Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (32 page)

“Escapes?” said Richard Glazar. “Yes, there were a few, three I think which were successful, all in phase two; afterwards it became impossible.

He was to tell me later that two young men – “they were twenty-four and twenty-five, I think,” he said – were smuggled out of the camp in the very first train to be sent out of Treblinka with the victims’ clothes and other belongings. “It was the last two days of October or the very first of November. We helped to hide them; it was all very carefully organized to get the news out to Warsaw.

“At the end of November, beginning of December, seven men from the Blue Command tried and were caught. Kurt Franz shot them in the
Lazarett
and then called a special roll-call and said that if anybody else tried, particularly if they succeeded, ten would be shot for each one who escaped.”

“I wouldn’t have cared if any of them had run away,” said former
SS
male nurse Otto Horn, who was in charge of the “roasts” in the upper camp but, generally described as “inoffensive”, was acquitted at the Treblinka trial. “I sometimes wondered why they didn’t. Once Matthes (who commanded the upper camp) sent me to take a detail out to look for branches: six men and a Ukrainian guard. We were no sooner out of the camp than the Ukrainian was off; they were always foraging in the villages for food and drink. Never a day passed that they didn’t come back with roast chicken,
slivovitz
, etc.…Anyway, here I was with the six men. I thought to myself, This is their chance. All they have to do is caper off.’ There wasn’t anything I could have done and, as I say, I wouldn’t have cared. No, I don’t think anything would have happened to me. It wouldn’t have been my fault. They were looking for branches all over the woods – that’s what they were supposed to be doing and I was alone with them and they were out of my sight for long periods – how could I have kept count of them? It was impossible. But – in the end they all came back.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t understand why.”

And Suchomel says, “A few days before the revolt I advised Masarek and Glazar to break out, but I said they should do it in small groups. And they said they couldn’t do that, because if they did, there would be terrible reprisals. That’s really something, if you come to think of it, isn’t it? And then they say the Jews aren’t courageous. I tell you, I got to know the most extraordinary Jews.”

“I know nothing about advice from Suchomel to break out,” said Richard. “But the revolt was being planned from November 1942. Very very few people knew about it, and even fewer were actually on the planning committee. It was headed of course by the camp elder, Galewski, and until March, when catastrophe struck us, Zhelo Bloch was the military expert on it.

“The period between late October and the beginning of January was the peak period – that was when most of the transports arrived, sometimes six of them – 20,000 people a day. At first mostly Jews from Warsaw and the West, with their riches – above all enormous quantities of food, money and jewels. It was really incredible how much and what we ate; I remember a sixteen-year-old boy who, a few weeks after his arrival, said one night he’d never lived as well as here in Treblinka. It was – you know – very very different from the way people have written about it.

“You see, we weren’t dressed in striped uniforms, filthy, liceridden, or, for much of the time, starving, as the concentration camp inmates mostly were. My own group – the Czechs – and the ‘court-Jews’ dressed extremely well. After all, there was no shortage of clothes. I usually wore jodhpurs, a velvet jacket, brown boots, a shirt, a silk cravat and, when it was cool, a sweater. In hot months I wore light trousers, shirt and a jacket at night. I shone my boots once or twice every day until you could see yourself in them, like in a mirror. I changed shirts every day and of course underclothes.
We
had no body-lice ourselves, but there were of course vermin all over the barracks – it was inevitable with all that was brought in by the transports. I’d wear a pair of pyjamas for two nights or so and then they’d be full of bloodspots where I had killed bugs that crawled up on us in the night, and I’d think to myself, ‘Tomorrow I must get new ones; hope they are nice silk ones; they are still on the way now.’ That sounds terrible, doesn’t it? Well, that is how one became. One was very concerned with the way one
looked;
it was immensely important to look clean on roll-call. One thought of small things all the time, like, ‘I must shave; if I shave again, I have won another round.’ I always had a little shaving kit on me. I still have it. I shaved up to seven times a day. And yet, this was one of the most torturing uncertainties; one never knew how the mood of the Germans ‘ran’ – whether, if one was
seen
shaving or cleaning one’s boots, that wouldn’t get one killed. It was an incredible daily roulette; you see, one
SS
might consider a man looking after himself in this way as making himself ‘conspicuous’ – the cardinal sin – and then another might not. The
effect
of being clean always helped – it even created a
kind
of respect in them. But to be seen doing it might be considered showing off, or toadying, and provoke punishment, or death. We finally understood that the maximum safety lay in looking much – but not
too
much – like the
SS
themselves and the significance of this went even beyond the question of ‘safety’.

