Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (40 page)

(Samuel Rajzman, who also spent a year hiding in the forest, told me that one day, when he returned from a nearby village where he had gone to get food for his group, he found them all dead, including Joe Siedlecki’s “girl friend”, killed – he said – by Polish partisans.)

“There were two men who wanted to go with me,” Joe continued, “but one of them looked very Jewish. Like a rabbi, he looked. I said, ‘What do you want of my life? Do me a favour, you go that way, I this.’ He had diamonds and gold and offered me a share if I let him go with me – the other one too. In the end we did go together, and only separated when we reached Warsaw.”

Like several of the Treblinka and Sobibor survivors – those whose appearance made it possible – Joe Siedlecki spent the rest of the war passing as a gentile. “I got into a Polish construction unit attached to the German army,” he said. “We got army rations, billets, travel passes.” He spent a year with this unit, in Wehrmacht uniform (presumably in Germany). “Finally everybody was going on leave. I had passed it up several times, but people were becoming suspicious, so in the end I too had to go to Poland on leave.”

When he got back to Poland, a Polish woman let him bunk in her kitchen. “Then I found out that she was hiding four Jews,” Joe said. “They’d been there for two years, and were paying her. She, her children and I slept in the kitchen, the hidden Jews in the bedroom. Not long after I came, their money ran out. And then she sold them to the Gestapo, for 100 zloty each.” After the liberation, he told the authorities that she had turned Poles over to the Gestapo. “I just said ‘Poles’; if I had said Jews, they probably wouldn’t have cared. But that way they took care of her,” he said, “
I
had nothing to do with it.”

It had all been planned so carefully, said Richard Glazar, “but all the plans came to nothing in this fantastic, really indescribable confusion when none of us finally knew where or in which direction to go. All we knew was that we had to run.…” (“We climbed the anti-tank barriers round the camp,” said Charles [Karel] Unger in his statement for the trial, “and got to a pond. We waded in and stayed there for hours with only our heads above water. While we were standing in the water, we could hear the posses and the dogs, jeeps and cars.…”)

Richard and Karel were to spend two years as foreign workers in Germany. They worked their way across Poland into Czechoslovakia, then to Mannheim where they lived among Germans and worked in a German factory. Richard remembered “sitting in a bloody German cinema, seeing
Baron Münchhausen
with Hans Albers – it was ridiculous, just ridiculous after Treblinka. We went quite mad.”

Their madness manifested itself in recklessness, “cocking a snook at the Germans”, he said, making “a sport out of challenging them”, laughing aloud in public at the reports of military defeats, walking through the streets and smiling broadly during air-raid alerts. Once, by a truly shattering irony, the Mannheim welfare service offered them coats which were unwrapped in front of their eyes from appallingly familiar “bundles tied up in sheets”. “We thought we were going mad,” Richard said again, but in a different way.

But there is a great deal more to the story of Richard Glazar’s escape, and I feel it should be left to him to tell it in print one day. Equally, he may perhaps publish the “Open Letter” he wrote to Jean-François Steiner after the publication of
Treblinka,
in which he expressed the “profound dismay felt by all the survivors at the politically or personally motivated misrepresentations [in that book] of real events and real people, most of them now dead and unable to defend themselves.”

“No one at all could have got out of Treblinka,” Richard said to me, “if it hadn’t been for the real heroes: those who, having lost their wives and children there, elected to fight it out so as to give the others a chance. Galewski – the ‘camp elder’; Kapo Kurland who had worked in one of the most tragic places in this tragic place – the
Lazarett
– an extraordinary man and the senior member of the revolutionary committee, to whom we prisoners swore an oath on the eve of the uprising; Sidowicz and Simcha from the carpentry shop; Standa Lichtblau, one of our Czech group, a mechanic by profession who worked in the garage and blew it up with the petrol tanks – the biggest, most important fire of the uprising; he died in it. And of course Zhelo Bloch who survived four hellish months to lead the revolt in the upper camp and who died in it. And finally Rudi Masarek; tall blond Rudi who of all the men in Treblinka would have had the best chance of getting away; he looked more German than the most ‘Aryan’ of the
SS
; he was better looking than their most carefully selected élite soldiers. He had his mother in Czechoslovakia and could have gone back, eventually, to a life of ease and plenty. He had come to Treblinka, deliberately, because he loved someone else more than himself. He died, deliberately, for us.”

