Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (28 page)

“The transport we had come on was numbered
BG
417 – Karel Unger, who was travelling with his whole family, had been assigned to a different set of numbers,
BU
. But we had arranged that I’d keep a lookout for him the day after or whenever, and reserve bunk-space for him next to me and all that, so that we could continue to stick together.

“I saw men with blue armbands on the platform, but without insignia. One of them carried a leather whip – not like any whip I’d ever seen, but like something for big animals. These men spoke very strange German. There were loud announcements, but it was all fairly restrained: nobody did anything to us [the prescribed pattern for transports arriving from the West]. I followed the crowd: ‘Men to the right, women and children to the left’, we had been told. The women and children disappeared into a barrack further to the left and we were told to undress. One of the
SS
men – later I knew his name, Küttner – told us in a chatty sort of tone that we were going into a disinfection bath and afterwards would be assigned work. Clothes, he said, could be left in a heap on the floor, and we’d find them again later. We were to keep documents, identity cards, money, watches and jewellery with us.

“The queue began to move and I suddenly noticed several men fully dressed standing near another barrack further back, and I was wondering who they were. And just then another
SS
man (Miete was his name) came by me and said, ‘Come on, you, get back into your clothes, quick, special work.’ That was the first time I was frightened. Everything was very quiet, you know. And when he said that to me, the others turned around and looked at me – and I thought, my God, why me, why does he pick on me? When I had got back into my clothes, the line had moved on and I noticed that several other young men had also been picked out and were dressing. We were taken through to the ‘work-barrack’, most of which was filled from floor to ceiling with clothes, stacked up in layers. Many of the clothes were filthy – we had to tear them apart by force, they stuck together with dirt and sweat. The foreman showed me how to tie the things together into bundles, wrapped up in sheets or big cloths. You understand, there was no time, not a moment between the instant we were taken in there and put to work, to talk to anyone, to take stock of what was happening … and of course, never forget that we had no idea at all what this whole installation was for. One saw these stacks of clothing – I suppose the thought must have entered our minds, where do they come from, what are they? We
must
have connected them with the clothes all of us had just taken off outside … but I cannot remember doing that. I only remember starting work at once making bundles, I
thought
as the foreman had told me, but then he shouted, ‘More, more, put more in if you want to stay around.’ Even then I didn’t know what he meant; I just put more in. Even though stuff was being carried in from outside, the very clothes the people who had arrived with me had taken off minutes before, I think I still didn’t think; it seems impossible now, but that’s how it was. I too went outside to pick up clothes and suddenly something hit me on the back – it was like being struck by a tree-trunk: it was a Ukrainian guard hitting me with one of these awful huge whips. [“Yes,” said Stangl, “I think there may have been umbrella wire in the whips.” – “No,” said Suchomel, “there was nothing in the whips except leather – they just say that now.”] ‘Run,’ he screamed, ‘run’ – and I understood from that moment on that all work in Treblinka was done at a run.”

Later somebody whispered the truth about Treblinka, “But carefully, carefully,” Richard said.

Life in Treblinka was always incredibly dangerous, always hung on a thread, but perhaps the most dangerous time was each morning, after the arrival of the transports, while the queues were moving up through the tube towards the death-camp and while the gas chambers were in operation.

