Trains to Treblinka

by Charles Causey

  “May I go?” asked Tchechia.

  Again her question startled Stangl, so direct, almost severe. He could tell she was a very smart girl, and one not to attempt to manipulate. He recognized her as the interim camp elder’s girlfriend and that she usually worked in the kitchen or at the clinic. She probably thinks I want to have her for myself now that her boyfriend is gone, he suspected. “By all means. Go. I am not going to keep you.”

  Stangl felt ashamed. He knew she thought he was making an advance on her. He also knew that she would have fought him. She was obviously educated, willful, and proud. She had stood up to him like no one else at the camp ever had. He respected her for that, but it also irritated him.

  “It was terrible,” Tchechia said to Bronka. “He just looked at me and asked questions.”

  “What did you say?” asked Bronka.

  “I asked him if I could leave. I wasn’t going to stick around to see what he had in mind.”

  “And you didn’t get in trouble?”

  “Not yet. I haven’t heard anything about it.”

  Tchechia and Bronka sat in their new room before lights-out. The female workers were taken out of the barracks and given small rooms they shared with one or two other people.

  “I could have never done what you did,” exclaimed Bronka. “I would have been too scared to even speak to the kommandant. They say he doesn’t ever speak to workers—essentially doesn’t even know they exist. He acts like all this work gets done invisibly.”

  “Well, he’s not as bad as Kuttner or Miete or Franz, but he runs this place, so in my mind he is the worst one of them all.”

  “He watches things…that is certain. I see him standing on the berm by the tube. He looks down on everyone like he is staring down at his kingdom. He loves to hit the top of his boot with his riding whip.”

  Tchechia and Bronka sat deep in thought for a moment. The weather was getting very warm. Trains were trickling into Treblinka about once per week. The guards were still selecting passengers out of the masses, but they were sent immediately to Camp 2. The smell originating from the upper camp had been shocking, like death itself. The girls were thankful they had not been recruited to work there like some of the other women. Camp 1 was upsetting enough.

  Bronka was still working as a seamstress with the male tailors under SS guard Franz Suchomel. There were not as many clothes as before, but each train would bring a large number of bundles to sort through and remove the Star of David. Whenever she could, Bronka spoke to Rudi Masarek about the revolt. There had been informers, traitors who were recently killed in their sleep by the organizing committee, and some who were still working in the camp. There was always news in the camp of who was speaking to whom, all in an effort to weed out the informers.

  The girls were eager to participate in the revolt. Whatever they were instructed to do they would do it. One request the organizers had for them was that once the revolt started, before they escaped into the woods, they were to use grenades to blow up buildings. This would help the fire spread.

  They wanted to leave the camp in the most desperate sense possible. It was hard to think of anything else.

  “I keep wondering what we will do when we escape,” said Bronka.

  “That’s not hard—run!” Tchechia replied.

  “I know. But we will be in the woods for a while, possibly with wounded people needing care. I know the Nazis will search savagely for us until we are captured.”

  “Or until the war is over. It is a matter of timing. We have to evade them until the Allies come and take over this part of Poland. Then we will be free. I have heard that the Soviets have started an offensive and are moving west. I intend to find somewhere to hide. We both have money. We should stay together as long as possible.”

  “I like that idea,” said Bronka. “You are much more confident than I am. I can run fast, but I have never traveled without my parents.”

  “We will be okay,” said Tchechia. “We will stay together, and we will be okay.”

  Chapter 24

  At Camp 2, the Artist had been at work creating new enormous racks at the edge of the large pits housing the remains of bodies killed in 1942, before the cremations started. Each pit contained tens of thousands of corpses at a minimum, and the largest one held nearly one hundred thousand. Even after a pit was cleared of bodies there would sometimes appear to be some blood in it. When this happened, a Jewish worker would strip naked and descend down into the pit to dig around and look for any additional body parts that were not captured by the excavator.

  Next to one of the larger pits where ninety thousand to one hundred thousand people were buried, the Artist created a specially designed rack where up to thirty thousand bodies could be placed at once—ten times the normal amount. All was going well with his plans until a ferocious gust of wind caused the flames to spill over and leap into the mass grave, which ignited immediately. As onlookers stood by, they noticed how the burning blood pooled near the surface, like petrol, intensifying the heat and flames so that over sixty thousand bodies in the large pit were burning at once. The Nazis cheered.

  A train made its way into Treblinka station on a warm, sunny morning. The pitiful souls who emptied out of it were the remnants from the Warsaw ghetto. They wore just rags for clothing and had little to no valuables. A few of the women from Warsaw were pulled out from the passengers and sent to Camp 2 to help in the kitchen. They were so distraught from what had happened in the ghetto that it took three days to calm them down enough so they could speak intelligibly about what they witnessed. They described it as complete annihilation.

  Of the other passengers, the men and women without any children were sent straight into the tube. For some reason, unknown to the workers, the mothers with children were marched up to Camp 2 by the Doll. When Kurt Franz arrived with his Warsaw prisoners of women and children, he marched them to the rim of the large pit, which was burning out of control.

