Treblinka

by Chil Rajchman

  S.S. men examined the bodies, talking to one another as they did so. If anyone turned out to be still alive, if anyone groaned or stirred, they were finished off with a pistol shot. Then a team of men armed with dental pliers would extract all the platinum and gold teeth from the mouths of the murdered people waiting to be loaded on to the trolleys. The teeth were then sorted according to value, packed into boxes and sent off to Germany. Had the S.S. found it in any way more convenient or advantageous to extract people’s teeth while they were still alive, they would, of course, have done this without hesitation, just as they removed women’s hair while they were still alive. But it was evidently easier and more convenient to extract people’s teeth when they were dead.

  The corpses were then loaded on to the trolleys and pushed along the narrow-gauge tracks towards long grave pits. There they were laid out in rows, packed closely together. The huge pit was not filled in; it was still waiting. In the meantime, as soon as the work of unloading the chambers had begun, the Scharführer “on transport duty” would have received a short order by telephone. The Scharführer would then blow his whistle — a signal to the engine driver — and another twenty wagons would be brought up slowly to the platform of a make-believe railway station called Ober-Majdan. Another three or four thousand people carrying suitcases, bundles and bags of food would get out and walk to the station square. Mothers were holding little children in their arms; elder children clung to their parents as they looked intently around. There was something sinister and terrifying about this square that had been trodden by millions of feet. And why did the railway line end just beyond the station? Why was there only yellow grass and three-metre-high barbed wire?

  The processing of the new contingent was carefully timed; they set out along “The Road of No Return” just as the last corpses from the gas chambers were being taken towards the grave pits.

  The pit had not been filled in; it was still waiting.

  A little later, the Scharführer would blow his whistle again — and another twenty wagons would slowly be brought up to the station platform . More thousands of people carrying suitcases, bundles and bags of food would get out and walk to the station square and look around. There was something sinister and terrifying about this square that had been trodden by millions of feet.

  And the camp commandant, sitting in his office amid heaps of papers and charts, would telephone the station in Treblinka village — and another sixty-car train escorted by S.S. men with sub-machine guns and automatic rifles would pull heavily out of a siding and crawl along a single track between rows of pines.

  The vast excavators worked day and night, digging vast new pits, pits that were many hundreds of metres long and many dark metres deep. And the pits were waiting. Waiting — though not for long.

  2

  As the winter of 1942–3 was drawing to an end, Himmler came to Treblinka, together with a group of important Gestapo officials.

  Himmler’s party flew to a landing strip in the area and was then taken in two cars to the camp, which they entered by the main gate.

  Most of the visitors were in army uniform; some — perhaps the various scientific experts — seemed like civilians, in fur coats and hats. Himmler inspected the camp in person, and one of the people who saw him has told us that the minister of death walked up to a huge grave pit and, for a long time, stared silently into it.

  His retinue waited at a respectful distance as Heinrich Himmler contemplated the colossal grave, already half full of corpses.

  Treblinka was the most important of all the factories in Himmler’s empire. Later that same day the S.S. Reichsführer flew back. Before leaving Treblinka, he issued an order that dumbfounded the three members of the camp command: Hauptsturmführer Baron von Pfein, his deputy Karol and Captain Franz Stangl. They were to start work immediately on digging up the corpses and burning every last one of them; the ashes and cinders were to be removed from the camps and scattered over fields and roads. Since there were already millions of corpses in the ground, this would be an extraordinarily complex and difficult task. In addition, the newly gassed were to be burnt at once, instead of being buried.

  What was the reason for Himmler’s visit and his personal categorical order? The answer is very simple: the Red Army had just defeated the Germans at Stalingrad. This must have been a terrifying blow for the Germans. Within a matter of days men in Berlin were, for the first time, showing concern about being held to account, about possible retribution, about the revenge to which they might be subjected; within a matter of days Himmler himself had flown to Treblinka and issued urgent orders calculated to hide the traces of crimes committed within sixty kilometres of Warsaw. Himmler’s orders were an echo, a direct repercussion of the mighty blow that the Red Army had just struck against the Germans, far away on the Volga.

  At first there was real difficulty with the process of cremation; the corpses would not burn. There was, admittedly, an attempt to use the women’s bodies, which burned better, to help burn the men’s bodies. And the Germans tried dousing the bodies with petrol and fuel oil, but this was expensive and turned out to make only a slight difference. There seemed to be no way around this problem, but then a thickset man of about fifty arrived from Germany, a member of the S.S. and a master of his trade. Hitler’s regime, after all, had the capacity to produce experts of all kinds: experts in the use of a hammer to murder small children, expert stranglers, expert designers of gas chambers, experts in the scientifically planned destruction of large cities in the course of a single day. The regime was also able to find an expert in the exhumation and cremation of millions of human corpses.

  And so, under this man’s direction, furnaces were constructed.

