Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (31 page)

The grab used to transfer bodies from the burial pits to the “roasts”. Photograph from Kurt Franz’s album, its title-page inscribed “Happy Days”

The house built at Treblinka after the camp had been demolished, in which a Ukrainian farmer was to be installed. If questioned, he would claim that he and his family had lived there for years

Treblinka now

6

“I
N OUR
group,” said Richard Glazar, “we shared everything; and the moment one of the group ate something without sharing it, we knew it was the beginning of the end for him.
Food
was uppermost in our minds; for a long time eating was an end in itself; we’d be given tin plates of soup at lunchtime, and bread and coffee. While the Western transports went on, there was so much food around, we used to throw the soup and bread away. There was a huge mountain of mouldy camp bread around [confirming what Suchomel had already told me, and contradicting Stangl’s story]. We only drank the coffee. No, they didn’t mind our taking food from the transports [presumably as long as they didn’t know]–there was so much, you see. Of course, the
SS
and the Ukrainians had first choice, but there was much much more than that. We stole it, and we bought it too. That is, the Ukrainians would help themselves to most of it and then sell it back to us for gold, American dollars or jewellery. They had no means of getting at the valuables – they guarded the outside work details and the camp itself, but the work camp, inside, was worked by Jews, and guarded by the
SS
. The group who actually worked on registering the valuables – millions in money and stones – were called the ‘gold-Jews’,
SS
-man Suchomel supervised them too; he did that and the tailor-shop.”

To be given several
SS
assignments was a proof of efficiency. “It was Wirth who originally appointed me as chief of the gold-Jews,” said Suchomel, “not Stangl. But Stangl was very careful about the valuables. I remember the day Eichmann came.…” For some reason hard to fathom, when I asked Stangl about this he always denied that Himmler or Eichmann visited either of the camps under his command. “Oh, he lied about that,” said Suchomel. “It was most certainly Eichmann who came that day with an
SS
group from Berlin. He told me himself; he said Eichmann and Globocnik were coming and to put everything in order, first in the tailoring shop and then I had to run over and make sure about the gold-Jews’ shop too. ‘Mark all the trunks and cases exactly as to content and description,’ he told me. ‘He is going to want to see it looking exactly right. And when they are here, you come up to us and make a report in proper military style.’

“Of course,” he said, “one was able to help sometimes, too. One morning one of the young Poles who worked under me came, distraught. He said, ‘Chief, please help me. My sister Broncha has arrived; she is already in the undressing barrack.… please save her.’ I went in there and asked which was Broncha. There she was, naked, trembling from head to foot and crying. I said, ‘Stop trembling. You
are
a seamstress, are you?’ And she – would you believe it, she said, trembling, ‘No, I can’t sew.’ So I said, ‘Don’t be stupid, you are a seamstress; just remember that and I’ll get you out.’ Then I told the barrack Kommando to hold her back – not to let her get into the tube or they’d have to answer to me for it. And I went over to see Stangl and told him that I just didn’t have enough workers in my shop – I had to have more. He said Wirth had ordered there was to be no more recruiting. ‘Everything has to go,’ he said. But I said I just had to have at least one more girl; so finally he said, ‘Well, in God’s name then,’ and gave me a chit for her – to show Küttner. If there wasn’t an official chit from Stangl, then, although Küttner might have agreed to let somebody stay if we asked him, Franz was almost bound to push them in again, just because they hated each other. Anyway, that’s how Broncha got out. She survived, you know; she is in Israel.”

“Later in the autumn,” Richard Glazar went on, “we were allowed a thirty-minute lunch break when we could talk, and everybody would ask each other, ‘What have you “organized” today?’ And that always referred to gold, money and food. After a while we did begin to think that we must
do
something; plan something, resist. But the work and the unremitting tension made us fearfully tired, just tired you know, and one used to say to oneself, or to close friends, ‘We
must
think – we
must
plan,’ but then we’d add, ‘We’ll think tomorrow, not today.’

“Did we become hardened, callous to the suffering, the horror around us? Well, one can’t generalize; as with everything in life, people reacted differently. One did, I think, develop a kind of dullness, a numbness where the daily nightmarish events became a kind of routine, and only special horrors aroused us, reminded us of normal feelings; sometimes this would be connected with specific and special people, sometimes with special events.

“There was the day when Edek arrived – he was a small fourteen-year-old boy. Perhaps he arrived with his family, perhaps alone, I don’t know; when he got off the train and stood on the ramp, all one could see of him was his head and his shoes; in between was the accordion he’d brought, and that was all he brought. An
SS
saw him and said right away, ‘Come, come,’ and from that day on he played for them. They made a kind of mascot of him; he played everywhere, at all hours, and almost nightly in their mess. And just about the same time a famous opera singer arrived – a young one, from Warsaw – and somebody drew him to the attention of the
SS
and he too was pulled out. It wasn’t long after that that they started the fires; we saw them for the first time in December, one night, through the barred window of the barrack; the flames rose high, high above the camp, flames in all colours: red, orange, blue, green, purple. And in the silence of the camp, and the terrible brightness of the flames, one heard nothing except little Edek playing his accordion and the young singer singing
Eli Eli.

