The Holocaust (68 page)
Authors: Martin Gilbert
While undressing I saw Engineer Galewski, of Warsaw, a friend of mine, among the workers. Galewski asked one of the Ukrainian guards to assign me to the workers’ brigade. I was told to dress and was placed in a group employed in carrying bundles of clothing from this square to the storehouses. I never saw my travelling companions again. After a few minutes I understood everything. I felt resentment against Galewski, due to whose intervention I was still alive.
Carrying extremely heavy bundles, we had to run the gauntlet between lined-up overseers who beat anyone they could lay their hands on with heavy sticks. All those who carried bundles had swollen faces. By noon no one who knew me would have recognized me, for my face had become a bluish mass, my eyes were bloodshot.
During the pause for lunch I complained to my friend and reproached him for having saved me. His answer was unexpected: ‘I did not save you to keep you alive,’ he whispered, ‘but to sell your life at a higher price. You are now a member of a secret organization that is planning an uprising, and you must live.’
Rajzman did live, not only to participate in the revolt, but to give testimony at the Nuremberg Tribunal of what happened at Treblinka. Of the fate of those in the working groups, he recalled:
There were thousands of pretexts for killing. If a piece of bread coming from an outside bakery was discovered on a worker the penalty was death. Death was meted out for not carefully removing the Jewish insignia from the clothes of the
murdered. Death for having kept a coin or a wedding ring, the last relic of the worker’s murdered wife.
The methods of execution were the following: (1) lashing to death while cold water was constantly poured on the victim; (2) hanging on gallows by the feet; (3) tearing to pieces by dogs (Franze’s favourite amusement); (4) the mildest form of death, yearned for by everyone—shooting.
For drinking water during work, smoking a cigarette, improper saluting, and similar offences, the penalties were from fifty to one hundred lashes on the bare body, but usually the worker was finished after fifty lashes, and if several pails of water did not bring him to, he was thrown on the fire.
Samuel Rajzman also gave testimony after the war of how the women, on arrival, were ‘shaved to the skin’, their hair being later packed up for despatch to Germany. His account continued:
Because little children at their mothers’ breasts were a great nuisance during the shaving procedure, later the system was modified and babies were taken from their mothers as soon as they got off the train. The children were taken to an enormous ditch; when a large number of them were gathered together they were killed by firearms and thrown into the fire. Here, too, no one bothered to see whether all the children were really dead. Sometimes one could hear infants wailing in the fire.
When mothers succeeded in keeping their babies with them and this fact interfered with the shaving, a German guard took the baby by its legs and smashed it against the wall of the barracks until only a bloody mass remained in his hands. The unfortunate mother had to take this mass with her to the ‘bath’. Only those who saw these things with their own eyes will believe with what delight the Germans performed these operations; how glad they were when they succeeded in killing a child with only three or four blows; with what satisfaction they pushed the baby’s corpse into the mother’s arms.
The invalids, cripples and aged who could not move fast were put to death in the same way as the children. The ditch in which the children and infirm were slaughtered and burned was called in German the ‘Lazarett’, ‘infirmary’, and the workers employed in it wore armbands with the Red Cross sign.
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Five days before Samuel Rajzman had reached Treblinka, another Jew had managed to escape from the camp. His name was Abraham Jacob Krzepicki and he had been at Treblinka for eighteen days, since August 26. A Jew in his early twenties, Krzepicki had fought in the Polish army in 1939. Deported from Warsaw in 1942, on the evening of August 25, he had worked in Treblinka until September 12, when he escaped and returned to Warsaw.
In Warsaw, Emanuel Ringelblum entrusted one of his colleagues, Rachel Auerbach, with the task of recording Krzepicki’s testimony, the first eye-witness account of Treblinka. Written in Yiddish, the account was later buried with other documents collected by Ringelblum’s ‘Joy of Sabbath’ circle. It was found by Polish building workers on 1 December 1950, under what had once been 68 Nowolipki Street.