  Furnaces of a special kind, since neither the furnaces at Majdanek nor those of any of the largest crematoria in the world would have been able to burn so vast a number of corpses in so short a time.

  The excavator dug a pit 250–300 metres long, 20–25 metres wide and 6 metres deep. Three rows of evenly spaced reinforced-concrete pillars, 100–120 centimetres in height, served as a support for giant steel beams that ran the entire length of the pit.

  Rails about five to seven centimetres apart were then laid across these beams. All this constituted a gigantic grill. A new narrow-gauge track was laid from the burial pits to the grill pit. Two more grill pits of the same dimensions were constructed soon afterwards; each took 3,500 to 4,000 corpses at once.

  Another giant excavator arrived, soon followed by a third. The work continued day and night. People who took part in the work of burning the corpses say that these grill pits were like giant volcanoes. The heat seared the workers’ faces. Flames erupted eight or ten metres into the air. Pillars of thick black greasy smoke reached up into the sky and stood there, heavy and motionless. At night, people from villages thirty or forty kilometres away could see these flames curling above the pine forest that surrounded the camp.

  The smell of burnt human flesh filled the whole area. If there was a wind, and if it blew in the direction of the labour camp three kilometres away, the people there almost suffocated from the stench. More than eight hundred prisoners — more than the number of workers employed in the furnaces of even the hugest of iron and steel plants — were engaged in the work of burning the bodies. This monstrous workshop operated day and night for eight months, without interruption, yet it still could not cope with the millions of human bodies. Trains were, of course, delivering new contingents to the gas chambers all the time, which added to the work of the grill pits.

  Transports sometimes arrived from Bulgaria. These were a particular joy to the S.S. and the Wachmänner, since the Bulgarian Jews, who had been hoodwinked both by the Germans and by the Fascist Bulgarian government of the time, had no idea of the fate that awaited them and brought with them large quantities of valuables and plenty of tasty food, including white bread. Then there were transports from Grodno and Białystok, and — after the uprising — from the Warsaw Ghetto. There was a t
ransport of rebels from other parts of Poland — peasants, workers and soldiers. There was a contingent of Bessarabian Gypsies: around two hundred men, with eight hundred women and children. They had come on foot, a string of horses and carts trailing behind them. They too had been hoodwinked; they were escorted by only two guards — and even these guards had no idea that they were leading these people to their death. I have been told that the Gypsy women clapped their hands in delight when they saw the handsome exterior of the gas chamber, and that they had no inkling until the very last minute of what lay in store for them.

  This greatly amused the Germans.

  The S.S. singled out for particular torment those who had participated in the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto. The women and children were taken not to the gas chambers but to where the corpses were being burned. Mothers crazed with horror were forced to lead their children on to the red-hot grid where thousands of dead bodies were writhing in the flames and smoke, where corpses tossed and turned as if they had come back to life again, where the bellies of women who had been pregnant burst from the heat and babies killed before birth were burning in open wombs. Such a spectacle was enough to rob the most hardened man of his reason, but its effect — as the Germans well knew — was a hundred times greater on a mother struggling to keep her children from seeing it. The children clung to their mothers and shrieked, “Mama, what are they going to do to us? Are they going to burn us?” Not even Dante, in his Hell, saw scenes like this.

  After amusing themselves for a while with this spectacle, the Germans burned the children.

  It is infinitely painful to read this. The reader must believe me when I say that it is equally hard to write it. “Why write about it then?” someone may well ask. “Why recall such things?”

  It is the writer’s duty to tell the terrible truth, and it is a reader’s civic duty to learn this truth. To turn away, to close one’s eyes and walk past is to insult the memory of those who have perished. Only those who have learned the whole truth can ever understand against what kind of monster our great and holy Red Army has entered into mortal combat.

  The S.S. had begun to feel bored in Treblinka. The procession of the doomed to the gas chambers had ceased to excite them. It had become routine. When the cremation of the corpses began, the S.S. men spent hours by the grill pits; this new sight amused them. The expert who had just come from Germany used to stroll around between the grill pits from morning till night, always animated and talkative. People say they never saw him frown or even look serious; he was always smiling. When the corpses were thrown down on to the bars of the grill, he would repeat: “Innocent, innocent”. This was his favourite word.

  Sometimes the S.S. organized a kind of picnic by the grill pits; they would sit upwind from them, drink wine, eat and watch the flames. The “infirmary” was also re-equipped. During the first months the sick and the aged had been taken to a space screened off by branches — and murdered there by a so-called doctor. Their bodies had then been carried on stretchers to the mass graves.

  Now a round pit was dug. Around this pit, as if the infirmary were a stadium, was a circle of low benches, all so close to the edge that anyone sitting on them was almost dangling over the pit. On the bottom of the pit was a grill, and on it corpses were burning. After being carried into the “infirmary”, sick and decrepit old people were taken by “nurses” to these benches and made to sit facing the bonfire of human bodies. After enjoying this sight for a while, the Nazi barbarians shot the old people in the back, or in the backs of their grey heads. Dead or wounded, the old people fell into the bonfire.