“Robert Altschuh said later that night – and that was the first time we had thought of it that way – ‘They are trying to find ways to hide the traces; they are burning the corpses. But they aren’t going to find it so easy – even one corpse doesn’t burn easily, and hundreds of thousands of corpses …?’

“So you see, that night, on the one hand we had allowed ourselves to be emotionally overwhelmed by this ‘special event’ – the fires. But then, only minutes afterwards, it was in a way cancelled out – and perhaps, although we may not have realized it, deliberately so – by Robert’s scientific consideration of the problem of how to burn hundreds of thousands of corpses. He had a lot of ideas on it; he analysed the human body for us, what burned and what didn’t burn; who would be easier and who more difficult to burn. And we listened, you know – with interest.

“Secrecy? Good heavens, there was no secrecy about Treblinka; all the Poles between there and Warsaw must have known about it, and lived off the proceeds. All the peasants came to barter, the Warsaw whores did business with the Ukrainians – it was a circus for all of them.” (Both Zabecki and Berek Rojzman had already spoken of the peasants who tended their fields which adjoined the camp. “And many others,” said Rojzman, “came to the fence to barter, mostly with the Ukrainians, but with us too.” Stangl was to talk about this too.)

Suchomel, in this context, also spoke about the “whores” Stangl had said were grouped about the camp. “They weren’t ‘whores’ in that sense,” he said. “We called them
Spekulantinnen.
They were women who came from all over – Warsaw too, I expect – to do business with the Ukrainians. They may have fucked with them – I suppose they did – but mainly they were around to ‘shop’. After Wirth came, he had twelve of them picked up at random, brought into the camp and had them whipped. Afterwards he shipped them to the labour camp …” (the Polish labour camp near a stone quarry about two kilometres above the extermination camp, which Zabecki had described as having been built first). Suchomel paused. “Did you know,” he said then, in a tone signifying scientific interest, “that all Jewesses have dimples in their buttocks? This was confirmed by the racial scientists.”

“No I didn’t,” I said. “But what has this to do with your
Spekulantinnen
story anyway?
They
weren’t Jewish, were they?”

“No,” he said, not understanding my meaning, or his own
non sequitur.

“You can’t really believe this nonsense anyway, can you?” I asked. “Have you ever seen the backside of a fat Christian woman? A German for instance?”

He didn’t answer.

I asked Richard Glazar whether there were girls among the “work-Jews” and he said “Yes, there were girls. They worked in the kitchen and the laundry, in both the lower and upper camps. Of course, anyone who was sent to work in the upper camp, girls or men, knew they’d never come down again.” (There is one single case on record – the carpenter Yankiel Wiernik – of someone moving back and forth between both parts of Treblinka. And although several people from the “upper camp” survived the August uprising, an authentic escape from there before then is unknown and considered impossible.)

“Yes,” said Richard, “of course most of the – few – girls who were there paired off with somebody. Love? It’s hard to say; relationships, strong friendships, yes – and yes, perhaps love; Kapo Kuba was in love – or lived with, if you like, a girl called Sabina. All the girls who were there were young and attractive; they only picked young and attractive ones, many of them blondes or redheads. Anyway, Sabina was found in bed, I think, with Kuba once, or something like that, and Küttner, one of the very bad
SS
men, said, ‘We can’t have all this whoring about,’ and sent her up to work in the laundry at the death camp. Well, Kapo Kuba volunteered to go up too, to be with her. They didn’t let him. But what would you call that? Not love? [Kuba is dead; “Sabina” is one of the two girls who survived, and lives in Israel.
*
]

“Then there was Tchechia. She was in love with Rakowski, the former camp elder. And he, they said, was in love with her. Stadie shot him when he discovered (through an informer) that he had planned an escape for himself and Tchechia, and found gold on him. Perhaps Tchechia slept with other men afterwards. But can you wonder? Did it really matter?”

(“Tchechia Mandel was the only real red-blonde in the camp,” said Suchomel, whose assiduous memory of individuals and events is remarkable. “She was a really intelligent distinguished girl, very proud and courageous. She was one of the few Jews all of us Germans addressed as ‘
Si
’ rather than ‘
Du
.’ Steiner [Jean-Franfois Steiner, author of the controversial book
Treblinka
] in his book said she slept with Germans – but never never did she do that. She was Kapo Rakowski’s girl friend – he was the chief Jew of the camp and she became pregnant by him and had an abortion. Tchechia was the daughter of an industrialist in Galicia – she was extremely well educated. I was told later how she died; I didn’t see it myself; it happened after I left Treblinka. It was quite a while after the revolt; only a few girls were still there waiting on the remnant of the German personnel who were liquidating the camp. The Unterscharführer who was in charge – he got up after lunch that day and apparently said to the three girls, ‘Well girls, it’s your turn now’ [
jetzt muss esja einmal drari gehen
].
†
And Tchechia laughed and said, ‘Aha, I never did believe your fairy-tale promises, you pigs. Go ahead, kill us. Just do me a favour and don’t ask
us
to undress.’ One of the girls, she was also called Tchechia – ‘little Tchechia’ they called her – she cried, and Tchechia said, ‘Don’t cry, don’t do them the favour. Remember, you are a Jewess.’ She was really something –
somebody
, you know.” The position Suchomel has adopted as an admirer of the Jews is as remarkable as his memory, and psychologically interesting.)