Treblinka Survivor: The Life and Death of Hershl Sperling (17 page)

All but three selected for labour were gassed. According to Glazer, ‘The trainloads from the Balkans brought us to a horrible realisation: we were the Treblinka factory workers and our lives depended on the whole manufacturing process, that is the slaughtering process at Treblinka.’

The Germans, however, were unhappy. While the amount of supplies brought by these transports was enormous, there was little money and valuables – unlike the Polish transports, whose victims had gold sewn in their clothing. The Germans did not know, or at least they could not prove, the money, gold and jewellery from the victims had already been snatched and buried by the Jewish Underground – probably by Chorazycki, who was gathering funds to buy weapons from the Ukrainians.

* * *

During their work tasks a few prisoners managed to steal glances at newspapers that contained reports about German military losses. A few weeks earlier the Germans had capitulated at Stalingrad, their Sixth Army destroyed, marking the beginning of Hitler’s long retreat from the east. The news grew steadily worse, and the reports exacerbated fears that with the end of the Third Reich, the prisoners – witnesses to the most terrible crime imaginable – would be annihilated.

At the beginning of March, Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s second in command, visited Treblinka and ordered that all the bodies that had been buried in mass graves before mid-November be dug up and burned. He was concerned with hiding the crimes, now that the tide of the war was turning. There were also German newspaper reports in early 1943 about the discovery of mass graves in the Katyn Forest, where Soviet military authorities had buried the bodies of 8,000 murdered Poles. The Nazis had exploited the Katyn discovery as anti-Soviet propaganda, and the last thing Himmler needed was physical evidence of German mass murder. There may also have been an order to begin winding down Treblinka’s operations at this time, although the available evidence is unclear. More than 800,000 Jews had already been exterminated in its gas chambers by the second half of February, and there was little further need for the killing centres of Operation Reinhard. Auschwitz-Birkenau had by now increased its murderous capability with more ovens and gas chambers, and was well equipped to handle Europe’s remaining Jews.

Within days of his visit, the gruesome task of opening the pits that had been dug behind the gas chambers and cremating the remains of several hundred thousand decomposing bodies began. This was to be the main task of Treblinka for the rest of its existence. Hershl writes:

Witnesses have said that from a distance it looked like a volcanic eruption boiling up through the earth’s surface, spreading flames and lava.

The more troublesome victims had probably been shoved into the gas chambers fully clothed, perhaps the result of tragic acts of resistance that we can never know.

The business of burning the corpses required more slaves in the extermination area, and additional prisoners were transferred from the lower camp, where the workload had been drastically reduced. Only one trainload of victims arrived per week. These people were gassed and their bodies were cremated along with those that had been dug up from the pits.

Talk of escape now reached fever pitch, although among the core planning group, everything remained secret. Then one evening, Küttner burst into the barracks and sent two members of the Organising Committee, Zelo Bloch and another man called Adesh, to the extermination camp. It is unclear whether the pair had been informed upon, or whether Küttner, a former jailer, smelled a conspiracy in the air. It was a blow to the plans for escape.

Chorazycki had by now accrued enough money to purchase a small arsenal – but his efforts had not come to fruition. On several occasions, the Ukrainians took the money, but produced no weapons. Then something unusual occurred. Almost every account from Treblinka survivors and perpetrators alike refers to what followed as a key event in the camp’s history.

One warm spring day, as the prisoners from the sorting area returned to the ghetto for their midday break, four Ukrainians were seen carrying what first appeared to be a bloody bundle from the SS barracks. Before the prisoners reached the pile of tin bowls, Chorazycki’s name was suddenly on everyone’s lips.

Another important member of the committee was gone. Nonetheless, the incident did not end with Chorazycki’s death. The Germans suspected the Gold Jews of being the source of the doctor’s cash, and conducted an investigation. The Jews were assembled near the Lazarett and ordered to strip. Bizarrely, each man was ordered to leap-frog naked into the Lazarett and stand before the burning pit, where Franz interrogated them with pistols pressed to the napes of their necks. It is a mark of the prisoners’ solidarity that none confessed. All were freed. It seems the greedy SS still required their services. Hershl writes: ‘The next day a search is made of the belongings of the Jewish kapo and a sack of gold is found among his things. He is shot dead on the spot.’

This kapo was almost certainly Benjamin Rakowski, who had been planning an independent escape with fifteen men. He was arrested and murdered by Miete after sums of money and gold were discovered hidden in the walls of the barracks.

One night in the middle of April, as the stench of burning corpses fouled the air with ever greater intensity, Hershl and Samuel Razjman slipped into the tailors’ shop and under the pretext of a card game, joined another meeting of the Organising Committee. Card games were outlawed in camp, and if discovered the penalty was 25 lashes, but they took the risk. That night, a daring plan was concocted to smuggle weapons out of the arms depot. It was decided that if the break-in were successful, a revolt would be initiated as soon as they had the weapons in their hands. Under this plan, they would kill the guards and free every prisoner. They would also burn Treblinka to the ground.

The following day, the wind changed direction and the stench of burning bodies was carried full force into the lower camp. A number of survivors mention this in their testimonies. Some of the prisoners vomited. However, around noon, Edek, one of the young
putzer,
ran to the door of the munitions depot, and stuffed metal shavings into the lock. Later, when the SS could not open the door of the arms store, a locksmith predictably was summoned. He tried the lock, and explained to the SS that it would have to be removed to the workshop in the ghetto and repaired. It was all part of the plan. While Ukrainians stood watch, the entire door was removed from its hinges and taken to the ghetto, where the lock was cleaned. The scene was stage-managed to perfection. In the workshop, under the watchful eyes of the SS, an imprint of the key was taken.

