The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks (10 page)

Although they were supervised by German and Ukrainian guards, Jewish prisoners had to carry out the repulsive tasks of emptying the train cattle cars of those who had died during the journey to the camp; taking the bodies from the showers to the burial pits; and searching through the clothing and belongings of their fellow Jews for anything of value. Anything that identified the items as Jewish was removed – such as the yellow stars that Jews were forced to wear – and all identity papers and passports were destroyed.

Initially, the Jews chosen for this task were replaced every three to five days by fresh arrivals, but when the former Commandant of Sobibor camp, Franz Stangl, was placed in charge, he began to create groups of Sonderkommandos, Jewish slave labourers. Roughly 700 men and a few women were, at least temporarily, saved, although they were killed for the slightest offence, and many chose suicide rather than be complicit in the murder of their own people. After new gas chambers were built, the camp operated at peak efficiency into the spring of 1943, by which time over 850,000 people had been murdered.

When Heinrich Himmler visited Treblinka that spring, he ordered that the mass graves were to be emptied, and the bodies burned. The bones were then to be crushed, and the ashes replaced in the graves. It was an attempt to hide the scale of the massacres, once the tide of the war had turned against the Nazi regime. This process took four months or so to complete; the Sonderkommandos were well aware that their own lives would be forfeit as soon as the work was completed.

There were many attempts to escape from Treblinka before the mass breakout in August 1943. Some Jews tried to flee from the trains but were shot by the guards, or worse, handed back to the Germans. This was the fate met by the Cienki brothers, who returned to their home town in October 1942 to tell their friends and neighbours the truth about the Treblinka trains. They were handed over to the Gestapo and shot. Aron Gelberd escaped the same month, but was stripped by Ukrainian farmers who found him. He managed to reach a place of safety and emigrated to Israel after the war. Others managed to get away to Jewish ghettoes, but then found themselves returned to Treblinka when these too were emptied as part of Operation Reinhard.

Attempts to hide inside the trains carrying the possessions back for resale were rarely successful. Moshe Boorstein and Simcha Laski managed it in late July 1942, and returned to Warsaw in time for the uprising there. Two months later, Czech businessman Oskar Berger managed to conceal himself, but was caught and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp. He survived the war. Yechiel Berkowicz, Abraham Bomba, Yechezkel Cooperman, Israel Einshindler, all successfully hid in the clothing.

Tunnels were started but few reached past the perimeter fence. One man, Lazar Sharson, did use a tunnel, and fled to the Warsaw ghetto on New Year’s Eve 1942. Four others with him did not manage to escape, and were hanged in front of the other prisoners in the death pit area. Some men, like Anshel Medrzycki and Abraham Krzepicki ran away naked, and were not apprehended.

The Germans were ruthless: after a spate of escape attempts, not only were the perpetrators hanged, but so were ten of the other Jewish slave workers.

At the start of 1943, a proper resistance group started to coalesce, led by Dr Julian Chorazycki, a former Polish army officer, but when he was found in April with a large sum of money which was going to be used to get hold of weapons from outside the camp, Chorazycki chose to swallow a vial of poison rather than risk giving away the names of his comrades. Jankiel Wiernik, a carpenter, became key to the arrangements, as he was one of the few people who could move between the Sonderkommandos who were based in the main part of the camp, and the others whose accommodation was near their work area in the burial pits. The prisoners lived in constant fear that their plan would be discovered: survivor Samuel Willenberg remembered one man facing death who tried to betray the conspiracy, but the Ukrainian guard to whom he was talking didn’t speak German.

As the work removing the bodies neared its closure, the committee chose its date. As Willenberg later recalled, “At the Organizing Committee meeting, held late at night by the light of fires burning the bodies of hundreds of thousands of those dearest to us, we unanimously approved the decision to launch the uprising the next day, 2 August 1943.

“I will never forget white-haired Zvi Korland, the eldest amongst us, who with tears in his eyes, administered to us the oath to fight to our last drop of blood, for the honour of the Jewish people.”

