Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps

by Yitzhak Arad

  Prisoners were usually given between twenty-five and fifty lashes with a special leather strap. The SS usually did the whipping; sometimes a Ukrainian was given the assignment. Frequently the prisoner had to count the number of lashes out loud, and if he made a mistake, or if he had no more strength to count, they would start over—from the beginning. There were prisoners who, gritting their teeth, took their lashes without a sound; others screamed to high heaven. There were instances of beatings of twelve- or fourteen-year-olds, and their screams shocked and terrified the prisoners standing on the sides. But the SS enjoyed it. As the screams grew louder and louder, Franz and Küttner—when they attended the roll call—enjoyed themselves all the more. When the whipping was over, the prisoner’s buttocks were a piece of bleeding meat. The prisoners who had no strength to return to the ranks after the whipping were taken straight to the Lazarett. Those who were still able to return to the ranks but who had no strength to go out to work the next morning were also taken to the Lazarett.

  SS Oberscharführer Karl Frenzel testified about the whipping of prisoners in Sobibor:

  During my year and a half stay in Sobibor, I frequently saw that the working Jews were whipped. The Jews had to bow down, and the Unterführers [SS men] ordered the Jewish capos to whip them. Usually they received between ten and twenty-five lashes. The working Jews attended the punishments in order to maintain camp discipline and as a deterrent. In most cases the Jews who were whipped were dressed.4

  Another form of punishment was “sports activities.” In Treblinka the prisoners who received punishments of this kind had to run in a circle and alternately drop to the floor and get up, and all the while the SS and the Ukrainians would whip them. The prisoners who had no strength to continue with this “exercise” were taken to the side. The “sports” would continue until all the weak had collapsed and had been removed from the circle of runners. With the completion of the “sports activities,” all those who had not been able to go on were taken to the Lazarett and put to death. The “activity” itself was a selection in which the strong survived and the weak were finished off. Frequently the Germans forced whole groups of prisoners to take part in these “sports activities” in order to weed out the weak and have them taken to the Lazarett. Young, strong workers from recent transports replaced those who had been killed. Usually Kurt Franz or Küttner were present at the “sports activities” and observed with obvious pleasure.

  Shmuel Wilenberg writes about the whipping and “exercises” that he and a building team foreman endured after a barrack wall on which they had been working collapsed:

  At the evening roll call we were called out of the ranks. My punishment was fifty lashes and the foreman was ordered to run around the square. The poor man had to run, lie down, and then get up at the order. All the while he was given kicks and lashes. After a quarter of an hour of this “pleasure” he was returned to the ranks. Then the hangmen turned to me, they tied me to a wooden horse and gave me fifty strong blows. They made me count them. I writhed with pain because they struck me in the area of my kidneys and spine, where I had suffered wounds previously which hadn’t healed for many months. The next day I felt the results. During the day my fever reached 40 degrees [centigrade]. Horrible pains in my hips prevented me from making any movement. I couldn’t even think about going out to work. . . . My friend Bohem found me a corner in the infirmary. He camouflaged me nicely with blankets and covered me. That’s how I remained until the evening. From time to time Germans came into the hut, but, my luck, no one spotted me. If they had discovered me I wouldn’t have escaped them, and no doubt they would have finished me off with a bullet.5

  The whipping, the “sports,” and the killing were all part of the routine of the evening roll call. The prisoners had to stand and watch the selections, the whipping, and the “sports” until the end. After the orchestra, under the direction of Artur Gold, was established, when the whipping was finished they would play marches and the choir would sing. At the end of the roll call, all the prisoners had to sing the “Treblinka Anthem,” and only then was the “Dismissed!” order given. The prisoners finally could return to their quarters. The “barracks elder” would then assign sleeping places to prisoners who had just arrived.

  There was no shower in the area of the living quarters, and the prisoners had no opportunity to wash or shower for months at a time. The limited amount of water that they were rationed was hardly enough to quench their thirst, let alone for washing. In the routine and daily life of the prisoners, no time was even set aside for washing. In testimonies that prisoners gave in great detail about the routine and life in the camps, there is barely a mention of cleanliness and washing. Conditions such as these all but invited disease and epidemics.

  Food in the Camps

  The food that was distributed to the prisoners in the camps was very meager, and it was difficult to live on it for an extended period of time—especially since we are talking about people who were put to work at hard labor for many hours of the day. For breakfast the prisoners received a cup of warm water, which was supposed to be coffee, with 150 to 200 grams of frequently stale bread. For lunch they were given soup with some unpeeled potatoes; sometimes this meal also included horse meat. In the evening they got only coffee.

