The Theory and Practice of Hell (44 page)

Oskar Berger, a merchant, lived with his wife and boy in Kattowitz. At the outbreak of the war he fled eastward and when Poland had been subdued he was put in the Kielce ghetto. In July 1942, the Jews there were “ resettled” and taken to Treblinka. Berger reports:

I was separated from my wife and never saw her again. Just before the resettlement all the sick, in homes as well as the hospital—somefour orfive hundredpersons—together with the inmates o f the homesfor the aged and the orphans in the orphan home, were either shot or killed by injection. I was a strong young man and was detailed to recover the bodies and bury them in a large garden in Okrej Alley. There were about sixty Jews in this detail. The bodies were flung into the pit dressed as they were, after we had searched them for jewels, gold and money, which had to be delivered to the SS. When the work had been done, we were assembled in the synagogue and Gestapo Chief Thomas picked some o f usfor shipment to Treblinka.

The trip was a nightmare. We crouched in the cars,

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crowded together, children crying, women going mad. We arrived toward three o'clock the next afternoon. There was a big sign at the railroad station: ” Treblinka Labor Camp. 99 The train was shunted to a siding which led into the woods for two or three miles. A ghastly scene greeted us at the end. Hundreds o f bodies lay about, together with scattered luggage and clothes, all in wild confusion. We were herded out o f the carriages, as German and Ukrainian SS men mounted to the roofs and began to shoot indiscriminately into the crowd. Men, women and children writhed in their own blood; screams and sobs rent the air Those who were not shot down were ultimately driven across the mounds o f dead and wounded through an open gate into a barbed-wire enclosure. Two wooden posts flanked the open area.

Together with several other men, including a certain Gottlieb o f Kielce, I was chosen to clean the cars, to pick up the bodies o f the new arrivals and take them to great pits that had been dug by steam shovels. Into these the bodies wereflung, regardless o f whether they were dead or still twitching. The work was supervised by SS men who held pistol or truncheon in one hand, whisky bottle in the other. Even now my memory stands aghast at the picture o f small children seized by their feet and dashed against tree trunks.

(There were sergeants, incidentally, who carried photo graphs of such scenes as souvenirs.)

We got no food, though for weeks our detail had to per form the most exhausting labor. Two or three shipments arrived every day. We lived on the food we found in the luggage o f the victims.

Sometimes there were shipments that held only corpses. I believe these people must have been gassed in the cars, for I never noticed any wounds. The bodies were con vulsively intertwined, the skin blue. Curiously enough there were isolated instances o f small children, from three to five years old, who survived these shipments. They were deaf and incapable o f speech, and their eyes were haunted. We were never able to conceal them for very long. The SS

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would discover them and put an end to them. There were also shipments that consisted exclusively o f children or old people. They would crouch in the clearing for hours
,
until they were liquidated by machine-gunfire.

During the weeks I worked at Treblinka a small brick building was constructed o ff to one side in the woods. The path leading to it was marked with a sign reading “ To the BathHouse.99 Another sign requested that gold, money, foreign exchange and jewels be deposited in a bundle at a bathhouse window. From this time on new arrivals were gassed rather than shot. A special detail like ours took care o f burying or cremating the bodies.

Many o f us made isolated attempts to escape. I belong to the very small number o f fortunates who succeeded. Together with my friend Gottlieb and a thirteen-year-old boy, I hid between blankets and bundles o f clothing and luggage which we had to load into freight cars. We took along a plentiful supply o f jewelry, gold and money, mostly American dollars. It was September 1942 when we made good our escape. Unfortunately my freedom was only short-lived. On January 5, 1943, I was again arrested in Cracow, as a
“
partisan, 99 together with Gottlieb. We were brutally tortured and had to confess that we were Jews. We were shackled and taken to the ghetto prison, where we remained until March 14, 1943. In company with one hundred other Jews we were then taken to the Ausch witz concentration camp in closed buses, andfrom there to Birkenau. Most o f the group were at once selected for the ”left side99and gassed. I had the good luck to be placed in the Clothing Room.