Kalman Teigman, a Polish airport worker who was transported to Treblinka in September 1942, gave the most public account of the revolt at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in December 1961. Eichmann had been one of the key Nazis responsible for the holocaust. He fled to South America after the war and was captured by Israeli intelligence agents in Argentina on 11 May 1960. Returned to Israel for trial, he faced fourteen weeks of testimony from over ninety concentration camp survivors, and was sentenced to death.

According to Teigman’s testimony, the eventual plan for the revolt was based around access to weapons within the camp itself. Two Jewish children were employed to clean the German officers’ shoes, and were working in a hut which also contained weapons. An extra key was made for the storage lock, and the children were to bring out arms in sacks: guns, bullets, revolvers and hand grenades. Smaller items would be put in buckets which were secreted around the camp – in the motor workshop, near piles of potatoes – and then at the pre-arranged time, the prisoners would grab these weapons, find a pretext to get the SS guards into the workshops, and kill them.

Like most escape attempts, it didn’t go according to plan. The revolt was supposed to start at 4 p.m., with the children collecting the weapons between 2 p.m. and 2.30. One of the prisoners, Jakob Domb, shouted out to those working in the extermination area, “End of the world today, the day of judgement at four o’clock” as he went about his rubbish-collecting earlier in the day. However, a couple of the Jews broke the Nazis’ strictly enforced rules and returned to their accommodation around the same time as the children were distributing the arms. They were caught by guards, and made to undress, revealing that they were carrying sums of money in readiness for the breakout. Around 3.30, one of the camp commanders began beating them to interrogate them, which scared the other prisoners, who were sure that they would break under pressure and reveal the escape plan.

Even though it wasn’t quite time for the revolt to start, driver mechanic Rudek Lubrenitski took matters into his own hands, and shot at the SS guards who were administering the beating. At the same time, a grenade was thrown – the signal for the revolt to begin.

One particular prisoner’s role was to disinfect the guards’ huts and accommodation, for which he used a spray gun connected to a tank on his back. Instead of simply putting disinfectant in the tank, he had added petrol to the mix, and sprayed the huts with this highly flammable substance. When the huge petrol tank was set ablaze with a grenade, the fire quickly spread to the huts.

The prisoners ran for their lives, over the fence, through the minefields into the surrounding forests, with the Germans pursuing them in cars, on foot and on horseback. Many – including most of the escape committee – were killed before they could reach freedom. Rudolf Masarek manned a machine gun from the top of the camp’s pigeon house to cover the escape of the others, only to be shot. Some, like camp elder Bernard Galewski who realized that he didn’t have the strength to run far from the Germans, committed suicide rather than be recaptured, or asked their friends to administer a coup de grace. But, as Kalman Teigman told a BBC documentary shortly before his death in July 2012, for those who did manage to escape the feeling was “unbelievable”.

Estimates of the number of prisoners who tried to escape vary from 300 to 750 but fewer than 200 remained at large by nightfall, after Franz Stangl began a massive manhunt. Of these, 70 survived the war, spreading around the world. Stangl took retaliation against those who remained: many were killed, others made to obliterate any evidence of the existence of the camp.

After escaping through Italy and Syria after the war, Stangl moved to Brazil, where he was arrested by Nazi hunter Simon Weisenthal. He was tried in West Germany, where he maintained that his conscience was clear and was sentenced to life imprisonment on 22 October 1970. He died of heart failure the following June. Eleven members of the SS personnel stationed at the camp had been brought to trial in October 1964; one was acquitted, one died before the hearing. The most sadistic of the guards, Kurt Franz, was one of four sentenced to life imprisonment.

The last word on Treblinka should rest with Kalman Teigman, who reinforced the horror of the camps at Eichmann’s trial: “The way in which facts are being presented here, one might come to the conclusion that the 700,000 Treblinka deportees were not gassed by the SS men, but all simply committed suicide.” Those who escaped never forgot those they were not able to save.