  In Treblinka during the period of almost daily transports, until December 1942, the prisoners were able to help themselves to the food that the transportees had brought with them. In the parcels of those who were taken to the gas chambers were substantial quantities of food, since the deportees thought they were being taken to work camps in the East. The packages usually included bread, potatoes, meat, butter, and other foodstuffs. Although the prisoners were ordered to transfer everything to the camp authorities, the SS became resigned to the fact that some of the large quantity of food that was brought into the camp by the deportees remained for the prisoners. There was therefore never a scarcity of food during the period of the transports, and the prisoners were not hungry. In December, however, as the frequency of the transports subsided, the SS men and Ukrainians took for themselves all the food that was brought into the camp, and the prisoners were forbidden to take any of it. Prisoners caught with a single piece of bread were executed. When the transports for extermination stopped, the Jewish prisoners began starving and had to make do with the meager portions that the Germans distributed. One of the prisoners describes the hunger:

  From day to day our meager rations were reduced. Food was distributed only once a day, in the evening. Every man received six cooked potatoes with the peels still on them. In addition, they distributed a slice of bread which was for the morning and which we were not allowed to eat until then. As we twisted and turned on the bunks at night, our insides were so empty that we couldn’t stop thinking about that slice of bread until we broke off a piece of the bread that tasted like clay and smelled like a sick animal. There were those who gobbled up the entire piece but who were still hungry afterward. What’s more, in the morning they could expect harsh punishment as well.6

  The hunger brought on trade and speculation in food. Money, gold, and other valuables that the prisoners took from the clothes and belongings of the murdered were used to buy food. Trade in food, on a limited scale, went on in the camps during the entire time, even when food was relatively plentiful. During those times the prisoners would buy special foods like salami, canned goods, alcoholic drinks, and cigarettes. But when the hunger set in, they bought anything they could get their hands on: bread, potatoes, fat, sugar, and so on. Then the prices soared: they would have to pay gold rubles for a loaf of bread or tens of dollars for a half pint of vodka. The middlemen in the food trade were the Ukrainian guards: the Jewish prisoners paid, and the Ukrainians brought in food from the villages around Treblinka. Sometimes food smuggling was done with the cooperation of the Ukrainians and the prisoners in the forest group or camouflage group who worked outside the camp.

  A prisoner who was caught with smuggled food, or with money or valuab
les that he intended to trade for food, paid with his life. The SS men kept a close watch over the buyers and sellers of food. In testimonies about Treblinka, there are even stories of Jews who for the slightest favors or for additional food would be willing to inform on their friends. Informers of this kind were known to all the prisoners. One of them, (Ye)Chezkel, had the position of “official informer,” and that was his job in the camp. He would go through the camp following the prisoners, who were as wary of him as of a German. Another informer was Kuba, who officially was a “barrack elder.” Shmuel Wilenberg writes:

  Certain informers were executed by the prisoners. It was done at night when the entire camp was deep in sleep. Four men would approach the informer, throw a blanket over his head, tie a rope to one of the roof beams and hang the accused. In the morning, when the SS men would see the hanging man, they would not be surprised, for it was a frequent sight—many people would commit suicide by hanging or by swallowing poison.7

  Other testimonies of prisoners in Treblinka contain no mention of the killing of informers.

  Despite the efforts of the SS personnel and despite the executions that were carried out, the trade in and smuggling of food in Treblinka never stopped; it continued during the entire period that the camps functioned.

  In testimonies from Belzec and Sobibor there is no mention about food smuggling.

  Lavatories and “Scheissmeister”

  Throughout the day the prisoners were under the careful watch of the SS, the Ukrainians, and the capos. Theirs was a day of perpetual work and motion, and woe to anyone who stopped to rest. Anyone who slowed down would be whipped on the spot or recorded by the capo or the SS man in charge for “treatment” at the evening roll call. The only place the prisoners were able to sit quietly for any amount of time without being watched was in the lavatories. There were only a few toilets in the camps, but the prisoners—and especially the weak and sick among them who continued working only out of fear that if they stopped working they faced certain death—found the only place for a short rest was in the lavatories. In general the Jewish capos were considerate of the sick and looked the other way during their frequent visits and long stays in the lavatories. During the winter that the typhus epidemic spread through Treblinka, the toilets became the main rest area.

  In Treblinka, Küttner began noticing the “exaggerated” use of the toilets by the prisoners and, to put a stop to it, he appointed a Jewish supervisor over every toilet; these supervisors were given the title Scheissmeister (“shit master”). For their entertainment, the Germans dressed the Scheissmeister in a special outfit: the clothes of a rabbi and an eight-cornered cantor’s turban. He had to wear a large alarm clock around his neck and carry a whip. He was also ordered to grow a Vandyke beard. He would have to make certain that the prisoners did not stay in the toilet for more than two minutes and that there should be no more than five people in the lavatory at a time. It was the duty of the Scheissmeister to chase out those who dallied. A prisoner who did not obey the Scheissmeister was registered and his number was submitted to Küttner.

  Thus the lavatories, which had been the only place where the prisoners had found some semblance of peace, turned into yet another place of hardship and torture.

