together with the film's director. After the screening, a member of the audience came up to Röhrig and asked him whether he would like to meet a real former member of the Sonderkommando. "There's one who lives several blocks from here," the man said. "Of course I want to meet him," Röhrig replied. Soon he was sitting with Dario Gabbai, who was deported with his family to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944. Of the appr. 2200 prisoners who were forced to work in the Auschwitz Sonderkommando, only about 90 to 110 survived the war. The Nazis usually killed most of them after a few months because they were eyewitnesses to the genocide, and would then replace them with new arrivals. Gabbai is believed to be the last remaining today. [Haaretz 2016].