“At the beginning of winter the huge transports from the East started coming,” Richard said. “The [Eastern] Polish Jews; they were people from a different world. They were filthy. They knew nothing. It was impossible to feel any compassion, any solidarity with them. Of course, I am not talking about the Warsaw or Cracow intellectuals; they were no different from us. I am talking about the Byelorussian Jews, or those from the extreme east of Poland.”

*
This is not now her name.

†
The shocking callousness of this phrase is untranslatable.

7

T
HE WORK-JEW
slaves hated their jailer-masters from the depth of their souls. And yet – and this is probably the most complex aspect of these awful events – as time went on, a terrifying kind of link developed between them. The origin of this link which, I believe, the Nazis recognized and used to the utmost extent, was the incompatibility between the two worlds of European Jewry; the Eastern and the Western. The generally highly educated, sophisticated Western Jews found themselves confronted by an appalling moral and emotional conflict on not only being identified by the Germans with the Jews from Eastern Poland and Russia, but even more on realizing
in themselves
a moral obligation – and a moral and emotional pressure – to accept this identification. But for many of them this was impossible; being Jewish had become a matter of religion, not race; their allegiance was to the country of their birth, be it Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, Holland, France or for that matter, Germany. And it was thus, tragically, almost easier for them to identify with the Germans, whose way of life had been so like their own, than with the vast numbers of “different” Jews whom many of them encountered now for the first time in their lives.

The hundreds of thousands of Eastern Jews, who had always, by choice as well as by necessity, lived apart from the mainstream of the population, felt themselves exclusively as Jews. Their religious, racial and national feelings were all combined in this one identity. It determined their way of life and all their allegiances, and outside it there was nothing except fear: the traditional and ingrained fear of pogroms which had been their lot for centuries.

It is this fear, combined with a measure of fatalism about the fact of racial persecution, that represented the widest gap between them and Western or assimilated Jews who knew, theoretically, about vicious pogroms but had never experienced them. It was the retrospective misunderstanding of this fatalism – its interpretation as some kind of mystical death wish – which allowed the victims of the “Final Solution” to be seen by some, in shocking distortion, as “sheep who allowed themselves to be led to slaughter”.

The fact is that at the time neither the Eastern nor the Western Jews could conceive that what they appeared to be facing was true, and the Nazis displayed terrifying astuteness in their understanding of the essential differences between the personality of the two groups; an “achievement” which can hardly be attributed to men like Stangl and Wirth, but probably originated either with Heydrich or the “medical” chiefs of T4 – the psychiatrists Professors Heyde and Nitsche. They recognized the capacity of the Western Jews individually to grasp the monstrous truth and individually to resist it, and therefore ordered that great pains be taken to mislead and calm them until, naked, in rows of five and running under the whiplash, they had been made incapable of resistance.

By the same token they realized that these precautions were unnecessary with the Eastern Jews who – up to a point – expected terror. All that was needed here was to create mass hysteria. “They arrived, and they were dead within two hours,” Stangl said. And these two hours were filled with such an infinity of carefully devised mass violence that it robbed these hundred thousands of any chance to pause, or think.