On October 21, 1944, we were transferred to Oranienburg near Berlin. This transfer was limited chiefly to those who had enjoyed good jobs and working conditions at Birenau. A t Oranienburg we were quarantined for two weeks in the H&nkel Works, miserably dressed and suf fering great hunger. We were then herded on foot to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and from there only two days later by rail to the notorious Buchenwald Sub sidiary Camp S III at Ohrdruf More than half the prisoners died within a short time from the effects o f the strenuous work in the mines. Every two months or so those

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who werefeeble or unfitfor work werepicked out and sent to Bergen-Belsen near Hanover
.

The stories of some survivors are marked by hair-breadth escapes. Motek Strigler of Zamosc, Poland, had been in ghettos and in labor and concentration camps since 1939. Buchenwald was his twelfth camp! He was able to tell of the extermination camp, Skarzisko Kamienno:

On the eve o f the Day o f Atonement, October 1943, the guard leader Schuhmann visited us in camp. He was looking for my comrade, Mendel Rubin, a well-digger of Cracow, and took him away. A few days later there was a report from the Gestapo at Radom that Rubin*s name was to be scratched, since he would not come back—he had been discharged. We heard nothing for a long time. In April 1944, two cars with German police arrived.They requisitioned straw originally allotted to usfor our bunks. This was taken to the woods, near sheds 96 and 97 o f C Plant. There it was woven into mats, and an area was marked off and surrounded with a six-foot wall o f the mats, making it impossible to see what happened inside the enclosure. We found out, nevertheless—through Mendel Rubin.

He was among those who worked there for about a month. The area was always surrounded by a heavy cor don o f German police. One day one o f the policemen came to us and asked for my comrade Henoch Edelmann of Cracow
,
a mechanic who worked with the German master plumber Corosta. The policeman gave Edelmann a small piece o f soap. It contained a little glass tube in which there was a slip o fpaper with a messagefrom Rubin. He had im portant newsfor us, he wrote, but would send it only when he was certain that communication had been established. By way o f confirmation he asked that he be sent certain pictures o f his wife and child which he had left behind. He got the pictures.

News from Rubin now began to arrive. The German policeman gave the messages to Regina Rabinowicz of Warsaw and Fela of Samosc, girls who worked with us. We got four orfive letters. Enclosed with one was a slip of

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paperfrom a Polishfriend o f Rubin’s. It bore the heading: “Katyn, Government General.” We buried all these re ports—it was Henoch Edelmann who took care o f that. In essence they reported thefollowing:

A t Radom, Rubin had been assigned to a detail o f sixty-seven men whose job it was to cremate the bodies o f Gestapo murder victims and to erase all traces. The victims often numbered hundreds a day. We got a list o f prominent persons who had been killed in this way. The detail itself consisted only o f candidatesfor death, i.e., o f men who were permitted to live only as long as they were left to this service. They were shackled hand andfoot and had to sleep in their clothes. They were given plenty o f food. They turned over to the Gestapo only part o f the money and jewelry they found, giving a share to the policemen, who returned the favor by providing food and drink.

Contact with Rubin was broken o ff when the policeman

who was acting as go-between fell in a skirmish with par tisans. We had learned from him that the men in the special detail were shiftedfrom place to place, as they were needed.

In our own plant the detail, during its sojourn, had to

dig up the thousands o f bodies that had been buried on the rifle range and cremate them. The site o f the mass graves was filled in, graded and planted with grass, but we were still able to find tell-tale traces—fragments o f bone, fingers cut o ff for their rings, melted down gold. The exhumed bones were not burned but loaded into a truck containing a bone mill.

Members o f the detail were themselves shot and cremated after a few weeks. Rubin, however, spent almost seven months there.

There is a wealth of testimony on similar operations in the east. The SS, the Secret Military Police and certain army units never tired in their efforts, though the reader is likely to in listening to the recital.

The Lublin district was the stamping ground of SS Lieutenant-General Globocnig, an Austrian who, following the murder of a Jewish jeweler in Vienna in 1933, had fled to