  The Nazis stood there and seemed to enjoy the terror-stricken faces of the toddlers and their mothers, as if it was a sport. Then the Doll and other SS men began grabbing the children and throwing them into the fiery pit, to the torture of their mothers, who passionately begged and pleaded with their captors. These mothers were being given special treatment because they had been some of the last out of Warsaw…and perhaps part of the resistance.

  As the women stood there wailing, the Nazi men tormented them, saying, “Why don’t you jump in to save them? Are you cowards?”

  Most of the women were now on their knees, clutching tightly to the remaining children and pleading with the guards to spare them, but to no avail. The ones who were not thrown alive into the flaming pit were marched up to the edge and shot so they would fall in. Of the onlookers whose turn would be next, many fainted and were dragged to the edge by a guard and then thrown in. The screams from the pit were bloodcurdling.

  While this was occurring in the upper camp, the husbands and fathers were beaten with rifle butts as they transitioned from the tube and entered the gassing rooms. They were packed in at record numbers and allowed to suffer in the stifling hot chamber for a while. As they yelled and shouted, the Nazi guard in charge of the diesel engine decided to wait and have another drink of whiskey first. This way, the victims could experience the full wrath of what was to come.

  Thankfully for the workers at the upper camp, a message arrived for Zelo from Camp 1. “The revolt would begin in days.”

  PART 4

  The Revolt

  Chapter 25

  In the throes of a hot summer, the work of Treblinka at Camp 1 practically ceased. The Warsaw ghetto had been cleaned out, some arriving on trains wounded with bayonet stabs, and some already dead. Though Camp 2 continued to remove bodies out of the ground for cremation night and day, Camp 1 was in desperate need of activity.

  Kommandant Franz Stangl decided to perform one more big construction push to keep the laborers occupied. Old roads were resurfaced. New roads were paved. Signs
were created for every corner of the camp. New fencing was put up. Decorative carving took place on some of the larger buildings where the Nazis lived. The Sunday shows were still conducted, but there was stifling, dry heat to deal with, not to mention an ever-present malodor that was revolting.

  Stangl was determined to keep everyone working hard to impress Odilo Globocnik and Christian Wirth, his regional supervisors. The new construction projects would keep the workers busy and validate Treblinka’s existence, but it was a challenge for everyone. None of the SS wanted to be there and some of the Ukrainian guards deserted. The stench was too much to bear.

  Stangl knew that without people entering the camp to be processed, Globocnik could shut down their entire operation on a whim and order the camp to be leveled. This would inevitably mean the death of all of the Jewish workers, a command he would be reluctant to issue.

  That was when a large group of Gypsies arrived…on foot, with horses pulling wagons full of goods. The workers watched as hundreds of Gypsies poured through Treblinka’s gates. However, it did not take long to process them. The passengers had no idea what their future held. Within a few hours all of them were gone, their bodies incinerated.

  The revolt date came but nothing happened. A train had arrived with many additional Ukrainian guards as escorts the exact morning the revolt was scheduled to take place. The organizers decided to put it off a few more days.

  That summer, Richard Glazar and Karel Unger were tasked onto the camouflage unit to go into the woods and bring back juniper branches for the fences. It was a highly organized mission, where the men were divided into groups, each with a foreman and SS guards for security. On one occasion, they returned to Treblinka but were ordered to enter the back gate of Camp 2. None of the Camp 1 inmates had ever seen the pits, or the gas chambers. It was quite a sight for Richard and Karel to digest.

  Out of the corner of Richard’s eye he recognized Zelo in a group of Camp 2 inmates who were laboring adjacent to the closest pit. Though he looked changed, it was definitely Zelo. His skin was blackened from working near the fires all summer, and his face appeared gaunt, but he still had that command presence Richard admired. His shoes and pants were soaked with blood, and it looked like he was shepherding men as they scraped ashes out from under the large grills.

  Zelo glanced toward Richard and recognized him as well. A friendly exchange took place among the two Czechs while they silently searched each other’s eyes. Richard noticed something urgent in Zelo’s expression. The end had come, everyone knew it. In a few days the Camp 2 workers would complete the exhumation mission and finish disseminating the ashes. As a result, the SS guards would surely kill them all because they were witnesses to the crime. Some action had to be taken immediately, like the very next day—that was the tidings Richard received from his nonverbal exchange with Zelo.

  But then, as if needing confirmation, Adasch—standing beside Zelo—shouted out in Yiddish for all to hear: “What are you waiting for? Everything is finished, isn’t it?”

  Richard, Karel, and their entire foraging crew from Camp 1 understood exactly what that meant. They returned to their barracks and explained to Rudi what happened.

  “We will revolt this week!” Rudi exclaimed. Then he called together Edek and some other young men to make sure they understood how important their task to break into the arsenal would be.

  Rudi defined for everyone the three main goals for the revolt: First, to set fire to all the buildings, which would destroy the camp; second, to kill all the SS and as many Ukrainian guards as possible; and third, to escape into the woods and, if possible, to free the Polish men and Jewish prisoners held in a penal colony nearby the main camp, sometimes referred to as Camp 3. There was no contact with the workers at Camp 3, so the forced laborers would have no early warning of the revolt. However, Zelo and Galewski thought it would be advantageous to kill the guards at Camp 3 as well, so they could not act as reinforcements to search the woods after the revolt. Rudi agreed. There were so many conditions that needed to take place in the first few moments of the revolt for it to be effective, it was hard for Rudi to keep them all in mind. Night after night he had gone over all the details with his fellow conspirators.