In his account of his deportation to Treblinka, Krzepicki wrote of how, during a halt on the journey, with hundreds of Jews suffocating in the heat, a German soldier had told them that ‘in Treblinka’ everybody would be given work ‘at his own occupation’. At this news, some of the deportees applauded. Others tried to work out what kind of work they would be given. As for water, for which the deportees were desperate, at Treblinka, the soldier assured them, ‘everyone would get water’.
On reaching Treblinka, and being ordered out of the train, women and children were sent to the left, men to the right. Krzepicki’s account continued:
The women all went into the barracks on the left and, as we later learned, they were told at once to strip naked and were driven out of the barracks through another door. From there, they entered a narrow path lined on either side with barbed wire. This path led through a small grove to the building that housed the gas-chamber. Only a few minutes later we could hear their terrible screams, but we could not see anything, because the trees of the grove blocked our view.
As we sat there, tired and resigned—some of us lying stretched out on the sand—we could see a heavy machine gun being set up on the roof of the barrack on the left side, with three Ukrainian servicemen stretched out around it. We figured that any minute they would turn the machine gun on us and kill us all. This fear put some new life into me, but then I again felt
the terrible thirst which had been torturing me for so many hours. The Ukrainians on the barracks roof had opened an umbrella over their heads to shield them from the sun. My sole thought at the moment was, ‘A cup of water! Just one more cup of water before I die!’
Some of the people I had known from the factory were sitting near to me. Our book-keeper K., our warehouseman D., and several other young people. ‘It’s no good,’ they said. ‘They’re going to shoot us! Let’s try to get out of here!’ We all thought that there was an open field beyond the fence which surrounded both barracks. We didn’t know then that a second fence lay further on.
When I had revived a little, I followed some of the others through an open door to the barracks on the right. I planned to break down one of the boards in the wall and to run away. But when we got into the barracks, we were overcome by stark depression. There were many dead bodies lying in the barracks, and we could see that they had all been shot. Through a chink in the barracks’ wall we could see a Ukrainian guard on the other side, holding a gun. There was nothing we could do. I went back outside.
As I later learned, the corpses were those of a transport of Jews from Kielce who had arrived in Treblinka that morning. Among them were a mother and her son. When it came time to separate them—women to the left and men to the right—the son wanted to say a last goodbye to his mother. When they tried to drive him away, he took out a pocket-knife and stuck it into the Ukrainian. As a punishment, they spent all that day shooting all the Jews from Kielce who were at the camp.
Krzepicki was chosen, with sixty other men, to throw bodies into a ditch. These were the bodies of Jews from earlier transports, most of whom had died on the journey. Krzepicki noted:
Countless dead bodies lay there, piled upon each other. I think that perhaps ten thousand bodies were there. A terrible stench hovered in the air. Most of the bodies had horribly bloated bellies; they were covered with brown and black spots, swollen, and the surfaces of their skin already crawling with worms.
The lips of most of the dead were strangely twisted and the
tips of their tongues could be seen protruding between the swollen lips. The mouths resembled those of dead fish. I later learned that most of these people had died of suffocation in the boxcar. Their mouths had remained open as if they were still struggling for a little air. Many of the dead still had their eyes open.
We, the new arrivals, were terror-stricken. We looked at each other to confirm that what we were seeing was real. But we were afraid to look around too much, because the guards could start shooting any minute.
Each day amid the murder of thousands of Jews, it was the killing of individuals that horrified Krzepicki most. As an SS man was talking to him, he caught sight of another prisoner:
He was standing in the ditch, receiving the bodies which others had been dragging over. It seemed to the German that he was not working fast enough.
‘Halt! Turn around!’ the SS man ordered the young man. He took his rifle from his shoulder and before the young man could have figured out what was expected from him, he lay dead among the bodies in the ditch. They dragged him farther along and soon additional corpses were piled on top of him.
The German returned the rifle to his shoulder and resumed our conversation, as if nothing had happened.
Later, Krzepicki was put to work cleaning out the railway wagons before they were sent away empty:
A Ukrainian and an SS man stationed themselves at either side of the exit gate and shone flashlights under the wheels to see whether anyone was hiding beneath the cars. A few cars pulled out in good order. But when he got to the third or fourth car, the German shouted, ‘Halt!’ He had discovered two boys lying hunched up between the wheels.
