Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (24 page)

“When the first train arrived – it was 9.30 a.m. – we could hear it from far away. Not because of the noise of the train, but because of the cries of the people, and the shooting.

“There were guards sitting on the roofs of the cars, with their sleeves rolled up, holding guns. They looked as if they had killed; as if they had had their hands in blood and then washed before arriving. The train was very full – incredibly full it seemed. It was a hot day but, bewildering to us, the difference in temperature between inside the cars and out was obviously such that a kind of fog came out and surrounded the train. There were chalked figures on each car – you know the Germans with their methodical ways – that’s why I know exactly how many people were killed in Treblinka. The figures on each car varied between 150 and 180. We didn’t know what was happening, but we began to note down the figures that very first day, and we never stopped for a year, until it was over. The train had left Warsaw the night before – it had travelled almost twelve hours … at least that’s how long the people had been in there – the trip ordinarily only takes about two hours.

“The people called out of the trains that they were being taken to work on farms or in factories, but we didn’t think so. We drew our own conclusions; a transport this carefully guarded, with so much shooting.…

“We had been told that the track to the camp could only take twenty cars at a time. One train usually had at least twenty cars, and sometimes in the weeks and months to come, three trains would arrive together. So everything except twenty cars would just stay in our station until they finished with each lot of twenty.

“But that first day – as I said before, it happened I was not on duty, and I wanted to know what was going on. We had been warned that the approaches to the camp were strictly off-limits and guarded. But actually there was a road of sorts that passed the perimeter of the camp – you see, there were fields all around it belonging to peasants who … oh yes … continued to work their fields throughout the existence of the camp. So it wasn’t as off-limits, or as guarded as all that – ever.”

(“Oh yes,” said Berek Rojzman, “they worked there all right.” – “But then, they saw everything that was going on?” I asked. Both he and Pan Zabecki seemed surprised at my surprise. “Of course they did,” they answered. “They were there all day.”)

“Anyway,” Zabecki went on, “I took a bicycle and cycled a stretch up the road and then got off, pretending that my chain had slipped, in case somebody saw me. I heard machine-guns, and I heard people screaming, praying to God and – yes – to the Holy Virgin.…I cycled back and I wrote a message to my [Home Army] section chief – we used to leave our messages under the arms in the statue of the saint in the square in Kossov – I informed my chiefs that some disaster was happening in my district.…

“After that the trains arrived every day. Within two weeks people began to try to escape, sometimes as many as one hundred out of one transport. There were times when whole cars arrived empty – at that initial period there were three specific occasions when this happened, and on each of these the guards were executed. The Germans who worked at the station told us that there was a punishment cellar in the camp: that’s where the [Ukrainian] guards were taken.”

(The day before, in Sobibor, Pan Gerung, the forester, had taken me to see a brick construction, not much larger than a pillbox, three or four yards away from the old forester’s cottage which had been Stangl’s billet and office. “You look at it,” he had said. “We don’t know what it was for. Tell me what you think.” The door opened on to about eighteen steps leading down into total darkness. It smelled dank and mouldy and something – indefinable – else. At the bottom was a small room, about six foot square, ventilated by two tiny slits almost at ceiling level. The floor was earth, the thick walls and the ceiling of rough reddish stone. And into the ceiling were driven four huge hooks. Stangl had never mentioned this room to me. Whatever its purpose, it was a place of horror.)

At the time of my visit to Poland, in 1972, everyone I met officially was very reluctant to discuss the question of past or present anti-Semitism, and Pan Zabecki, although a transparently honest man, was no exception to this rule. Except that – because he was so honest – his evasions were the more obvious.

“No,” he said, looking embarrassed, “I don’t think one can say that people around here were anti-Semitic. The Germans had set up ghettos in all the towns and I remember that in the smaller places the people took food to the ghettos and gave it to the Jews.”

It is certain – as I have already said – that many people in Poland, on many occasions and at tremendous risk to themselves, did try to help Jews. But other informants, less inhibited by official presences, told me that if Christian Poles took food to Jews, particularly in Eastern Poland, it was more often than not in order to sell it. “In the barbed-wire enclosure near Malenzow,” said Stanislaw Szmajzner, “we had no food or drink, and a few Poles came and offered water in exchange for gold rings or money. Nobody had much left, but whoever did, gave these traders their valuables to get a sip of water.” And Richard Glazar said “…  the going rate for two white rolls, three-quarters of an ounce of sausage and a third of a litre of vodka was between ten and twenty us dollars – often more.”

None the less, some of the details Pan Zabecki gave from his own experience did confirm the existence of individual acts of compassion such as that described by Pan Gerung in Sobibor.

“When people realized that not only adults but babies were being killed,” Pan Zabecki said, “they felt pity. It manifested itself first by their bringing water to the trains. It really is very difficult to describe adequately what it was like and what we all felt,” he said again. “I myself couldn’t do anything – I couldn’t allow myself to be seen exchanging one word with people on the transports or make one gesture towards them; it would have jeopardized the work I was doing for the underground. It is difficult to show to you in words how pitiful it was, the kind of compassion people felt, and yet the little – the terribly little they
could
do: you see, even the German railway workers tried at first to help – the engineer in charge ordered the huge canisters from the engine to be used to shuttle drinking water to the trains as they stood in our station. And at first the train supervisors allowed this. But after a few days it was stopped. But even then, people continued to bring water, until the Germans began to shoot to keep them away from the trains.

“The population was horrified – not only because of what they saw; they were paralysed with fear and horror, and then quite soon they became physically ill from the terrible smell that began to emanate from the camp. But then too, you see, everybody became terrified for themselves; they were
seeing
all this and one became more and more convinced that anyone who witnessed these unspeakable horrors would have to be eliminated too.

