The peasants began carting out the cinders and ashes in spring 1943, and they continued until summer 1944. Each day twenty carts made from six to eight trips; during each trip they scattered 120 to 130 kilos of ash.
“Treblinka” — the song that eight hundred people were made to sing while they cremated corpses — included words exhorting the prisoners to humility and obedience; their reward would be “a little, little happiness, that would flash by in a single moment”.
Astonishingly, there really was one happy day in the living Hell of Treblinka. The Germans, however, were mistaken: what brought the condemned this gift was not humility and obedience. On the contrary, this happy day dawned thanks to insane audacity — thanks to the insane audacity of people who had nothing to lose.
All were expecting to die, and every day of their life was a day of suffering and torment. All had witnessed terrible crimes, and the Germans would have spared none of them; the gas chambers awaited them all. Most, in fact, were sent to the gas chambers after only a few days of work, and were replaced by people from new contingents. Only a few dozen people lived for weeks and months, rather than for days and hours; these were skilled workers, carpenters and stonemasons, and the bakers, tailors and barbers who ministered to the Germans’ everyday needs. These people created an Organizing Committee for an uprising. It was, of course, only the already-condemned, only people possessed by an all-consuming hatred and a fierce thirst for revenge, who could have conceived such an insane plan. They did not want to escape until they had destroyed Treblinka. And they destroyed it.
Weapons — axes, knives and truncheons — began to appear in the prisoners’ barracks. The risk they incurred, the price they paid to obtain each axe or knife, is hard to imagine. What cunning and skill, what astonishing patience, were required to hide these things in the barracks! Stocks of petrol were laid in — to douse the camp buildings and set them ablaze. How did the conspirators achieve this? How did petrol disappear, as if it had evaporated, from the camp stores? How indeed? Through superhuman effort — through great mental ingenuity, through determination and a terrifying audacity. A large tunnel was dug beneath the ammunition store. Audacity worked miracles; standing beside the conspirators was the God of courage. They took twenty hand grenades, a machine gun, rifles and pistols and hid them in secret places. Every detail in their complex plan was carefully worked out. Each group of five had its specific assignment. Each mathematically precise assignment called for insane daring. One group was to storm the watchtowers, where the Wachmänner sat with their machine guns. A second group was to attack the sentries who patrolled the paths between the various camp squares. A third group was to attack the armoured vehicles. A fourth was to cut the telephone lines. A fifth was to seize control of the barracks. A sixth would cut passages through the barbed wire. A seventh was to lay bridges across the anti-tank ditches. An eighth was to pour petrol on the camp buildings and set them on fire.
A ninth group would destroy whatever else could be destroyed.
There were even arrangements to provide the escapees with money. There was one moment, however, when the Warsaw doctor who was collecting this money nearly ruined the whole plan. A Scharführer noticed a wad of banknotes sticking out of his pocket; the doctor had only just collected the notes and had been about to hide them away. The Scharführer pretended not to have seen anything and reported the matter to Kurt Franz. Something extraordinary was clearly going on — what use, after all, was money to a man condemned to death? — and Franz immediately went off to interrogate the doctor. He began the interrogation with calm confidence; there may well, after all, have been no more skilled torturer in the world. And there was certainly no-one at all in the world — Franz believed — who could withstand the tortures he practised. But the Warsaw doctor outwitted the S.S. Hauptmann. He took poison. One of the participants in the uprising told me that never before in Treblinka had such efforts been made to save a man’s life. Evidently Franz sensed that the doctor would be slipping away with an important secret. But the German poison did its job, and the secret remained a secret.
Towards the end of June it turned suffocatingly hot. When graves were opened, steam billowed up from them as if from gigantic boilers. The heat of the grills — together with the monstrous stench — was killing even the workers who were moving the corpses; they were dropping dead on to the bars of the grills.
Billions of overfed flies were crawling along the ground and buzzing about in the air. The last hundred thousand corpses were now being burned.