The Treblinka breakout is one of the incidents related in Canadian author Robert J. Sawyer’s novel
Frameshift,
and also is fictionalized for Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s novel
The Strain,
although this includes a vampiric element.

Sources:

Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team: Treblinka Death Camp:
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ar/treblinka/treblinkarememberme.html

Yad Vashem:
http://www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/this_month/resources/treblinka

Testimony of Kalman Teigman at the trial of Adolf Eichmann: quoted at
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ar/treblinka/revolt.html

Any escape from prison, particularly if it involves high-profile inmates, such as serial killers or terrorists, tends to lead to debate in the seats of government, whether it’s at a local level or national. Often these discussions can become quite hyperbolic, with each plot apparently the worst scenario that can possibly be imagined, and those who were negligent, or unfortunate enough to be responsible for the breach in security, are castigated – even if subsequent discoveries show that they weren’t at fault. The reign of terror of the Kray Twins and their henchmen in London was already an emotive topic when one of their friends, the so-called Mad Axeman, Frankie Mitchell, escaped from Dartmoor – and in a debate in the House of Lords two days later, Lord Derwent didn’t hold back. “This particular case of Mitchell is a quite scandalous example of an error of judgement combined with a complete disregard of the safety of the public,” he thundered. And when you bear in mind that Mitchell was eventually executed, apparently on the orders of the Kray Twins, because they were unable to keep him under control, you may think that, on this occasion, the noble lord had a point!

In 1958, Frank Samuel Mitchell had been sentenced to concurrent sentences of life imprisonment and ten years’ imprisonment on charges of robbery, some with violence, and since September 1962 had been held at Dartmoor Prison. Although physically very strong, he had the mental age and attitudes of a child. He had a long history of violent crime, including beating a prison officer senseless, for which he was flogged. At various stages, he had been declared insane and held at both Rampton and Broadmoor. He had escaped from the latter, and held an elderly couple hostage with an axe that he found in their garden shed, earning himself the nickname of The Mad Axeman. However, since he had been at Dartmoor, he had not become involved in any incidents of violence, and in line with prison policy at the time, in May 1965 he was allowed to be employed on an outside working party. As the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, explained to the House of Commons on 13 December 1966, the day after Mitchell’s escape, “The object of outside working parties is to test the trustworthiness and develop the responsibility of a prisoner in conditions of less than maximum supervision when his eventual return to the community is contemplated.” The prison authorities believed that Mitchell had matured and they didn’t anticipate that he would abuse the trust that was being shown.

Frankie Mitchell wanted to go home for Christmas. He made that clear when he was visited by friends of the Kray brothers in the spring of 1966; he repeated it after his escape when he was still effectively being held prisoner, this time by the Krays. If anything was the overriding motive for his escape, it was that. The former Governor of Dartmoor Prison had recommended that a date be set for his release, but the government refused to do so, and for someone of his restricted mental abilities, it must have seemed as if he was going to be stuck in prison for the rest of his life, exactly as the judge had apparently ordered.

Mitchell’s working party often consisted of himself and another prisoner, and they would be left to their own devices on the moor. From all accounts, the prison officers were wary of Mitchell, and as long as he came back to the prison, he was often left to his own devices. During the autumn of 1966, he was able to visit local public houses in Peter Tavey, half a dozen miles from the prison, and even go into local towns to buy budgerigars, which he had taken an interest in breeding during his time in Dartmoor. That gave ample opportunity for him to be given clear instructions.

The Krays, who at that time controlled much of the villainy in the East End of London, had got to know Mitchell when they were all locked up in Wandsworth jail, and they kept in touch with him when he was moved to Dartmoor. Around Easter 1966, two of their henchmen, “Fat Wally” Garelick and Patrick Connelly visited Mitchell, giving false names, along with a girl (known as Miss A in the court proceedings). The discussion turned to the Krays, and Mitchell made it clear he didn’t want to still be in Dartmoor at the end of the year. “You won’t be here for Christmas,” he was told, and, according to the evidence Miss A gave at the trial of the Kray brothers and their accomplices, the two men told her that “they” were going to get Mitchell out.