One obvious problem with the plan was that the storeroom stood beside the German barracks, so the weapons had to be removed during the day, while the SS were making their rounds. This fact also determined the timing of the prospective rebellion. The following day, Edek and three other young
putzer
stole undetected into the arms depot and removed two boxes of hand grenades. They hid them under a heap of garbage in a wheelbarrow. If caught, the reprisal would have been brutal for all the prisoners. Nonetheless, they brought the grenades to the shoemakers’ workshop in the ghetto, where several members of the Organising Committee were waiting, ready to instigate the revolt over the next few hours. However, when the boxes were opened, those with military experience quickly saw that the grenades had no detonators. The
putzer
had not known the difference. Grenades without detonators were useless. Word was passed to the rest of the committee that the uprising had to be halted. Now they had to return the grenades to the storeroom. No survivor testimony exists to provide details of how this was achieved. However, the
putzer
succeeded in returning the grenades to the armoury unnoticed and the episode was never discovered. Yet it remained another bitter blow.

* * *

During May, small transports again began to trickle into Treblinka from Warsaw. By all accounts, they were an awful sight. These were the survivors of the courageous Warsaw ghetto uprising, beaten and bedraggled. After the uprising was crushed and the ghetto reduced to rubble, the survivors were thrown into the rail cars – many of them bayoneted, starving and suffocated. They carried little or no baggage. Witnesses described these as the most miserable transports that had ever arrived in Treblinka, more dead than alive. There was nothing for the
Lumpenkommando
to sort in the yard and they brought no food with which to feed the workers. Many of the Jews on the transports were so tired and beaten they had not even the strength to carry themselves to the gas chambers and were taken instead to the Lazarett on stretchers. But, at the same time, word was passed from the victims to the prisoners about the heroism that had occurred in the Polish capital. They were told how 750 Jewish fighters fought to protect the remaining ghetto inhabitants against the heavily armed and well-trained Germans for nearly a month, until the resistance was finally crushed. They had fought desperately because they knew what awaited them. Of the more than 56,000 Jews captured, about 7,000 were shot, and the remainder deported to the death camps. Some 7,000 were transported to Treblinka.

As if one were needed, there now came a sign. One of the last transports to arrive included several members of the Warsaw Ghetto Underground. Determined to die with dignity, they had smuggled grenades and pistols beneath their clothing. When this transport was brought into Reception Square and ordered to remove their clothing, one of them pulled out a grenade and threw it into the middle of the yard. According to the testimonies, the grenade killed a Ukrainian guard and wounded one SS man, as well as three Jews from the Red Group. A number of the Jews who had arrived on the same transport were also injured.

Nonetheless, around 200 men and a few women were pulled from the transport to replace some of those who had died in the typhus epidemic. The detail of what had occurred in Warsaw acted as a spur to many, bolstering the prisoners’ resolve to rebel and escape.

* * *

Spring gave way to a scorching Polish summer and the workload of Treblinka’s Jewish
Sonderkommando
dwindled. A suffocating heat settled over the camp. A strange limbo descended upon this death factory with no-one to exterminate. The Ukrainians were bored and a few deserted. Melted black tar dripped from the rooftops of the barracks. A hot, stifling wind blew sand around the camp and carried the stench of death everywhere. The excavators still worked late into the night and the slaves in the extermination area continued their gruesome task of burning the corpses.

The idea of a summer in Treblinka without transports inspired the Germans to use their Jewish slaves for further construction work. Perhaps Stangl hoped to persuade his masters of the continued usefulness of the camp. Roads were resurfaced, the ground was levelled and spread with gravel, and rolls of barbed-wire were placed between the two perimeter fences as anti-tank traps. The cultivated area outside the camp was enlarged. A carved wooden globe with a compass now hung above the main gate, with the SS insignia cut in it. The Tyrolean guardhouse was decorated with new carvings. Elsewhere, asphalt was laid on pathways that were edged with multicoloured stones. At every corner stood a new signpost, each decorated with carvings. Under the words, ‘To The Ghetto’, the image of a bent, hook-nosed Jew carrying a bundle on his back was wrought. Another sign read ‘Karl Seidel Strasse’, named after the oldest member of the Treblinka SS.

I imagined Hershl now, labouring with cracked lips, his eyes aching and his head pounding with delirium, sweat pouring down his face, his chest and his spine bent. It must have seemed to Hershl there were no other Jews left in the world. He and this pathetic group of prisoners had watched their people murdered, transport by transport. Then, one day in the middle of all the construction work, the whistle of an approaching train was heard and then the screeching of metal wheels on the track outside the camp. At first there was speculation that the Wehrmacht had crossed the English Channel and it was the English, Scottish and Irish Jews who were coming to be exterminated. How Hershl’s heart must have sunk as this misinformation circulated. However, these were not British Jews. Little by little, in a series of small transports over the next week or so, groups of wasted individuals came – first in threadbare prisoners’ jackets, then in civilians’ rags. They were prisoners from a penal camp. Then came the Gypsies. Hershl writes: ‘The Gypsies are not brought in wagons but in small groups on horses and carts. They are not sent to the death camp, but are brought to the Lazarett, where they are shot and burned.’