“There was an incredible rivalry amongst the
SS
men,” Richard said. “You see, they weren’t just an amorphous mass, as people now like to imagine them; they were, after all, individual men, with individual personalities. Some were worse, some better. Almost every one of them had their protégés amongst the prisoners, whom they played off against each other. Of course, one can’t look at this in the same way one might consider other ‘organizations’ where heads of sections have their favourites. Obviously, no ordinary standards of emotion or behaviour can apply; because all of existence, for us especially, and up to a point, at least by reflection, also for them, was reduced to a primeval level: life and death. Consequently all ordinary reactions became special, or at least very different. Perhaps some
SS
men developed a kind of ‘loyalty’ to one prisoner or another – though one hesitates to call it that; there really was almost invariably another, and usually nefarious, reason for any act of kindness or charity. One must always measure whatever they did against the deep fundamental indifference they felt towards all of us. It was of course more than indifference, but I call it that for want of a better word. Really, when one wants to evaluate how they behaved and what they were, one must not forget their incredible power, their autonomy within their narrow and yet, as far as we were concerned, unlimited field; but also the isolation created by their unique situation and by what
they
– and hardly anyone else even within the German or Nazi community – had in common. Perhaps if this isolation had been the result of good rather than evil deeds, their own relationships towards each other would have been different. As it was, most of them seemed to hate and despise each other and do anything – almost anything – to ‘get at’ each other. Thus, if one of them selected a man out of a new transport for work, in other words to stay alive at least for a while, it could perfectly easily happen – and often did – that one of his rivals, and make no mistake about it, in one sense or another they were all rivals, would come along and kill that man just to spite him [send him into the queue to be killed] or else ‘mark’ him, which was tantamount to death [anybody ‘marked’ went with the next transport]. All this created a virtually indescribable atmosphere of fear. The most important thing for a prisoner in Treblinka, you see, was not to make himself conspicuous. To this, too, there were degrees – which I will tell you about later. But basically it meant, first of all, not to do anything ‘wrong’ – the ‘wrongest’ thing being to work at anything remotely less than one’s top capacity. And there were a hundred and one other arbitrary ‘wrong’ things, depending only on who saw you. Of course, I am not talking about any kind of insubordination; I mean in the context of our lives that would have been impossible – simply unthinkable. What one had to do was to develop to a fine art one’s understanding of how to remain alive.

“All this applied much more during the first six months than the second. The whole Treblinka time needs to be divided into four phases. The first one was the months under Dr Eberl [before Glazar himself – or Stangl – arrived]. The second one, already under Stangl, but in the beginning of his rule, was still a period of utter arbitrariness where one
SS
might select a man for work and an hour later, he might be dead, sent ‘up’ by another. Phase three – after the beginning of 1943 – was one of comparative stability: there were less transports; the
SS
by then knew their comparatively safe jobs far from the shooting war
depended
on their proving themselves indispensable by running efficient camps, so they began to value useful workers. And by that time, too, the prisoners had become individuals of sorts to them. They had, so to speak, ‘tenure’ in their jobs; there was a terrible kind of communality of basic purpose between the murderers and the victims – the purpose of staying alive.

“Finally phase four was the two, three months before the uprising in August 1943 – a period of increasing insecurity for the Germans when the Russians were approaching and the
SS
had begun to realize what it would mean if the war was lost and the outside world learned of what had been done in Treblinka, and that they were in fact individual men, individually accountable. And that it followed that they might, eventually, be able to make use of individual prisoners [to speak in their defence].

“However, these are generalizations; the reason why, the morning of our arrival, it was fifteen or thirty minutes before somebody managed to whisper to us what Treblinka was for, was that this was phase two of the camp’s existence and fear dictated every move.”

Richard Glazar, as I had learned to understand by then, has an extraordinary capacity for recall, and for relative detachment – essential if this particular story is to be bearable – and, in a wider sense, of value.

“How can one say how one reacted?” he said. “What I remember best about that first night is that I decided not to move; to … how can I say it … stand, sit, lie very very still. Was it already an unconscious realization that the main thing was not to be noticed? Did I instinctively connect being ‘noticed’ with ‘movement’? I don’t know. I told myself, ‘Swim along with the current … let yourself be carried … if you move too much, you’ll go under.…’

“That night I wasn’t hungry. I mean, there
was
food – there was always food after the arrival of ‘rich’ [Western] transports – but I couldn’t eat. I was terribly terribly thirsty, a thirst that continued all evening, all night.…