  German humour has never been highly valued; we have all heard people speak of it as heavy-handed. But who on earth could have imagined the humour, the jokes, the entertainments of the S.S. at Treblinka? They organized football matches between teams of the doomed, they made the doomed play tag, they organized a choir of the doomed. A small zoo was set up near the Germans’ sleeping quarters. Innocent beasts from the forest — wolves and foxes — were kept in cages, while the vilest and cruellest predators ever seen on earth walked about in freedom, sat down for a rest on little benches made of birch wood and listened to music. Someone even wrote a special anthem for the doomed, which included the words:

  Für uns giebt heute nur Treblinka,

  Das unser Schiksal ist…

  A few minutes before their death, wounded, bleeding people were forced to learn idiotic and sentimental German songs and sing them in unison:

  …Ich brach das Blumelein

  Und schenkte es dem Schönste

  Geliebte Mädelein…

  The chief commandant selected a few children from one contingent. He killed their parents, dressed the children up in fine clothes, gave them lots of sweets and played with them. A few days later, when he had had enough of this amusement, he gave orders for them to be killed.

  The Germans posted one old man in a prayer shawl and phylacteries next to the outhouse and ordered him not to allow people to stay inside for more than three minutes. An alarm clock was hung from his chest. The Germans would look at his prayer shawl and laugh. Sometimes the Germans would force elderly Jewish men to recite prayers or to arrange funerals for those who had been murdered, observing all the traditional rites. They would even have to go and fetch gravestones — but after a while they were made to open the graves, dig up the bodies and destroy the gravestones.

  One of the main entertainments was to rape and torment the beautiful young women whom the S.S. selected from each contingent. In the morning the rapists would personally accompany them to the gas chambers. Thus the S.S. — the bulwark of Hitler’s regime and the pride of Fascist Germany — entertained themselves at Treblinka.

  It needs to be emphasized that these creatures were far from being mere robots that mechanically carried out the wishes of their superiors. Every witness attests to their shared love of philosophizing. The S.S. loved to deliver speeches to the doomed; they loved to discuss what was happening at Treblinka and its profound significance for the future. They were all deeply and sincerely convinced that what they were doing was right and necessary. They explained at length how their race was superior to all other races; they delivered tirades about German blood, the German character and the mission of the German race. These beliefs have been expounded in books by Hitler and Rosenberg, in pamphlets and articles by Goebbels.

  After they had finished work for the day, and after amusements such as those described above, they would sleep the sleep of the just, not disturbed by dreams or nightmares. They were not tormented by conscience, if only because not one of them possessed a conscience. They did gymnastics, drank milk every morning and generally took good care of their health. They showed no less concern with regard to their living conditions and personal comforts, surrounding their living quarters with tidy gardens, sumptuous flowerbeds and summerhouses. Several times a year they went on leave to Germany, since their bosses considered work in this “factory” detrimental to health and were determined to look after their workers. Back at home they walked about with their heads held high. If they said nothing about their work, this was not because they were ashamed of it but simply because, well disciplined as they were, they did not dare to violate their solemn pledge of silence. And when, in the evening, they went arm in arm with their wives to the cinema and burst into loud laughter, stamping their hobnailed boots on the floor, it would have been hard to tell them apart from the most ordinary man in the street. Nevertheless, they were beasts — vile beasts, S.S. beasts.

  The summer of 1943 was exceptionally hot. For weeks on end there was no rain, no clouds and no wind. The work of burning the corpses was in full swing. Day and night for six months the grill pits had been blazing, but only a little more than half of the corpses had been burned.

  The moral and physical torment began to tell on the prisoners charged with this task; every day fifteen to twenty prisoners committed suicide. Many sought death by deliberately infringing the regulations.

&nb
sp; “To get a bullet was a luxury,” I heard from a baker by the name of Kosów, who had escaped from the camp. In Treblinka, evidently, it was far more terrible to be doomed to live than to be doomed to die.

  Cinders and ashes were taken outside the camp grounds.

  Peasants from the village of Wólka were ordered to load them on to their carts and scatter them along the road leading from the death camp to the labour camp. Child prisoners with spades then spread the ashes more evenly. Sometimes these children found melted gold coins or dental crowns. The ashes made the road black, like a mourning ribbon, and so the children were known as “the children from the black road”. Car wheels make a peculiar swishing sound on this road, and, when I was taken along it, I kept hearing a sad whisper from beneath the wheels, like a timid complaint.

  This black mourning-ribbon of ashes, lying between woods and fields, from the death camp to the labour camp, was like a tragic symbol of the terrible fate uniting the nations that had fallen beneath the axe of Hitler’s Germany.