The uprising was planned for 2 August. It began with a revolver shot. The banner of success fluttered over the holy cause.
New flames soared into the sky — not the heavy flames and grease-laden smoke of burning corpses but bright wild flames of life.
The camp buildings were ablaze, and to the rebels it seemed that a second sun was burning over Treblinka, that the sun had rent its body in two in celebration of the triumph of freedom and honour.
Shots rang out; machine-gun fire crackled from the watchtowers that the rebels had captured. Hand grenades rang out as triumphantly as if they were the bells of truth itself. The air shook from crashes and detonations; buildings collapsed; the buzzing of corpse flies was drowned out by the whistle of bullets. In the pure, clear air flashed axes red with blood. On 2 August the evil blood of the S.S. flowed on to the ground of the Hell that was Treblinka, and a radiant blue sky celebrated the moment of revenge. And a story as old as the world was repeated once more: creatures who had behaved as if they were representatives of a higher race; creatures who had shouted “Achtung! Mützen ab!” to make people take off their hats; creatures who had bellowed, in their masterful voices, “Alle r-r-r-raus unter-r-r-r!”, to compel the inhabitants of Warsaw to leave their homes and walk to their deaths — these conquering beings, so confident of their own might when it had been a matter of slaughtering millions of women and children, turned out to be despicable, cringing reptiles as soon as it came to a life-and-death struggle. They begged for mercy. They lost their heads. They ran this way and that way like rats. They forgot about Treblinka’s diabolically contrived defence system. They forgot about their all-annihilating fire-power. They forgot their own weapons. But need I say more? Need anyone be in the least surprised by these things?
Two and a half months later, on 14 October, 1943, there was an uprising in the Sobibór death factory; it was organized by a Soviet prisoner of war, a political commissar from Rostov by the name of Sashko Pechersky. The same thing happened as in Treblinka: people half dead from hunger managed to get the better of several hundred S.S. beasts who were bloated from the blood of the innocent. With the help of crude axes that they themselves had forged in the camp smithies, the rebels overpowered their executioners. Many of the rebels had no weapon except sand. Pechersky had told them to fill their pockets with fine sand and throw it in the guards’ eyes. But need we be surprised by any of this?
As Treblinka blazed and the rebels, saying a silent farewell to the ashes of their fellows, were escaping through the barbed wire, S.S. and police units were rushed in from all directions to track them down. Hundreds of police dogs were sent after them.
Aeroplanes were summoned. There was fighting in the forests, fighting in the marshes — and few of those who took part in the uprising are still alive. But what does that matter? They died fighting, with guns in their hands.
After 2 August Treblinka ceased to exist. The Germans burned the remaining corpses, dismantled the stone buildings, removed the barbed wire and torched the wooden barracks not already burned down by the rebels. Part of the equipment of the house of death was blown up; part was taken away by train. The grills were destroyed, the excavators taken away, the vast pits filled in with earth. The station building was razed; last of all, the track was dismantled and the sleepers removed. Lupins were sown on the site of the camp, and a settler by the name of Streben built himself a little house there. Now this house has gone; it too was burned down. What were th
e Germans trying to do? To hide the traces of the murder of millions of people in the Hell that was Treblinka? Did they really imagine this to be possible? Can silence be imposed on thousands of people who have witnessed transports bringing the condemned from every corner of Europe to a place of conveyor-belt execution? Did the Germans really think that they could hide the dead, heavy flames and the smoke that stood in the sky for eight months, visible day and night to the inhabitants of dozens of villages and hamlets? Did they really think that they could force the peasants of Wólka to forget the screams of the women and children — those terrible screams that continued for thirteen months and that ring in their ears to this day? Can the memory of such screams be torn from the heart? Did they really think they could force silence upon the peasants who for a whole year had been transporting human ash from the camp and scattering it on to the roads round about?