“I remember, that evening in the barrack, the others watching us new ones. ‘How are you going to behave?’ they wondered. ‘Are you going to scream, shout, sob? Are you going to go mad, hysterical, melancholy?’ All these things happened; and from the next night on, when I myself was one of the ‘old’ ones, I watched the ‘new’ ones in exactly the same way. It was not curiosity – nor was it compassion. Already we were beyond such simple feelings; we did it in response to a need within ourselves; we needed to prove to ourselves, over and over, that everyone was the same as oneself, with the same fears, the same aggressions – perhaps not quite the same capacities. There was a kind of reassurance in both these things, and watching the new arrivals became a kind of rhythm, every night.…”

Richard spoke a great deal about “relationships” and how important they were to survival. “My friend Karel arrived in a transport the day after I had come. His whole family were killed at once but he was twenty-one years old and strong like me, so he too was among the lucky ones to be selected for work. From that moment we were never apart until 1945 when we returned to Prague together – they used to call us the twins.” (Karel Unger now lives in the state of Washington and refused to come to Germany to testify at the Treblinka trial, and later at Stangl’s trials.) “He cannot understand how I can send my boy to Germany to study,” said Richard sadly. “Our feelings about some things may be very different now.” (A year later Richard told me that Karel and his wife had come to stay with them in Switzerland a few months earlier, “and our feelings
weren’t
different,” he said happily. “It was as if we had said goodbye a week before; we are still twins.”)

The small Czech contingent of which Glazar was a part, so important in the life of the camp, is even today spoken of by other survivors, and by former
SS
men too, with a kind of awe. “They were special,” said Samuel Rajzman, who lives in Montreal and is, in terms of wisdom and achievement, a rather “special” man himself. “They had a special kind of strength, a special life force.” “The Czechs?” said Suchomel. “Oh yes, I remember them very well. They
were
a special group: Masarek, Willie Fürst–they worked in the tailor shop under me. And then there was Glazar. Those lads slept on and under feather comforters. They were tidy – really tidy.” And Berek Rojzman in Poland, also mentioned the Czechs. “I slept next to them. They were – they were a sort of elite group. Masarek,” he said with awe, “and of course Glazar. I knew them all.” It is gratifying to him to speak of them.

Richard says they were aware of this feeling in the other prisoners. “At the time,” he said, “it was shaming for us. They seemed to feel we were superior to them. One of the Poles, David Bart, said once, ‘
You
must survive; it is more important than that we should.’ But there were very few of us. At the ‘peak period’ of the camp – autumn and winter of 1942 – there were a thousand work-Jews, eighteen of them us Czechs. Two of us survived, that’s all.” (Altogether about 250,000 Czech Jews were killed during the “Final Solution”.)

At the beginning of what Glazar called phase two, the
SS
(Stangl, no doubt, with his talent for organization) decided they could use certain professionals and people with qualities of leadership to improve efficiency. With few exceptions (one of them a woman, and an informer who was later “executed” by the revolt committee) the members of this “élite” were Warsaw Poles over forty; doctors, engineers, architects and financiers. They were given the best, and slightly segregated accommodation, and armbands with the word
Hofjude
– “Court Jew” (derision even in privilege) – the main purpose of which was to protect them from some
SS
man’s murderous whim. (Of the Czechs, only Rudolf Masarek – much younger than the others – was eventually to be appointed a “Court Jew”.)

“Later, when we were in phase three,” said Richard, “the armbands became unnecessary; they took them off then because they found it embarrassing to flaunt them before the rest of the slaves when they came back at night, half dead from exhaustion.”

Six of the young Czechs, all arriving within days of each other, became close friends; but even within the six, they paired off in twos. “There was Karel and me,” said Richard. “We worked from October until March in the warehouse, more specifically in ‘men’s clothing’ – they called us ‘Karel and Richard from Men’s Better Overcoats’. The one who arrived next was Robert Altschuh, a twenty-seven-year-old medical student, and after him thirty-two-year-old Hans Freund; he’d worked in textiles in Prague. Five days after us Rudi Masarek arrived; he was twenty-eight, tall, blond, blue-eyed; his family had owned one of the most exclusive men’s shirt shops in Prague.…” (When Suchomel first saw Masarek, he said, “What the hell are
you
doing here? You aren’t a Jew, are you?”)