One of them got a bullet even before he could crawl out from under the car. The other was able to jump out and started running quick as lightning, trying to lose himself in the crowd of Jews. But the SS man stopped him right away. The young man immediately took his papers out of his pocket and tried to prove that he was a worker. He shouted and pleaded, but this did not impress the German. He started hitting him over the
head as hard as he could with his rubber truncheon, until the boy collapsed. Then the Ukrainian came up, turned his rifle upside down and with great force, as if chopping wood, hit his victim over the head with the rifle butt. Finally, they put a bullet in him. Then, at last, they left him alone. The train rolled out.
On his second day at Treblinka, Krzepicki had been taken to an incoming train. ‘I was stunned by what I saw there. The train contained only corpses. They had suffocated on the journey from lack of air: six thousand Jews, from the town of Miedrzyrzec, some seventy-five miles from Treblinka. As the Jewish prisoners worked, they discovered a few of the Miedrzyrzec deportees who had ‘merely fainted, and were now regaining consciousness’. Among the living, Krzepicki found ‘a little child, about a year or a year and a half old. The child had regained consciousness and was crying at the top of its voice. I put it down, too, apart from the others, next to the pile of rags. By the next morning the child was dead and it was thrown into the ditch.’
Krzepicki also recalled the last act of defiance of those who were driven to their deaths. ‘All over Treblinka’, he wrote, ‘one would find scattered bits and pieces of money notes including dollar bills and other foreign currencies. These bills had been torn up and thrown away by Jews who finally understood what kind of place this was. This was their final protest and act of revenge before disappearing forever in the “bath house”.’
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Eight days after Krzepicki had managed to escape from Treblinka, an underground newspaper in Warsaw published his story. The article ended:
Today every Jew should know the fate of those resettled. The same fate awaits the remaining few left in Warsaw. The conclusion then is: Don’t let yourself be caught! Hide, don’t let yourself be taken away. Run away, don’t be fooled by registrations, selections, numbers and roll calls! Jews, help one another! Take care of the children! Help the illegals!
The dishonourable traitors and helpers—the Jewish police—should be boycotted! Don’t believe them, beware of them. Stand up against them!
We are all soldiers on a terrible front!
We must survive so that we can demand a reckoning for the tortured brothers and sisters, children and parents who were killed by the murderer’s hand on the battlefield for freedom and humanity!
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The following night, September 12, was the eve of the Day of Atonement. During the day, a further 2,196 Warsaw Jews, most of them women and children, were rounded up, sent to Treblinka, and gassed, bringing the total number of deportees in the previous seven weeks to 253,741. There were now, in the Warsaw ghetto, no more than fifty-five thousand Jews, most of them ‘exempt workers’, some, ‘wildcats’ in hiding. A further eight thousand Jews had managed to cross illegally from the ghetto to ‘Aryan’ Warsaw.
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In each deportation, whether to Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor or Chelmno, Jews tried to jump from the trains. But armed guards shot most of them down. When yet more Jews from Jaworow were deported to Belzec at the beginning of September, ‘Youthful Jadzia Beer got her skirt caught in the car window. She dangled in mid-air until a Nazi guard “helped” her with a bullet through the heart.’
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No corner of Nazi-controlled Europe, or of occupied Russia, was too distant for the murderers of Jews to reach it. On September 7, as the German army reached the Caucasus in their drive towards the Caspian Sea, the Jews of remote and isolated Kislovodsk were told that, ‘for the purpose of colonizing sparsely populated districts of the Ukraine’, all those with ‘no permanent abode’ were to present themselves at the railway station in two days’ time, at six in the morning. Every Jew was to bring luggage ‘not exceeding twenty kilogrammes in weight’ and food ‘for a minimum of two days’. Further food would be provided by the German authorities ‘at the railway stations’. Also ‘subject to transfer’ were Jews who had been baptised.
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