* something of a theoretician: Kurt Franz’s rank was the equivalent of second lieutenant. Although officially deputy to Hauptsturmführer Franz Stangl (camp commandant from September 1942 to August 1943), Franz was effectively in charge of the day-to-day running of the camp. Young and handsome, with a round, almost babyish face, he was nicknamed Lalke (Yiddish for “doll”). He was, however, a sadist, and many accounts of Treblinka mention his vicious dog. According to Rajchman, Franz would order Barry, “Man, bite that dog!” [Rajchman] In 1959, in Düsseldorf, Franz was arrested. During a search of his apartment, police found a photograph album labeled “The Best Years of My Life” (Die schönsten Jahre meines Lebens), which contained pictures of the camp, of Stangl, of Barry, of the excavator, etc. [Chrostowski, 103]. In 1965, in Düsseldorf, Franz was sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in an old people’s home in Wuppertal on July 4, 1998.
* of spectators: Henry Noel Brailsford was a left-wing British journalist and the author of Our Settlement with Germany (1944). He was in no sense a defender of Hitler. He had, however, been one of the relatively few left-wing writers in Britain to criticize the Soviet show trials—and this had made him unpopular with the Soviet authorities. Grossman seldom repeats Soviet propaganda so unthinkingly.
* the entire staff of his Vatican: The intensity of Grossman’s venom may seem startling. Recent research, however, suggests that his criticism of the pope is justified. Susan Zuccotti has established that, during the Holocaust, Pope Pius XII and the Vatican knew what the Nazis were doing yet chose to keep silent [Susan Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000)]. Sereny also discusses the culpability of the pope and the Vatican [Sereny, 64–77, 140–42, and 277–86].
* stabbing an SS officer: On September 10 or 11, 1942, Meir Berliner, a citizen of Argentina, jumped out from the ranks of the prisoners and stabbed Max Bialas with a knife. Berliner and at least ten other prisoners were shot on the spot; Bialas died en route to the military hospital, and another 160 prisoners were shot in reprisal. The Wachmänner’s barracks were then named the Max Bialas Barracks.
* no one can honor it: These stories are exaggerated, but some parts, at least, are confirmed by other sources. [For example, see Samuel Willenberg, Surviving Treblinka (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 127; and Wiernik, in Donat, 172.] Rajchman records that, on November 10, 1942, a transport of Jews from Ostrowiec was—unusually—forced to enter the gas chambers at night. A group of thirty or forty men resisted. Naked, they fought with their fists before being brought down by automatic rifles.
* Majdanek, Sobibor, and Bełzec: Christian Wirth, the gassing expert, had aimed at the destruction of 25,000 people a day, but this proved impossible [Donald James Wheal and Warren Shaw, Dictionary of the Third Reich (London: Penguin, 2002), 288]. Aktion Reinhard was evidently imbued with a sense of manic urgency at every level—from that of strategic planning to that of the day-to-day running of the camps. According to Mark Mazower, “A sense of excitement and urgency coursed among those charged with the secret killing, and they felt under constant pressure to accelerate it and finish before the news leaked out. Globocnik believed that ‘the whole Jewish action should be carried out as quickly as possible to avoid the danger of one day finding ourselves stuck in the middle of it in the event of difficulties forcing us to halt the action.’ Victor Brack, a leading figure in the programme, noted that Himmler himself wanted them to ‘work as fast as possible if only for reasons of concealment.’” [Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire (London: Penguin, 2008), 386.] Himmler told Wirth that he expected him and his men to be “inhuman to a superhuman degree” (Ich mute ihnen Übermenschlich-Unmenschliches zu). [In Donat, 273.]
* with the help of straps: There was indeed a period during which the bodies were taken to the grave pits by trolleys pushed along a narrow-gauge track. This system, however, proved impractical; the Totenjuden went back to carrying the corpses on stretchers. [This information available at www. deathcamps.org/treblinka/treblinka.html.]
* on an industrial scale: There are no other accounts of the use of steam or pumps to remove the air from the chambers. According to Rajchman, however, “On days when they had been warned by the Extermination High Command in Lublin that there would be no transport arriving the following day, the executioners, out of pure sadism, left people shut in the gas chambers until they died from suffocation, simply from lack of air.” [Rajchman.]
