Treblinka

by Chil Rajchman

  Up to twenty thousand people passed through Treblinka every day. Days when only six or seven thousand people passed through the station building were considered quiet. The square would fill with people four or five times each day. And all these thousands, all these tens and hundreds of thousands of people, of frightened, questioning eyes, all these young and old faces, all these dark- and fair-haired beauties, these bald and hunch-backed old men and these timid adolescents — all were caught up in a single flood, a flood that swallowed up reason, and splendid human science, and maidenly love, and childish wonder, and the coughing of the old, and the human heart.

  And the new arrivals trembled as they sensed the strangeness of the look on the faces of the watching Wachmänner — a cool, sated, mocking look, the look of superiority with which a living beast surveys a dead human being.

  And once again during these brief moments the people who had come out into the square found themselves noticing all kinds of alarming and incomprehensible trifles.

  What lay behind that huge six-metre-high wall covered with blankets and yellowing pine branches? Even the blankets were somehow frightening. Quilted, many-coloured, silken or with calico covers, they looked all too similar to the blankets the newcomers had brought with them. How had these blankets got here? Who had brought them? And who were their owners? And why didn’t they need their blankets any longer? And who were these men wearing light-blue armbands? Troubling suspicions came back to mind, frightening rumours that had been passed on in a whisper. But no, no, this was impossible. And the terrible thought was dismissed.

  This sense of alarm always lasted a little while, perhaps two or three minutes, until everyone had made their way to the square.

  There was always a slight delay at this point; there were always cripples, the old, the sick and the lame, people who could barely move their legs. But soon everybody was present.

  An S.S. Unteroffizier instructs the newcomers in a loud, clear voice to leave their things in the square and make their way to the bathhouse, taking with them only identity documents, valuables and toiletries. They want to ask all kinds of questions: should they take their underwear? Is it really alright to undo their bundles? Aren’t all their belongings going to get mixed up? Might they not disappear altogether? But some strange force makes them hurry on in silence, not looking back, not asking questions, towards an opening — an opening in a barbed-wire wall, six metres high, that has been threaded with branches. They walk past anti-tank hedgehogs, past thickets of barbed wire three times the height of a human being, past an anti-tank ditch three metres deep, past thin coils of steel wire strewn on the ground to trip a fugitive and catch him like a fly in a spider’s web, past another wall of barbed wire many metres high. And everyone is overwhelmed by a sense of helplessness, a sense of doom. There is no way to escape, no way to turn back, no way to fight back: staring down at them from low squat wooden towers are the muzzles of heavy machine guns. Should they call out for help?

  But all around them are S.S. men and Wachmänner armed with sub-machine guns, hand grenades and pistols. These men are power; they are power itself. Tanks, aircraft, lands, cities and sky, railways, the law, newspapers, radio — everything is in their hands. The whole world is silent, crushed, enslaved by a gang of bandits who have seized all power. London is silent, and so is New York. And only somewhere thousands of kilometres distant, on the banks of the Volga, is the Soviet artillery pounding away, obstinately proclaiming the determination of the Russian people to fight to the death for liberty, calling upon every nation to join in the battle.

  Back on the square by the station two hundred workers with light-blue armbands (“the blue squad”) were silently, swiftly and deftly untying bundles, opening baskets and suitcases, removing straps from bedrolls. The belongings of the new arrivals are being sorted out and appraised. On to the ground tumble neatly packed darning kits, spools of thread, children’s underwear, shirts, sheets, pullovers, little knives, shaving kits, bundles of letters, photographs, thimbles, scent bottles, mirrors, bonnets, shoes, home-made boots made from quilted blankets (to protect against extreme cold), ladies’ slippers, stockings, lace, pyjamas, packs of butter, coffee, tins of cocoa, prayer shawls, candlesticks, books, dry biscuits, violins, children’s toy building blocks. It requires real skill to sort out, in the course of only a few minutes, all these thousands of objects. Everything of value is to be sent to Germany; everything old, shabby and valueless is to be burnt.

  And God help the unfortunate worker who puts an old wicker suitcase into a pile of leather cases destined for Germany, or who throws a new pair of stockings from Paris, still bearing their factory stamp, on to a heap of worn-out socks. Workers were not given the chance to make more than one mistake. Usually there were forty S.S. men and sixty Wachmänner “on transport duty”, as they called this first stage of the work: meeting the trains, escorting people out from the “railway station” and into the square, and then supervising the workers with the light-blue armbands as they sorted through the things left behind on the square. These workers often infringed the regulations by slipping into their mouths little pieces of bread, sugar or sweets that they found.

  They were, however, allowed to wash their hands and faces with eau-de-cologne and perfume, given that there was a shortage of water at Treblinka and only Wachmänner and the S.S. were allowed to wash with it. And while the still-living people who had left all these things were preparing to enter the “bathhouse”, the work of the blue squad was nearing completion. Items of value were already being taken away to the storerooms, while the letters, the yellowed wedding announcements, the photographs of newborn babies, brothers and brides, all the thousands of little things that were so infinitely precious to their owners yet the merest trash to the masters of Treblinka were being gathered into heaps and taken away to vast pits already containing hundreds of thousands of similar letters, postcards, visiting cards, photographs and sheets of paper covered in children’s scribbles or children’s first clumsy drawings in crayon. The square was then hurriedly swept and made ready to receive a new contingent of the doomed.

