Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (50 page)

In the first two months of the Large Action, some 265,040 Jews were taken to the Umschlagplatz, and another 10,380 or so killed in the ghetto itself. Perhaps sixty thousand Jews remained. They were predominantly fit younger males.
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Each stage of the mass murder of the Warsaw Jews was so dreadful that it gave rise to hopes that the near future might at least be better than the immediate past. Some Jews really did believe that labor in the east would be better than life in the ghetto. Once assembled at Umschlagplatz, Jews could be forgiven for believing that embarking on trains would be better than indefinite waiting under the hot sun without food, water, and sanitary facilities. The supervision of Umschlagplatz was assigned to the Jewish police, who occasionally freed people they knew, or people who could afford to bribe them. As the historian Emanuel Ringelblum recorded, the Jewish police sometimes demanded, in addition to cash, payment “in kind,” which is to say sex with the women whom they saved.
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In the trains, illusions faded. Although assured that their destination was a labor camp “in the east,” some Jews must have suspected that this was false: after all, people with labor certificates were precisely the ones who remained in Warsaw. If work was the goal, then why were the very old and the very young sent first? The trains were accorded the lowest priority in the railway system, and often took days to reach a destination that was in fact rather close to Warsaw—Treblinka was only about a hundred kilometers to the northeast. The Jews were given no food or water, and died in large numbers on many of the transports. Children licked each other’s sweat. Mothers sometimes threw small children from trains, guessing that they would be more likely to survive in the wild than wherever the train was going. Some parents explained to their very small children, born in the ghetto, what could be seen through windows or cracks in doors. The very youngest had never seen fields or forests before. Nor would they again.
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Poles would yell at the trains going by. The gesture of a finger across the throat, remembered with loathing by a few Jewish survivors, was meant to communicate to the Jews that they were going to die—though not necessarily that the Poles wished this upon them. Some Poles called for money; others, perhaps more merciful, perhaps with other needs, asked for children. Yankiel Wiernik remembered his own transport, an early one from Warsaw: “My view took in everyone and everything, yet I could not take in the enormity of the misfortune.” No one could.
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Each transport was assembled from fifty-seven to sixty train cars, or about five to six thousand people. Upon arrival at the rail station nearest Treblinka, the train stopped. Then, sometimes after a wait of hours or even days, another engine pulled up, and moved nineteen or twenty of the cars—1,700 to 2,000 people—to a rail spur inside the Treblinka death factory. The second engine pushed rather than pulled these cars, so that the engineer was going backward, and never himself faced or entered the facility.
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The Jews who were still alive were then forced from each car by Trawniki men brandishing guns and cracking whips. The Jews deported to Treblinka died, almost all of them, in these first few weeks, but not as smoothly as at Bełżec and Sobibór, and not as the Germans intended. The regular and massive transports of Jews had overwhelmed the small gas chambers at Treblinka very quickly, and so the Germans and the Trawniki men had to resort to shooting. This was not the task for which the Trawniki men had been trained. They did it badly, but they did it. By August the rail spur inside the Treblinka death factory was surrounded by piles of corpses.