* a single human being: Arad writes: “When the doors were opened, all the corpses were standing; because of the crowding and the way the victims grasped one another, they were like a single block of flesh.” [Arad, 86.] Rajchman, himself one of the Totenjuden, writes, “This compression results from people being terrorized and pressed against one another when they are forced to enter the gas chamber. They hold their breath in order to squeeze in. After suffocation and the death agony, the bodies swell up and so the corpses form a single mass.” [Rajchman.]
* breathing for longest: In Auschwitz, at least, where the Germans used Zyklon B rather than carbon monoxide, children and weaker people fell to the ground, while those who were stronger climbed over them, trampling and crushing them as they tried instinctively to claw their way to the more breathable air up above.
* important Gestapo officials: Himmler visited Aktion Reinhard headquarters and the death camps of Sobibor and Treblinka in late February or early March 1943. By this time, nearly all the Jews of Poland had been exterminated, and Auschwitz-Birkenau had, in any case, greatly increased its killing capacity. Sobibor and Treblinka had fulfilled their purpose.
* far away on the Volga: It seems that Himmler had always intended the corpses to be cremated and that, during this visit, he merely reiterated a previous order that the camp command had failed to carry out [Arad, 167]. Grossman may, however, be right in a broader sense. Arad writes: “In January 1944, the question of hiding his crimes began to bother Globocnik, whereas a year and a half earlier, in August 1942, when asked by visiting SS officers whether it would not be better, for reasons of secrecy, to cremate rather than to bury the corpses...Globocnik had answered, ‘We ought, on the contrary, to bury bronze tablets stating that it was we who had the courage to carry out this gigantic task.’” [Ibid., 376.] It has been suggested that it was the German discovery of the mass graves of Katyn that made Himmler decide to cover up traces of Nazi crimes. (In 1940 the Soviet NKVD had shot about 22,000 Polish officers and other members of the country’s elite. The Wehrmacht found the mass graves in 1943 and tried to exploit this discovery for anti-Soviet propaganda.) This hypothesis, however, is untenable: Himmler visited Treblinka in mid-March 1943, and the Katyn massacre was discovered only in April 1943.
* cremation of millions of human corpses: Mazower writes that “Standartenführer Paul Blobel, who had...been responsible for the SS death squad which organized the Babi Yar massacres outside Kiev, was the man Himmler chose for the job. Starting with Auschwitz and Chelmno, Blobel ordered that the huge burial pits be uncovered and their remains burned, either in special crematoria or on huge bonfires. He issued similar instructions for Bełzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, and his underlings visited the camps to make sure the burning of the hundreds of thousands of bodies proceeded according to instructions.” [Mazower, 410.] Grossman may, however, have been thinking of one of these “underlings,” Scharführer Herbert Floss, who served successively at Bełzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka as the cremation “expert” [Arad, 173].
* the pine forest that surrounded the camp: Compare the words of Richard Glazar, a Czech Jew who survived Treblinka: “Suddenly...flames shot up. Very high. In a flash, the whole countryside, the whole camp, seemed ablaze...We knew that night that the dead would no longer be buried, they’d be burned.” [Claude Lanzmann, Shoah: The Complete Text (New York: Da Capo, 1995), 9–10.]
* burning the bodies: As noted, there were in fact around two hundred Totenjuden.
* from Bulgaria: No Jews were deported from Bulgaria proper
. It is possible that these were Greek Jews from Thrace. Thrace was occupied by Bulgaria, and Jews were deported from there. My thanks to Jean-marc Dreyfus for this suggestion.
* including white bread: In Shoah, Richard Glazar describes how, after a period during which there had been few transports and, as a result, very little food in the camp, transports began to arrive from the Balkans: “These were rich people; the passenger cars bulged with possessions. Then an awful feeling gripped us, all of us...a feeling of helplessness, of shame. For we threw ourselves on their food...The trainloads from the Balkans brought us to a terrible realization: we were the workers in the Treblinka factory, and our lives depended on the whole manufacturing process, that is, the slaughtering process at Treblinka.” [Lanzmann, 137; also Sereny, 212–14.]