  In Camp 2, the Nazis began to celebrate. They had whipped and beaten the inmates to such a degree that the speed of the work was greatly increased. Over six hundred thousand bodies had been exhumed, and they were now excavating the final pit using two excavators. They would be done soon, so they decided to have a toast toward their accomplishment. They planned a banquet for that evening, sort of an early celebration supper. Zelo and Adasch found it ironic that the Nazis would celebrate, yet it was the Jews who had done all the work.

  One of the excavators was broken down and needed repairs, but it appeared they were no longer concerned with fixing it. They had almost completed the mission. One of the main duties now was discarding the ashes. The process was to not only sprinkle the ashes out in the field, making sure there were no bony fragments in it, but also to replace some of the ash back into the deep pits to be covered over with a layer of sand. Soon the soil would be graded down, the ashes completely disbursed, and the mission would be over. All they would have to do was burn the new bodies arriving for processing, which would only take a few hours once they were removed from the gas chambers.

  Zelo sent word through the carpenter Jankiel that the revolt must take place within the next twenty-four hours.

  Rudi Masarek was now pressed for time. It was Sunday, August 1st. There were still several items that needed to be done, yet he would honor Zelo’s appeal. It was decided the revolt would take place the following day at 5:00 p.m. The plan was to use the arms room depot key to steal the two cases of grenades with their triggers, along with a few rifles and ammunitions, in the early afternoon. After those items were secured, there would be no turning back from commencing the revolt.

  The first group of men in action would surround the barracks and cut the telephone wires. Then the Ukrainian guards were to somehow be lured away from their posts, possibly with a twenty-dollar gold coin, before grabbing their weapons and shooting them. Grenades were to be thrown into the German command post and other places where the Ukrainians and SS might be milling at the time of the revolt. Besides blowing up the gassing chambers, all the wooden buildings were to be doused with gasoline and set on fire, and the armored truck was to be taken over and used to shoot at guards.

  In addition to the disrupting events, one contingent of inmates was to focus on the sadistic SS guards like the Doll and Miete and liquidate them as fast as possible. Another contingent would eradicate the Ukrainians on the guard towers. And several men were to focus on opening the gates that faced the forest for a mass escape.

  A single shot, fired at 5:00 p.m., was the signal to begin the revolt. One serious problem to consider was the difficulty of having that many anxious men and women make it through the day without giving away any clues. Too many people were in on the plans, and they had not yet dealt with all the informers. There were approximately six hundred Jewish workers left in the lower camp and two hundred in the upper camp. The revolt had to be synchronized. If they were discovered early it would mean many of them would die in the Lazarette.

  Forty of the men had previous military training. Rudi was counting on this fact for some assurance their scheme could work. Still everyone was edgy. The workers knew that the next day they would either escape or be killed. There was no other option if they participated in the revolt. Camp elder Galewski made his rounds, reassuring everyone and encouraging them to remain calm and prepare mentally for the next day.

  In the women’s quarter there was never much talk of the revolt, chiefly due to the effectiveness of a couple of female informers. Therefore the women were not officially told when it would start, but they could tell it was imminent due to the way the men were acting. Tchechia received the clues with a measured response. She knew which workers could be trusted and which ones could not. There was
a female kapo who lorded it over the women each day. She was a known informer. Her name was Paulinka.

  Paulinka and Kuttner Kiewe had an understanding. To that date in August, Paulinka had given away at least six Jews who had mistakenly confided to her they had plans to escape. She was despicable, and Tchechia speculated that Paulinka was probably the reason the men felt they could not trust her and Bronka with too many of the details. Someone should take care of her first, thought Tchechia.

  Bronka caught a quick glance from Rudi during the Sunday afternoon camp performances. It was the type of look that communicated that he had some important information for her. He did not smile, or even hold the gaze for very long, but without a shadow of a doubt, Bronka knew what it meant. The revolt was inevitable now.

  Bronka thought for a moment. It was comfortable standing there, listening to the concert. The guards had treated them better in the last few weeks than they had earlier in the year, when trains flooded Treblinka’s unloading platform with passengers. It almost seemed wiser not to revolt with how well the guards were treating them, but Bronka knew the comfort she now felt was fleeting. Besides, what would happen when the war ended?

  Bronka knew that all of the workers would have to be killed because they could not be left alive as witnesses to the murders occurring there. Bronka reassured herself that the revolt was the only way forward, the only plan that could move her out of the cycle of slave labor followed by death. She and Tchechia would participate in the revolt and escape—or die trying.

  Tchechia was stronger than her, both emotionally and physically. Bronka realized she might die while trying to flee the guards, while Tchechia would more likely make it safely to her freedom. These thoughts were a little terrifying for her, but she knew she could not be paralyzed by fear. That fear in itself could cause her death if it prevented her from taking a risk on the most important day.