Oskar Berger, who arrived on a transport of August 22nd, remembered “hundreds of bodies lying around.” Yankiel Wiernik recalled his arrival on 24 August: “The camp yard was littered with corpses, some still in their clothes and some naked, their faces distorted with fright and awe, black and swollen, the eyes wide open, with protruding tongues, skulls crushed, bodies mangled.” A Jew who had arrived the day before, 23 August, had just avoided joining that pile. He was chosen for labor, which chiefly meant the disposal of human remains. He recalled how the killing was done in those early weeks of Treblinka: “After we left the wagon the Germans and Ukrainians, whips in their hands, drove us into a courtyard, where they ordered us to lie down with our faces to the ground. Then they walked through and shot us in the back of the neck.” Adam Krzepicki, who arrived on 25 August, recorded a similar impression: “Corpses of people of different ages, in different positions, with different expressions on their faces the moment they breathed their last. All around, just earth, sky, and corpses!” The next day, 26 August, was remembered by Edward Weinstein: “And I looked out, and I saw Hell. Bodies, as high as the windows on the cattle car, on the ramp.” Franz Stangl, the German (Austrian) police officer who commanded the death factory at Sobibór, was called in to investigate the chaos of Treblinka. He was, presumably, not a man who was easily overwhelmed by death, and unlike the arriving Jews he had some idea of what to expect. Nevertheless he was shocked by what he found: “The smell was indescribable; the hundreds, no, the thousands of bodies everywhere, decomposing, putrefying.”
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Irmfried Eberl, the German (Austrian) medical doctor who commanded Treblinka, had hoped to prove his worth. He wanted his kill rates to exceed those of the other death facility commanders, the police chiefs at Bełżec and Sobibór. He continued to accept transports in August 1942 even as the number of people to be killed far exceeded the facility’s capacity to asphyxiate them. Death then radiated outward: from the gas chambers to the waiting area in the courtyard, and from the courtyard to the trains waiting at the station, or on the tracks, or somewhere far away in occupied Poland. The Jews died all the same, almost all of them; but now a few escaped from the trains, which had very rarely happened during earlier transports to Sobibór and Bełżec.
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Escapees from the trains made their way back to the Warsaw ghetto, often with an idea of what they had been spared. The disorganization also drew the attention of onlookers. Because of all the delays, trains conveying German soldiers to the eastern front were more likely to pass or to be caught behind one of the death trains; a few onlookers took photographs, others vomited from the stench. Some of these soldiers were on their way to southwestern Soviet Russia to take part in the offensive at Stalingrad. Those German soldiers who saw the Treblinka transports knew, if they wanted to know, just what they were fighting for.
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Eberl was removed from his post for incompetence, and in August 1942 Stangl took command at Treblinka. Stangl, who later said that he regarded the mass gassing of Jews as his “profession” and that he “enjoyed it,” quickly put Treblinka in order. He called a temporary halt to transports, and had the bodies buried by Jewish laborers. When the death facility was opened again in early September 1942, it functioned much more like the machine that it was designed to be.
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Stangl commanded with the help of a particularly vicious assistant, Kurt Franz, whom the Jewish laborers called “the Doll” (for his vanity and good looks). Franz liked to watch Jews box, he liked to watch his dog attack Jews, and he liked to watch animals in general: at one point he had the Jewish laborers construct a zoo. The Germans were assisted by a few dozen Trawniki men, who served as guards, and performed a few essential functions within the facility, such as herding Jews into the gas chambers and releasing the carbon monoxide gas. The rest of the labor was performed by a few hundred Jews, spared from death only in order to carry out tasks associated with mass killing and plunder, and doomed themselves to a quick death if they showed any sign of weakness. Like Bełżec and Sobibór, Treblinka was designed to function on Jewish labor, such that the Trawniki men had to do little and the Germans next to nothing.
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As rumors of Treblinka spread, the Germans engaged in propaganda. The Polish government, in exile in London, had been passing on to its British and American allies reports of the gassings, along with other German killings of Polish citizens. Throughout the summer it urged the British and the Americans to take retributive actions upon German civilians, to no effect. Officers of the Polish resistance, the Home Army, considered an attack on Treblinka, but did not carry one out. The Germans denied the gassings. The chief of the Jewish police in Warsaw and the official “resettlement commissioner,” Józef Szerzyński, claimed that he had received postcards from Treblinka. There was indeed a postal service inside the Warsaw ghetto, which functioned even during these weeks. The post-men wore caps with bright orange bills so that they would not be seized in the roundups. But they brought, of course, no news from Treblinka.
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The transports from Warsaw to Treblinka began again on 3 September 1942. The last transport of the Large Action, on 22 September 1942, included the Jewish police and their families. As the Jewish policemen neared the station, they threw from the windows their hats and any other markers of their former mission or social status (Jewish policemen often came from prosperous families). This was prudent behavior, since Jewish policemen could meet a hard reception from fellow Jews in a concentration camp. Yet Treblinka was no camp. It was a death facility, so their actions made no difference. The policemen were gassed like everyone else.

Within a few months, Stangl had changed the appearance of Treblinka, and thereby increased its lethal functionality. Jews who arrived at Treblinka in late 1942 disembarked not to a simple ramp surrounded by dead bodies but inside a mock train station, painted by a Jewish laborer to resemble a real one. It had a clock, a timetable, and ticket counters. As Jews stepped from the “station,” they could hear the sound of music, played by an orchestra led by the Warsaw musician Artur Gold. Those Jews who limped or hobbled or otherwise revealed themselves to be weak at this point were taken to a “clinic.” Jewish workers with red armbands helped them to a building marked with a red cross. Behind this building the sick Jews were shot in the back of the neck over a ditch, by Germans dressed as doctors. The chief executioner was August Miete, whom the Jewish laborers called the Angel of Death,
Malakh Ha-Mavet
. Those Jews who could move themselves took a few steps forward into a kind of courtyard, where the men and the women were separated: men to the right, women to the left, as they were told in German and Yiddish.
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In the courtyard, the Jews were forced to strip naked, on the pretext that they were to be disinfected before a further transport “to the east.” Jews had to bundle their clothes neatly and tie their shoes together by the laces. They had to surrender any valuables; women were subjected to cavity searches. At this point a few women, in some of the transports, were selected for rape; and a few men, in some of the transports, were selected for labor. The women then shared the fate of the rest, whereas the men would live for a few more days, weeks, or even months as slave laborers.
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All the women went to the gas chambers without their clothes, and without their hair. Each woman had to sit before a Jewish “barber.” Religiously observant women who wore wigs had to surrender them. Even at this very last moment before death, people reacted differently, individually. For some women, the hair-cutting was confirmation of the “disinfection” story; for others it was the proof that they were about to be killed. The women’s hair was to be used to make stockings for German railway workers and to line the slippers worn by German submarine crews.
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Both groups, first the women and then the men, naked, humiliated, and helpless, were forced to run through a tunnel. It was a few meters wide and about a hundred meters long; the Germans called it “the road to Heaven.” At its end Jews might see a large Star of David in the gable over the entrance to a dark room. A ceremonial curtain hung with a Hebrew inscription: “This is the gateway to G-d. The righteous shall pass through.” Probably few enough of them noticed these details, as they were forced roughly inside by the two guards posted at the entrance, both of them Trawniki men. One of the Trawniki men held a piece of pipe, the other a sword, and both yelled and beat the Jews. Then one of them closed and locked the door, and called for “Water!”—the very last element of the deception, no longer necessary for this doomed group, now sealed in a gas chamber, but for whoever else might be waiting. A third Trawniki man threw a lever, and a tank engine pumped carbon monoxide into the chamber.
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