* his favorite word: Grossman has misunderstood the German word tadellos. This does not mean “blame-free” in the sense of “innocent” but “blameless” in the sense of “beyond reproach” or, more colloquially, “first-class.” Auerbach notes that one German official document stated: “The burning of corpses received the proper incentive only after an instructor had come down from Auschwitz.” She goes on to say that the Jews nicknamed this instructor Tadellos, since that was his favorite expression: “‘Thank God, now the fire’s perfect [tadellos],’ he used to say when...the pile of corpses finally burst into flame.” [In Donat, 38.]
* Das unser Schiksal ist: “For us today there is only Treblinka. This is our Fate.”
* Geliebte Mädelein: “I picked the little flower and gave it to the most beautiful and beloved maiden.” Grossman has misspelled several words in these lines quoted from songs. These may simply be mistakes on his part or he may have been trying to reproduce the words as he heard them pronounced.
* orders for them to be killed: Grossman is not the only person to have made this allegation, but Sereny argues convincingly that it is false [Sereny, 259].
* destroy the gravestones: Grossman seems to have added this paragraph later. Though not in the manuscript, nor in any Soviet publications, it is included in the Russian text of The Black Book [available at http://jhistory.nfurman.com/shoa/grossman005.htm]. Grossman’s account is confirmed by Willenberg: “Kurt Franz ordered the foremen to go to the storeroom and procure two rabbinical black suits and a couple of black hats with pompoms on them. Two prisoners were equipped with whips and ordered to don this get-up...alarm clocks dangled from their necks on strings. They were called the Scheisskommando—the Shit Detail.” [Willenberg, 117.]
* vile beasts, SS beasts: Compare: “The great majority of Germans among the Treblinka personnel were young men aged 26–30, mostly married and with small children. They considered themselves special human beings, who had been given a difficult and responsible mission by the Führer. SS men debated with Engineer Galewski, the ‘camp elder’...about the superiority of the German race...about their sophisticated culture and the coming new order in Europe. They forced prisoners to organize choirs and orchestras, to dance, play football and box. Their commanders felt compassion for them in their hard service and they often sent them to Germany on leave. The German camp staff were concerned about their own well-being, and constantly worked on improving their living conditions. They tried to keep their barracks looking nice, by planting and tending flower gardens.” [Chrostowski, 41; see also Willenberg, 114–15.]
* like a timid complaint: Auerbach describes the road as being surfaced with “a weird mixture of coals and ashes from the pyres where the corpses of the inmates were cremated.” [In Donat, 70.] Auerbach may be mistaken about the coal, which is not mentioned in any other account.
* 120 to 130 kilos of ash: A large part of the ashes was returned to the grave pits. Alternate layers of sand and ashes were covered by a two-meter layer of sand [Rajchman].
* flash by in a single moment: As noted, the Totenjuden—the Jews working and living in the extermination area—in fact numbered about 200. The “little happiness” they were supposed to hope for was a bullet in the back of the head—a quick death.
* for an uprising: The camp was divided into three zones: the living area (Wohnlager), the reception area (Auffanglager), and the extermination area (Totenlager). The living and reception areas were known as the Lower Camp, the extermination area as the Upper Camp. An organizing committee was formed in the Lower Camp in late February or early March 1943; an organizing committee was formed by the Totenjuden in the Upper Camp in late May or early June.
* hid them in secret places: Most of the various sources for the history of the uprising indicate that the armory was opened with the help of a key that the prisoners had copied. It also seems that the weapons were probably taken from the storeroom only on the afternoon of the uprising.
* to provide the escapees with money: The prisoners whose job it was to sort through the clothes and belongings of the dead often found money and valuables. It was not difficult to hide some of this away.
* the secret remained a secret: All the slightly different versions of this story agree that the Scharführer entered the barrack unexpectedly, taking Doctor Chorazycki by surprise, that Chorazycki took poison, and that Kurt Franz was enraged by the failure of another prisoner-doctor to save Chorazycki’s life.