“There was a railway family sharing our accommodation in the station house, and they had children of ten and twelve. For days these children went with their parents to take water to the Jews; but the children reacted so strongly, the parents became afraid they were being made ill by it, and they sent them away, to relatives in Pruszukow. My wife, too, had been taking water to the Jews every day and I finally said to her, ‘You mustn’t go any more: you have a small child, I don’t want you to risk it.’ Anguish on behalf of the Jews,” he said, “turned very quickly into this sharp fear for ourselves. But, you must imagine what it was like living here: every day, as of the early morning, these hours of horror when the trains arrived, and all the time – after the very first days – this odour, this dark foggy cloud that hung over us, that covered the sky in that hot and beautiful summer, even on the most brilliant days – not a rain-cloud promising relief from the heat, but an almost sulphuric darkness bringing with it this pestilential smell.

“There was a period – in the beginning – when my wife could no longer function at all; she could no longer do anything around the house; she couldn’t cook, she couldn’t play with the boy, she couldn’t eat and hardly slept. She had a sort of complete nervous breakdown. When I was a pow she had managed, but now she broke down completely. This extreme condition she was in lasted for about three weeks, then she became pathologically indifferent; she did her work, moved, ate, slept, talked – but all of it like an automaton.…

“Of course there was no question of a normal sexual life; we felt we lived in a cemetery; how could one feel joy there?

“Of course, for many of us men it was different – we had more of a purpose; we were so involved in our activities for the ‘Conspiracy’
*
, it gave us an outlet for our emotions, for our hate. We were very very busy, you know – we not only did our ordinary jobs, and collected and delivered information, but we also did partisan training in the woods. For us, in the final analysis, it was a very full life. But I could see that my friends’ wives reacted just like my wife did.

“I know a great deal has been said about the brutality of the Ukrainians,” he said, “but actually the Lithuanians who mostly guarded the trains were much worse than the Ukrainians; they really were sadists; they used to shoot at people, blind, through the windows of the cars, when they begged for doctors, water and to be allowed to relieve themselves. They did it as a sport – they laughed and joked and bet while they did it. Amongst the Ukrainians there were several who we knew wanted to get away. But you see, that too was dangerous; they were in just as much danger as everybody else. One of the Ukrainian guards did escape, with the help of his Polish girl friend from that little village near us. Stangl himself came to the village then and asked the village chief – the mayor I suppose you’d call him – who this Ukrainian had visited. First he refused to say but then they beat him and he told. Then they went to the father of this girl and took him to the camp. His old mother hanged herself that night; actually the man was allowed back home the next day.

“And then there was the other side of the coin: the Ukrainians began to have a great deal of money. And they wanted more and more women. One farmer forced his twelve-year-old daughter to sleep with Ukrainians. The Conspiracy learned of this and a group went one night and beat him up. Then there was the case of two Polish girls who came from somewhere, got a room and ‘received’ Ukrainians; the Conspiracy shaved the head of one of them and executed the other.

“As time went on there were more and more violent incidents of one sort or another and people were more and more afraid. One of my colleagues at the station, an engineer who was helping me count cars, Tadeuz Kancakowski, was seen by the Germans putting a note with figures on a spike; two German civilians came and took him to an office in Malkinia. He was sent to Majdanek [the concentration camp near Lublin] and never returned. And in the autumn, we suddenly heard that twenty cars were being readied for something in our own station. People became absolutely frantic – they thought that now it was our turn. About two hundred people packed up that very night and left; that was about the time, too, when all the children, and most of the women went away. After that there were almost only men left in the region.

“No,” he said, “I didn’t consider sending my wife and boy away. I was too busy; I didn’t want to stay by myself – the cooking and everything – it would have been impossible. I convinced her that she had to bear it just as I had to. After that she slowly became better.…”

*
Underground organization directed by the Polish government in exile in London.

*
The Polish Resistance.

2

I
HAVE
already mentioned the extraordinary metamorphosis in Stangl’s face, which I first saw when he began to speak about his work in the Euthanasia Programme, and which had recurred whenever we reached a point in his story which was really intolerable. He underwent this change again when we began to speak of what he found when he arrived at Treblinka. His voice became slurred and again his face thickened, coarsened and turned dark red.

“I drove there, with an
SS
driver,” he said. “We could smell it kilometres away. The road ran alongside the railway. When we were about fifteen, twenty minutes’ drive from Treblinka, we began to see corpses by the line, first just two or three, then more, and as we drove into Treblinka station, there were what looked like hundreds of them – just lying there – they’d obviously been there for days, in the heat. In the station was a train full of Jews, some dead, some still alive … that too, looked as if it had been there for days.”

“
But all this mas nothing new to you? You had seen these transports constantly, in Sobibor?
”

“Nothing like
this.
And in Sobibor – I told you – unless one was actually working in the forest, one could live without actually seeing; most of us never saw anybody dying or dead. Treblinka that day was the most awful thing I saw during all of the Third Reich” – he buried his face in his hands – “it was Dante’s Inferno,” he said through his fingers. “It was Dante come to life. When I entered the camp and got out of the car on the square [the
Sortierungsplatz
] I stepped knee-deep into money; I didn’t know which way to turn, where to go. I waded in notes, currency, precious stones, jewellery, clothes. They were everywhere, strewn all over the square. The smell was indescribable; the hundreds, no, the thousands of bodies everywhere, decomposing, putrefying. Across the square, in the woods, just a few hundred yards away on the other side of the barbed-wire fence and all around the perimeter of the camp, there were tents and open fires with groups of Ukrainian guards and girls – whores, I found out later, from all over the countryside – weaving drunk, dancing, singing, playing music.…”