17

W
HEN
S
TANGL
described the steps he took to put down the revolt, he spoke without animosity and only in terms of strategy; one could in fact, detect in him, and in several of the former
SS
men I spoke with a measure of admiration for the insurgents.

“At the moment of the revolt,” he said, “we had about 840 Jews in the upper and lower camp. When the shooting stopped, after about ten minutes, we called out that those who wanted our protection were to assemble outside my quarters.”

(“When it started,” said Suchomel, “Tchechia – you remember, the good-looking red-blonde – was working in the kitchen.
SS
, cleaners and kitchen-girls were all lying together on the floor in the passageways because they were shooting in, from outside. Tchechia was lying quite near me. I don’t know whether she had known about the revolt in advance. I know that Wirth sometimes boasted that he had even got the Jews to kill each other. Well, I was there and I have never heard or seen one single instance of such a thing happening. Except, of course, there were Jewish informers, employed by Küttner, and Jews died because of them – that is true. But perhaps even there not many. But I do know that the notorious ‘Kappowa’ Paulinka gave away at least six Jews to Küttner. After the revolt she was found, with her head shattered, on the path where she had tried to escape to the upper camp. And they dealt with one other informer too; but those were the only cases I know of.…”)

“More than a hundred reported to us when we called them,” said Stangl. “Meanwhile the security troops had surrounded the camp at a distance of five kilometres. And of course, they caught most of them.”

“Did they bring in the ones they caught?”

“Oh no, they shot them. Towards the end of the afternoon the figures began coming in. I had somebody sitting by the telephone taking them down and adding them up. By 5 or 6 o’clock it looked as if they had already caught forty more than ever escaped. I thought, ‘My God, they are going to start shooting down Polskis next’ – they were shooting at anything that moved.…”

Franciszek Zabecki, the traffic controller at Treblinka station, was, of course, a witness of the uprising. He says that it began exactly at 3 p.m.

“I heard shooting and almost at the same time saw the fires. They burned till 6 p.m. The
SS
came to the mayor and told him that anyone who helped escapees would be shot at once. There were hundreds of troops around, almost immediately; people were so afraid to be taken for Jews, almost everybody stayed locked up in their houses. The troops shot on sight at anything that moved. One woman, Helen Sucha, hid a Jew: they took her up to the labour camp and she was never heard of again.”

“Did Poles join German posses, as all the survivors have claimed they did?”

“I think,” said Zabecki, “that people were far too afraid to be mistaken for Jews to venture out at all, but of course there may have been some; I myself didn’t know any. I only know how happy we of the ‘Conspiracy’ were that the Jews were at last rebelling.…”

“I gave the order to stop shooting as soon as I realized they were shooting wildly at anything that moved,” said Stangl. “Yes, I remember exactly now: we had 105 left – that’s right. I also gave the order at once that none of these 105 were to be killed. We had to stop these reprisal measures; they were what had made us hated by everybody. So nobody else was killed in Treblinka – certainly not while I was there.…”

“The record appears to claim that the exterminations continued after the revolt? Perhaps after you left?”

“I don’t think so. How could they have? Everything – all the facilities – had been burned down.…”

(“After the revolt and all the fires, of all things the gas chambers remained intact,” said Suchomel. “They were of brick. And Stangl said to me, ‘The fools, why didn’t they burn those down?’ You know,” he said, a little regretfully, “Stangl was going to put the work-Jews to work outside the camp, in the peat bog; the new programme was to start on August 3, one day after the revolt. He intended to rebuild Treblinka, better than ever; he was going to have brick houses for the work-Jews. He already had building material lying there all ready when the order came to obliterate the camp – and then of course the decision to reassign most of the staff.…”)

“They left me stewing for three weeks,” said Stangl, “before Globocnik sent for me. It was my hardest time. I was sure I’d get all the blame. But as soon as I entered the office, Globocnik said, ‘You are transferred as of immediately to Trieste for anti-partisan combat.’ I thought my bones would melt. I had been so sure they’d say I had done something wrong, and now I had on the contrary what I had always wanted; I was going to get out. And to Trieste too – near home.