  Not always, however, did things go so smoothly. Sometimes, when the prisoners knew where they were being taken, there were rebellions. Skrzeminski, a local peasant, twice saw people smash their way out of trains, knock down the guards and run for the forest. On both occasions every last person was killed by machine-gun fire. The men had been carrying four children, aged four to six; they too were shot. Another peasant, Marianna Kobus, has described similar attempts at escape. Once, when she was working in the fields, she saw sixty people break out of a train and run towards the forest; all were shot before her eyes.

  But the contingent of new arrivals has now reached a second square, inside the inner camp fence. On one side of this square stands a single huge barrack, and there are three more barracks to the right. Two of these are used for storing clothes, the third for storing footwear. Further on, in the western section of the camp, are barracks for the S.S., barracks for the Wachmänner, food stores and a small farmyard. There are cars, trucks and an armoured vehicle. All in all, this seems like an ordinary camp, like Treblinka I.

  In the south-eastern corner of the compound is an area fenced off with tree branches; towards the front of this area is a booth bearing the sign “Lazarett”. The very old and the decrepit are separated from the crowd waiting for the “bathhouse” and taken on stretchers to this so-called infirmary. A man in a doctor’s white coat, with a Red Cross armband on his left arm, comes out to meet them. Precisely what happened in the Lazarett — how the Germans used their Walther automatic pistols to spare old people from the burden of all possible diseases — I shall describe later.

  The main thing in the next stage of processing the new arrivals was to break their will. There was a never-ending sequence of abrupt commands — bellowed out in a manner in which the German army takes pride, a manner that is proof in itself of the Germans being a master race. Simultaneously hard and guttural, the
letter “r” sounded like the crack of a whip.

  “Achtung!”

  After this, in the leaden silence, the crowd would hear words that the Scharführer repeated several times a day for month after month: “Men are to remain where they are. Women and children must go to the barracks on the left and undress.” This, according to the accounts of eyewitnesses, marked the start of heart-rending scenes. Love — maternal, conjugal or filial love — told people that they were seeing one another for the last time. Handshakes, kisses, blessings, tears, brief hurried words into which people put all their love, all their pain, all their tenderness, all their despair… The S.S. psychiatrists of death knew that all this must be cut short, that these feelings must be stifled at once. The psychiatrists of death knew the simple laws that operate in slaughterhouses all over the world, laws which, in Treblinka, were exploited by brute beasts in order to deal with human beings. This was a critical moment: the moment when daughters were separated from fathers, mothers from sons, grandmothers from grandsons, husbands from wives.

  Once again, echoing over the square: “Achtung! Achtung!” Once again people’s minds must be confused with hope; once again the regulations of death must be passed off as the regulations of life. The same voice barks out word after word: “Women and children are to remove their footwear on entering the barrack. Stockings are to be put into shoes. The children’s little stockings into their sandals, boots and shoes. Be tidy!” And straight after this: “As you proceed to the bathhouse, take with you your valuables, documents, money, towel and soap. I repeat…”

  Inside the women’s barrack was a hairdresser’s. The hair of the naked women was cut with clippers; old women had their wigs removed. This had a strange psychological effect: the hairdressers testify that this haircut of death did more than anything to convince the women that they really were going to the bathhouse. Young women would sometimes stroke their heads and say, “It’s uneven here. Please make it smoother.” Most of the women calmed down after their haircut; nearly all of them left the barrack carrying their piece of soap and a folded towel. Some young women wept over the loss of their beautiful plaits.

  Why did the Germans shave women’s hair? To deceive them better? No, Germany needed this hair. It was a raw material. I have asked many people what the Germans did with the hair that they removed from the heads of the living departed. Every witness said that the vast heaps of hair — black, red-gold and fair, straight, curly and wavy — were first disinfected, then packed into sacks and sent off to Germany. All the witnesses confirmed that the sacks bore German addresses. How was the hair used? No-one could answer. There is just one written deposition, from a certain Kohn, to the effect that the hair was used by the navy to fill mattresses and for such things as making hawsers for submarines. Other witnesses claim that the hair was used to pad saddles for the cavalry.

  This testimony, in my view, requires further confirmation. In due course, this will be given to humanity by Grossadmiral Raeder, who in 1942 was in charge of the German Navy.

  The men undressed outside, in the yard. One hundred and fifty to three hundred strong men from the first contingent of the day would be chosen to bury the corpses; they themselves were usually killed the following day. The men had to undress quickly but in an orderly manner, leaving their shoes, socks, underwear, jackets and trousers in neat piles. These were then sorted out by a second work squad, known as “the reds” because of the red armbands they wore to distinguish them from the squad “on transport duty”. Items considered worth sending to Germany were taken to the store; first, though, any metal or cloth labels had to be carefully removed from them. All other items were burned or buried in pits.

  Everyone was feeling more and more anxious. There was a terrible stench, intermingled with the smell of lime chloride.