Did they really think they could silence the still-living witnesses who had seen the Treblinka executioner’s block in operation from its first days until 2 August, 1943, the last day of its existence?
Witnesses whose descriptions of each S.S. man and each of the Wachmänner precisely corroborate one another? Witnesses whose step-by-step, hour-by-hour accounts of life in Treblinka have made it possible to create a kind of Treblinka diary? It is no longer possible to shout “Mützen ab!” at these witnesses; it is no longer possible to lead them into a gas chamber. And Himmler no longer has any power over his minions. Their heads bowed, their trembling fingers tugging nervously at the hems of their jackets, their voices dull and expressionless, Himmler’s minions are now telling the story of their crimes — a story so unreal that it seems like the product of insanity and delirium. A Soviet officer, wearing the green ribbon of the Defence of Stalingrad medal, takes down page after page of the murderers’ testimonies. At the door stands a sentry, wearing the same green Stalingrad ribbon on his chest.
His lips are pressed tight together and there is a stern look on his gaunt weather-beaten face. This face is the face of justice — the people’s justice. And is it not a remarkable symbol that one of the victorious armies from Stalingrad should have come to Treblinka, near Warsaw? It was not without reason that Himmler began to panic in February 1943; it was not without reason that he flew to Treblinka and gave orders for the construction of the grill pits followed by the obliteration of all traces of the camp. It was not without reason — but it was to no avail. The defenders of Stalingrad have now reached Treblinka; from the Volga to the Vistula turned out to be no distance at all. And now the very earth of Treblinka refuses to be an accomplice to the crimes the monsters committed. It is casting up the bones and belongings of those who were murdered; it is casting up everything that Hitler’s people tried to bury within it.
— We arrived in Treblinka in early September 1944, thirteen months after the day of the uprising. For thirteen months from July 1942 the executioner’s block had been at work — and for thirteen months from August 1943, the Germans had been trying to obliterate every trace of this work.
It is quiet. The tops of the pine trees on either side of the railway line are barely stirring. It is these pines, this sand, this old tree stump that millions of human eyes saw as their freight wagons came slowly up to the platform. With true German neatness, whitewashed stones have been laid along the borders of the black road. The ashes and crushed cinders swish softly. We enter the camp. We tread the earth of Treblinka. The lupin pods split open at the least touch; they split with a faint ping and millions of tiny peas scatter over the earth. The sounds of the falling peas and the bursting pods come together to form a single soft, sad melody. It is as if a funeral knell — a barely audible, sad, broad, peaceful tolling — is being carried to us from the very depths of the earth. And, rich and swollen as if saturated with flax oil, the earth sways beneath our feet — earth of Treblinka, bottomless earth, earth as unsteady as the sea. This wilderness behind a barbed-wire fence has swallowed more human lives than all the earth’s oceans and seas have swallowed since the birth of mankind.
The earth is casting up fragments of bone, teeth, sheets of paper, clothes, things of all kinds. The earth does not want to keep secrets.
And from the earth’s unhealing wounds, from this earth that is splitting apart, things are escaping of their own accord. Here they are: the half-rotted shirts of those who were murdered, their trousers and shoes, their cigarette cases that have turned green, along with little cog-wheels from watches, pen-knives, shaving brushes, candlesticks, a child’s shoes with red pompoms, embroidered towels from the Ukraine, lace underwear, scissors, thimbles, corsets and bandages. Out of another fissure in the earth have escaped heaps of utensils: frying pans, aluminium mugs, cups, pots and pans of all sizes, jars, little dishes, children’s plastic mugs. In yet another place — as if all that the Germans had buried was being pushed up out of the swollen, bottomless earth, as if someone’s hand were pushing it all out into the light of day: half-rotted Soviet passports, notebooks with Bulgarian writing, photographs of children from Warsaw and Vienna, letters pencilled in a childish scrawl, a small volume of poetry, a yellowed sheet of paper on which someone had copied a prayer, ration cards from Germany… And everywhere there are hundreds of perfume bottles of all shapes and sizes — green, pink, blue… And over all this reigns a terrible smell of decay, a smell that neither fire, nor sun, nor rain, nor snow, nor wind have been able to overcome. And thousands of little forest flies are crawling about over all these half-rotted bits and pieces, over all these papers and photographs.