“I went back to Treblinka, but I only stayed three or four days, just long enough to organize transport. The last day I had all the work-Jews who were left fall in, because I wanted to say goodbye to them. I shook hands with some of them. I heard about
that
later too.…”

(“He assembled everybody”, said Suchomel, “and told us that we were to go to Italy. He was overjoyed. You could see it.…”)

“Paul wrote me right after the uprising,” said Frau Stangl, “although he didn’t tell me there had been a revolt; he just said it was all over now. And later he wrote to say that he’d been transferred to Italy and how happy, how relieved he was to get out of there at last. I only heard about the revolt later.…”

Franciszek Zabecki, who continued to make notes of everything that went in and out of Treblinka station, knows exactly what happened after that.

“After the revolt there were still transports from Bialystock. Thus, on August 18, 1943, came ‘Pj 202’ consisting of thirty-seven cars. The last transport for Treblinka came on August 19: ‘Pj 204’ from Bialystock with thirty-nine cars … ” Pj stood for transports of Polish Jews.

This was the point when the
Aktion Reinhard
ended in Treblinka. All the buildings were demolished, lupins and pine trees were planted all over the site and a small farm was built from the bricks of the dismantled gas chambers.

“A Ukrainian called Strebel was put in the farmhouse,” said Pan Zabecki. “He received permission to send for his family from the Ukraine and they all lived there until the arrival of the Russians.”

Globocnik confirmed the real function of the Ukrainian “farmer” in a report to Himmler dated Trieste, January 5,1944. “For reasons of surveillance,” he wrote,“ a small farm has been built on the sites of each of the [former] camps, the farm to be occupied by an expert to whom a regular income must be assured so as to enable him to maintain the farm.”

“After the liquidation of the camp,” said Pan Zabecki, “five [railway] cars with prisoners [Jews] left Treblinka on October 20, 1943, for Sobibor” (where they were to be killed soon afterwards).
*
The last twenty-five or thirty work-Jews in Treblinka – amongst them the three girls Suchomel spoke of – were killed a few days later. And shortly afterwards the remaining
SS
personnel left the camp-site in two lorries.

There have been conflicting reports of the number of people who were killed in Treblinka. The Polish authorities finally adopted the figure of 750,000. The West Germans raised their official estimate in early 1971 when new evidence emerged, to 900,000; and Stangl was sentenced on the basis of this new figure. Franciszek Zabecki has insisted from the very beginning that the numbers were much higher. I myself have always felt that the deeds and the numbers were so monstrous, the figures have become almost irrelevant: however many there were, each individual represents equally the crime, and the loss. But, even so, for the record I feel we should allow the last word to the man who is the only one still amongst us who was there from the very first day to the last.

“I
know,” Franciszek Zabecki said to me, “the others guess. There
were
no German papers on which to base these estimates except those I rescued and hid – and they are inconclusive. But I stood there in that station day after day and counted the figures chalked on each carriage. I have added them up over and over and over. The number of people killed in Treblinka was 1,200,000, and there is no doubt about it whatever.”

*
The uprising at Sobibor took place on October 14, so there, too, the killing continued after the revolt.

Part IV

1

M
Y CONVERSATIONS
with Franz Stangl were in two parts – the first, seven days during April 1971, and the second, nine weeks later, in June. This gave me time to work on what he had told me in April and to see what else I would need, and allowed him to reflect – and to rest. By the time I left him in April, just before the Easter weekend, promising to return a few weeks later, I knew that in a curious way – and I say this with reflection – I had become his friend. It was, of course, a completely one-sided relationship. He knew nothing about me except my name and would never have dreamed of presuming to ask me any personal question. As he did not know my married name, he never even knew that it was my husband who came with me when I returned to Düsseldorf, to take the photographs for the article that was to appear in the
Daily Telegraph Magazine
(some of which are reproduced in this book).