8

A
T CHRISTMAS
1942 Stangl ordered the construction of the fake railway station. A clock (with painted numerals and hands which never moved, but no one was thought likely to notice this), ticket-windows, various timetables and arrows indicating train connections “To Warsaw”, “To Wolwonoce” and “To Bialystock” were painted on to the fačade of the “sorting barracks”; all for the purpose of lulling the arriving transports – an increasing number of whom were to be from the West – into a belief that they had arrived in a genuine transit camp. “It is possible,” Stangl agreed at his trial, “that I ordered the construction of the fake station.”

“
You’ve been telling me about your routines
,” I said to him. “
But how did you
feel?
Was there anything you enjoyed, you felt good about?
”

“It was interesting to me to find out who was cheating,” he said. “As I told you, I didn’t care who it was; my professional ethos was that if something wrong was going on, it had to be found out. That was my profession; I enjoyed it. It fulfilled me. And yes, I was ambitious about that; I won’t deny that.”

“
Would it be true to say that you got used to the liquidations?
”

He thought for a moment. “To tell the truth,” he then said, slowly and thoughtfully, “one did become used to it.”

“
In days? Weeks? Months?
”

“Months. It was months before I could look one of them in the eye. I repressed it all by trying to create a special place: gardens, new barracks, new kitchens, new everything; barbers, tailors, shoemakers, carpenters. There were hundreds of ways to take one’s mind off it; I used them all.”

“
Even so, if you felt that strongly, there had to be times, perhaps at night, in the dark, when you couldn’t avoid thinking about it?
”

“In the end, the only way to deal with it was to drink. I took a large glass of brandy to bed with me each night and I drank.”

“
I think you are evading my question.
”

“No, I don’t mean to; of course, thoughts came. But I forced them away. I made myself concentrate on work, work and again work.”

“
Would it be true to say that you finally felt they weren’t really human beings?
”

“When I was on a trip once, years later in Brazil,” he said, his face deeply concentrated, and obviously reliving the experience, “my train stopped next to a slaughterhouse. The cattle in the pens, hearing the noise of the train, trotted up to the fence and stared at the train. They were very close to my window, one crowding the other, looking at me through that fence. I thought then, ‘Look at this; this reminds me of Poland; that’s just how the people looked, trustingly, just before they went into the tins.…’ ”

“
You said ‘tins
’,” I interrupted. “
What do you mean?
” But he went on without hearing, or answering me.

“…  I couldn’t eat tinned meat after that. Those big eyes … which looked at me … not knowing that in no time at all they’d all be dead.” He paused. His face was drawn. At this moment he looked old and worn and real.

“
So you didn’t feel they were human beings?
”

“Cargo,” he said tonelessly. “They were cargo.” He raised and dropped his hand in a gesture of despair. Both our voices had dropped. It was one of the few times in those weeks of talks that he made no effort to cloak his despair, and his hopeless grief allowed a moment of sympathy.

“
When do you think you began to think of them as cargo? The way you spoke earlier, of the day when you first came to Treblinka, the horror you felt seeing the dead bodies everywhere – they weren’t ‘cargo’ to you then, were they?
”

“I think it started the day I first saw the
Totenlager
in Treblinka. I remember Wirth standing there, next to the pits full of blue-black corpses. It had nothing to do with humanity – it couldn’t have; it was a mass – a mass of rotting flesh. Wirth said, ‘What shall we do with this garbage?’ I think unconsciously that started me thinking of them as cargo.”

“
There were so many children, did they ever make you think of your children, of how you would feel in the position of those parents?
”

“No,” he said slowly, “I can’t say I ever thought that way.” He paused. “You see,” he then continued, still speaking with this extreme seriousness and obviously intent on finding a new truth within himself, “I rarely saw them as individuals. It was always a huge mass. I sometimes stood on the wall and saw them in the tube. But – how can I explain it – they were naked, packed together, running, being driven with whips like …” the sentence trailed off. (“Stangl often stood on the earthen wall between the [two] camps,” said Samuel Rajzman in Montreal. “He stood there like a Napoleon surveying his domain.”)