We walk on over the swaying, bottomless earth of Treblinka and suddenly come to a stop. Thick wavy hair, gleaming like burnished copper, the delicate lovely hair of a young woman, trampled into the ground; and beside it, some equally fine blonde hair; and then some heavy black plaits on the bright sand; and then, more and more… Evidently these are the contents of a sack, just a single sack that somehow got left behind. Yes, it is all true. The last hope, the last wild hope that it was all just a terrible dream, has gone. And the lupin pods keep popping open, and the tiny peas keep pattering down — and this really does all sound like a funeral knell rung by countless little bells from under the earth. And it feels as if your heart must come to a stop now, gripped by more sorrow, more grief, more anguish than any human being can endure…
Scholars, sociologists, criminologists, psychiatrists and philosophers — everyone is asking how all this can have happened.
How indeed? Was it something organic? Was it a matter of heredity, upbringing, environment or external conditions? Was it a matter of historical fate, or the criminality of the German leaders?
Somehow the embryonic traits of a racial theory that sounded simply comic when expounded by the second-rate charlatan professors or pathetic provincial theoreticians of nineteenth-century Germany — the contempt in which the German philistine held “Russian pigs”, “Polish cattle”, “Jews reeking of garlic”, “debauched Frenchmen”, “English shopkeepers”, “hypocritical Greeks” and “Czech blockheads”; all the nonsense about the superiority of the Germans to every other race on earth, all the cheap nonsense that seemed so comical, such an easy target for journalists and humorists — all this, in the course of only a few years, ceased to seem merely infantile and was transformed into a threat to mankind. It became a deadly threat to human life and freedom and a source of unparalleled crime, bloodshed and suffering. There is much now to think about, much that we must try to understand.
Wars like the present war are terrible indeed. A vast amount of innocent blood has been spilt by the Germans. But it is not enough now to speak about Germany’s responsibility for what has happened. Today we need to speak about the responsibility of every nation in the world; we need to speak about the responsibility of every nation and every citizen for the future.
Every man and woman today is duty-bound to his or her conscience, to his or her son and to his or her mother, to their motherland and to humanity as a whole to devote all the powers of their heart and mi
nd to answering these questions: what is it that has given birth to racism? What can be done to prevent Nazism from ever rising again, either on this side or on the far side of the ocean? What can be done to make sure that Hitlerism is never, never in all eternity, resurrected?
What led Hitler and his followers to construct Majdanek, Sobibór, Bełżec, Auschwitz and Treblinka is the imperialist idea of exceptionalism — of racial, national and every other kind of exceptionalism.
We must remember that Fascism and racism will emerge from this war not only with the bitterness of defeat but also with sweet memories of the ease with which it is possible to commit mass murder. It has turned out that it is really not so very difficult to kill entire nations. Ten small chambers — hardly enough space, if properly furnished, to stable a hundred horses — ten such chambers turned out to be enough to kill three million people.
Killing turned out to be supremely easy — it does not entail any uncommon expenditure.
It is possible to build five hundred such chambers in only a few days. This is no more difficult than constructing a five-storey building.
It is possible to demonstrate with nothing more than a pencil that any large construction company with experience in the use of reinforced concrete can, in the course of six months and with a properly organized labour force, construct more than enough chambers to gas the entire population of the earth.
This must be unflinchingly borne in mind by everyone who truly values honour, freedom and the life of all nations, the life of humanity.
Translated from the Russian by Robert Chandler
MAP
FURTHER READING
Treblinka: testimony and reportage Richard Glazar, Trap with a Green Fence: Survival in Treblinka, trans.
Treblinka Page 13