  There were fat and persistent flies — an extraordinary number of them. What were they doing here, among pine-trees, on dry well-trodden ground? Everyone was breathing heavily now, shaking and trembling, staring at every little trifle that might give them some understanding, at anything that might lift the curtain of mystery and let them glimpse the fate that awaited them. And what were those gigantic excavators doing, rumbling away in the southern part of the camp?

  Next, though, came another procedure. The naked people had to queue at a “ticket window” to hand over their documents and valuables. And again they heard that terrible, hypnotizing voice:

  “Achtung! Achtung!” The penalty for concealing valuables is death. “Achtung! Achtung!”

  The Scharführer sat in a small wooden booth. Other S.S. men and Wachmänner stood nearby. On the ground were a number of wooden boxes into which they threw valuables. One was for paper money; one was for coins; a third was for watches, rings, earrings, and brooches with precious stones and bracelets. Documents were just thrown on the ground, since no-one had any use for the documents of the living dead who, within an hour, would be lying crushed in a pit. Gold and valuables, however, were carefully sorted; dozens of jewellers were engaged in ascertaining the quality of the metal, the value of the stones, the clarity of the diamonds.

  Astonishingly, the brute beasts were able to make use of everything. Leather, paper, cloth — everything of use to man was of use to these beasts. It was only the most precious valuable in the world — human life — that they trampled beneath their boots.

  Powerful minds, honourable souls, glorious childish eyes, sweet faces of old women, proudly beautiful girlish heads that nature had toiled age after age to fashion — all this, in a vast silent flood, was condemned to the abyss of non-being. A few seconds was enough to destroy what nature and the world had slowly shaped in life’s vast and tortuous creative process.

  This booth with its small “ticket window” was a turning point. It marked the end of the process of torture by deception, the end of the lie that held people in a trance of ignorance, in a fever that hurled them between hope and despair, between visions of life and visions of death. This torture by deception aided the S.S. men in their work; it was an essential feature of the conveyor-belt executioner’s block. Now, however, the final act had begun; the process of plundering the living dead was nearly completed, and the Germans changed their style of behaviour. They tore off rings and broke women’s fingers; earlobes were ripped off along with earrings.

  At this point a new principle had to be implemented if the conveyor-belt executioner’s block was to continue to function smoothly. The word “Achtung!” was replaced by the hissing sounds of “Schneller! Schneller! Schneller! Faster! Faster! Faster! Faster into non-existence!”

  We know from the cruel reality of recent years that a naked man immediately loses his powers of resistance. He ceases to struggle. Having lost his clothes, he loses his instinct of self-preservation and starts to accept whatever happens to him as his inevitable fate. Someone with an unquenchable thirst for life becomes passive and apathetic. Nevertheless, to make doubly sure that there were no mishaps, the S.S. found a way to stun their victims during this last stage of the conveyor belt’s work, to reduce them to a state of complete psychic paralysis. How did they achieve this?

  Through a sudden recourse to pointless, alogical brutality.

  The naked people — people who had lost everything but who obstinately persisted in remaining human, a thousand times more so than the creatures around them wearing the uniforms of the German army — were still breathing, still looking, still thinking; their hearts were still beating. All of a sudden their towels and pieces of soap were knocked out of their hands. They were lined up in rows of five.

  “Hände hoch! Marsch! Schneller! Schneller!” They were then marched down a straight alley, 120 metres long and two metres wide, bordered by flowers and fir trees. This led to the place of execution. There was barbed wire on either side of the alley, which was lined by S.S. men and Wachmänner standing shoulder to shoulder, the former in grey uniforms, the latter in black. The path was sprinkled with white sand, and those who were walking in front with
their hands in the air could see on this loose sand the fresh imprint of bare feet: the small footprints of women, the tiny footprints of children, the heavy footprints of the old. This faint trace in the sand was all that remained of the thousands of people who had not long ago passed this way, who had walked down this path just as the present contingent of four thousand people was now walking down it, just as another contingent of thousands, already waiting on the railway spur in the forest, would walk down it in two hours’ time. Those whose footprints could be seen on the sand had walked down this path just as people had walked down it the day before, just as people had walked down it ten days before, just as people would walk down it the next day and in fifty days’ time, just as people walked down it throughout the thirteen months of the existence of the Hell that was Treblinka.

  The Germans referred to this alley as “The Road of No Return”.

  A smirking, grimacing creature by the name of Suchomel used to shout out, deliberately garbling the German words: “Children, children, schneller, schneller, the water’s getting cold in the bathhouse! Schneller, children, schneller!” This creature would then burst out laughing; he would squat down and dance about. Hands above their heads, the people walked on in silence between the two rows of guards, who beat them with sticks, sub-machine-gun butts and rubber truncheons. The children had to run to keep up with the adults. Everyone who witnessed this last sorrowful procession has commented on the savagery of one particular member of the S.S.: Sepp. This creature specialized in the killing of children. Evidently endowed with unusual strength, it would suddenly snatch a child out of the crowd, swing him or her about like a cudgel and then either smash their head against the ground or simply tear them in half.