  Night in the Camp; A Time of Rest and Reflection

  At nine in the evening, the prisoners were locked into their barracks. Shortly thereafter, the lights were turned out and night fell on the camp. In Belzec the lights were turned out half an hour after nightfall, and the prisoners were not even allowed to talk with one another. In Treblinka lights-out was usually at 21:00 and in Sobibor at 22:00.8

  The night hours in the huts were the only time that the prisoners were able to rest, relax a bit, collect themselves and their thoughts, with no Germans or Ukrainians spying on them. Wilenberg describes night in Treblinka:

  We would welcome the night and the few hours of relative quiet that we had for sleeping. Sleep allowed us to forget the harsh life in the camp, dulled our suffering and sometimes transported us to a dreamland where everything was fantasy. But usually nightmares came to haunt us, actually they were the impressions of what we had seen during the day. Because we were suffering from sickness and weakness from hunger and hard labor, into our sleep came all kinds of weird thoughts, extraordinary notions that, combined with the hallucinations that ruled our subconscious, expressed themselves in nightmares and horrible dreams. Sometimes the stillness of night was broken by a sigh or scream; sometimes by the muffled cough of someone suffering from tuberculosis, or someone snoring loudly. Here and there someone would wake up, let out a juicy curse, punch his noisy neighbor, and then fall back to sleep—which was more of a snatched nap. But there were also nights with no sleep, full of work, beatings, and endless running.9

  For the new prisoners who had just arrived in the latest transports, the first night in the camp was a time for reflection and a bit of unwinding from the shock they had experienced from the moment they had arrived in the camp. Yechiel Reichman tells of such a night in Treblinka:

  We came into the hut, which was so full to capacity that people were lying on the floor. I looked at my friend Leibel, and he looked at me, and our tears poured down like rain. We asked each other: “Why the tears?” I couldn’t answer. I wasn’t able to talk. We tried to encourage and calm each other. “Leibel,” I said to him, “yesterday at this time my little sister was still alive.” And he answered, “And my whole family, my relatives, and 12,000 poor Jews from our city.” And we were alive, spectators to this great calamity, and we became like stone, so that we could eat and carry with us this great pain. Where did this unnatural strength to keep going come from? Among the people in the hut we suddenly saw Moshe Ettinger from our city. He embraced us with bitter tears. After he calmed down somewhat, he told us how he had been saved. . . . Now he was crying and could not forgive himself for remaining alive while his wife and son had died. We were like drunkards. Yesterday all who were close to me were still alive, and today—everyone was dead. I was crying over my fate, what had become of me. At that moment I saw in the corner of the hut the poor people who had remained alive standing and praying the Afternoon and Evening Services, and then, with tears in everyone’s eyes, reciting the Kaddish. . . . The time is nine o’clock. The hut is locked. The lights are put out. We lie down with our pain. . . . At five in the morning we are awoken by the signal to get up and we are torn from the night and sleep. . . .10

  The morning had ushered in another routine day, another day of suffering.

  In their testimonies, the former prisoners do not speak too much about the nights in the camps. The difficult and unending experiences that occurred during the day completely overshadowed the nights, which usually passed uneventfully.

  In spite of the hell they lived in, which became their daily existence, those who survived continued to go through this routine and, to a certain extent, even got used to it. Dov Freiberg says:

  It is difficult for me to explain what happened to us—how we could continue to live. I remember in the beginning, when a transport arrived, we wanted to die. But later, after some time, transports arrived, and we were sitting and eating. Even the suicides stopped, and those who did commit suicide were the newcomers who were not yet used to living in this inferno. All this in spite of the fact that we knew that our end would also be cremation in Camp III. If someone among us looked a little better than the others, we used to tell him jokingly, “You’ll burn better because of your fat. . . .”11

  Daily Life

  The conditions under which the prisoners were kept in the camps, the daily selections, the torture and punishment, the hunger and disease, all contributed to the fact that the average time that a Jewish prisoner remained alive in the camps was a few months at most. Only a few survived for longer periods. Those who entered the camp around the time of its establishment and lasted until the final stages of the camp’s existence can be counted on one hand.

  The constant turnover in the prisoner ranks,
the daily executions and replacement with new arrivals from transports that came from different cities and countries retarded the growth of personal contact and deeper ties among the prisoners. That hardly anyone knew anyone else was a deterrent to establishing close relationships. It also protected the prisoners from future emotional hurt in the event of a death of a friend. Rudolf Reder, from Belzec, writes about this:

  We were one mass. I knew a few names, very few. It was meaningless for me to know who a man was or what his name was. I know that the doctor was a young man from the Przemysl area; his name was Jakubowitz. I knew a tradesman from Cracow; his name was Schlussel, and his son. Another Jew from Czechoslovokia, Ellbogen, and the cook Goldschmidt from the famous restaurant in Karlsbad, “The Hanicka Brothers.” No one was interested in the other. We went on with our horrible lives in a purely mechanical way.12

  This description relates to Belzec, but the situation was similar in the other camps, especially until a permanent prisoner work staff was maintained. During a later period, in 1943, in Sobibor and Treblinka, when the frequency of the transports lessened, despite the problem of food, some aspects improved, some of the previous tension subsided, and the prisoner population became more stabilized. Then personal ties and meetings between the prisoners became a more natural occurrence.