* with a revolver shot: The uprising began thirty minutes earlier than intended. Afraid that the commander of the Lower Camp had gotten wind of their plans, one of the conspirators shot him. The uprising thus began before the conspirators had finished removing weapons from the armory and distributing them.
* the moment of revenge: Much of this, sadly, is exaggerated. For all their heroism—Sereny justly refers to the uprising as “one of the most heroic efforts of the war-time years in East or West” [Sereny, 236]—the rebels failed to capture any watchtowers. Nor did they kill any SS, although they did kill twelve to fifteen Wachmänner. Several barracks were burned down, but the camp received three more transports that month. The last of these—the last of all the transports to Treblinka—arrived on August 19. Around three hundred prisoners escaped during the uprising, but two-thirds of these were quickly recaptured or killed.
* Sashko Pechersky: On being first taken to Sobibor, Pechersky said, “How many circles of hell were there in Dante’s Inferno? It seems there were nine. How many have already passed? Being surrounded, being captured, camps in Vyazma, Smolensk, Borisov, Minsk...And finally I am here. What’s next?” [Argumenty i fakty (August 10, 2008).] For more than a year after escaping from Sobibor, Pechersky fought as a partisan. But when the Red Army liberated Belorussia, he and his fellow partisans—like most Red Army soldiers ever taken prisoner by the Germans—were conscripted into the special penal battalions for suspected traitors that were used as cannon fodder and for clearing minefields. Pechersky survived this too, was promoted to the rank of captain, and even received a medal for bravery. Appalled by Pechersky’s account of Sobibor, his battalion commander risked his own life, contravening regulations by sending Pechersky to Moscow to testify to the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. “Uprising in Sobibor,” compiled by Pavel Antokolsky and Venyamin Kaverin on the basis of Pechersky’s testimony, was published in Znamya in April 1945; it was also included in the unpublished Black Book. In 1948, Pechersky was dismissed from his job as a theater administrator and arrested; only after Stalin’s death in 1953 and mounting international pressure on his behalf was he released. Pechersky died in 1990, never having received any medal or award for his heroism at Sobibor. In 2007 a small memorial plaque was placed on the side of the building where he had lived.
* the blood of the innocent: As if unable to believe how few SS there were in the camps, Grossman again exaggerates the numbers.
* farewell to the ashes of their fellows: In “A Year in Treblinka,” Wiernik writes that, during the minutes just before the uprising, “We silently bade farewell to the spot where the ashes of our brethren were buried.” [In Donat, 187.]
* with guns in their hands: These last two sentences are present in the manuscript but omitted fro
m all published versions.
* it too was burned down: The Ukrainian’s surname was Strebel [Arad, 373].
* earth as unsteady as the sea: Franz Suchomel has said that when he first came to Treblinka in August 1942, “The ground undulated like waves because of the gas...Bear in mind, the graves were maybe eighteen, twenty feet deep, all crammed with bodies! A thin layer of sand, and the heat. You see?” [Lanzmann, 46.] Grossman, however, was in Treblinka in September 1944, more than a year after the corpses had been burned. The instability he describes may have had other causes. The ground was sandy, and the vast grave pits may not have been packed down firmly enough. We also know that local peasants had been digging up the ground in search of valuables that the Germans had failed to recover.
* any human being can endure: It is clear from the manuscript that this is the original conclusion, and that the remaining paragraphs were added later.
* any uncommon expenditure: Sereny quotes Glazar: “This is something, you know, the world has never understood; how perfect the machine was. It was only lack of transport because of the Germans’ war requirements that prevented them from dealing with far vaster numbers than they did; Treblinka alone could have dealt with the 6,000,000 Jews and more besides. Given adequate rail transport, the German extermination camps in Poland could have killed all the Poles, Russians and other East Europeans the Nazis planned eventually to kill.” [Sereny, 214.]
* entire population of the earth: The previous three and a half paragraphs, from “to commit mass murder” to “entire population of the earth,” were omitted from all published versions of this article. It is not known who was responsible for this omission.
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