The Road (34 page)

"The Hell Of Treblinka”

Written in September 1944; first published in Znamya (November 1944).

*
Bełzec, and Auschwitz
:
The
Dictionnaire de la Shoah
gives an estimate of 900,000 deaths. Timothy Snyder [
Bloodlands
(New York: Basic Books, 2010), 408] gives a figure of 780,863 for the total number of Jews murdered at Treblinka. This is taken from a study by Peter Witte and Stephen Tyas [“A New Document on the Deportation and Murder of Jews during ‘Einsatz Reinhard’ 1942,”
Holocaust and Genocide Studies
15, 3 (2001): 468–86]. Hershl Polyanker, a lesser-known Soviet journalist, gives the same mistaken estimate of three million deaths in an article written, like Grossman’s, in September 1944. His “Treblinka—Hell on Earth,” probably originally written in Yiddish, was translated into Spanish and sent by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee to newspapers in Cuba, Mexico, and Uruguay [GARF, fond 8114, opis' 1, delo 346, 162–72].

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the General Government
: Since 1939 a large area of Poland, renamed the Generalgouvernement, had been under German civil administration. Some parts of the country, however, had been incorporated into the German Reich.

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passed through its gates
: It is likely that about 10,000 prisoners passed through the camp, and that about 2,000 prisoners were kept there at any one time [Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman,
The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry
, David Patterson, trans. and ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 555, note 9].

*
the Wachmänner
: An additional security force was formed to assist the SS in running the camps; it was composed mainly of former Soviet POWs who had initially volunteered to serve as policemen in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union. These volunteers usually referred to themselves as Wachmänner (guards); the Germans referred to them as Hilfswillige (auxiliaries) or as Trawniki men, since they had been trained at a camp near Lublin called Trawniki; the camp inmates and the local Poles simply called them “the Ukrainians.” The subject of collaboration with the Nazis on the part of Soviet citizens was taboo. Grossman was obliged to use the term Wachmänner and say as little as possible about who these men were. Most were indeed Ukrainian; the Germans correctly considered Ukrainians especially likely to be hostile to Soviet rule—and in any case, the Ukraine, unlike Russia, had been occupied in its entirety. There were, however, representatives of other Soviet nationalities, including Russians and at least one half-Jew [Snyder, 256ff; Arad, 20–22].

*
“Broad Is My Motherland!”
: A popular Soviet song.

*
Panie Wachman
:
Panie
is a standard Polish form of address. The boy’s first two words could be translated as “Mister Guard.”

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a thousand workers involved
: The number of workers employed at any one time was, in fact, four hundred to five hundred [Witold Chrostowski,
Extermination Camp Treblinka
(London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2004), 26].

*
Unteroffizier
: A noncommissioned officer.

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other Belorussian cities
: Łomza, Białystok, and Grodno are now part of Poland. In 1939 they were incorporated into the Soviet Union in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

*
Bessarabia
: A name more commonly used before 1917; it corresponds, approximately, to the area now occupied by the Republic of Mol-dova.

*
return to this figure
: Many of Grossman’s estimates—the number of prisoners in each wagon, the number of wagons in each train—are accurate. His most serious error lay in accepting the peasants’ mistaken reports that transports arrived every day. From June 23, 1942, until mid-December 1942, and from mid-January 1943 until the end of May 1943, there was probably an average of two new transports each day. During other periods, however, there was, on average, only one new transport each week [Chrostowski, 99].

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act with impunity
: It is now generally agreed that this decision was made between late August and mid-December 1941.

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extermination of the Jews
: By March 1941, as many as 445,000 Jews were living in the Warsaw ghetto, but this number was soon reduced by illness and starvation. In the summer of 1942 around 300,000 Jews were deported, most of them to Treblinka; nearly all were killed in the gas chambers. Around 7,000 Jews died in the Ghetto Uprising in April 1943, and another 7,000 were deported immediately afterward to Treblinka. The remaining Jews, approximately 42,000, were deported to forced-labor camps; most were murdered in November 1943. [Figures from U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, available at www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005413.]

*
those with weak hearts would die
: “Thousands of Jews died en route to the death camps during that summer from thirst, suffocation and lack of minimum sanitary facilities in the crowded freight cars. The trip from Warsaw and other ghettos to Bełzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, which should have lasted a few hours, sometimes lasted a day or two.” [Arad, 65.]

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a large number of people were wounded
: Arad quotes the testimony of a Pole from Treblinka village: “I saw how guards, who were always drunk, would open the freight-car doors at night and demand money and valuables. Then they would close the doors and fire into the cars.” [Arad, 67.] Gitta Sereny quotes from the diary of an Austrian soldier on his way to the front in a troop train, who chanced to observe a transport of Jews: “When we reach Treblinka station the train is next to us again—there is such an awful smell of decomposing corpses in the station, some of us vomit. The begging for water continues, the indiscriminate shooting by the guards continues...” [Gitta Sereny,
Into that Darkness
(London: Pimlico, 1995), 250.]

*
for the necessary visas
: This paragraph is confirmed by other sources. Around 95 percent of those murdered at Treblinka, however, were Jews from Poland [Chrostowski, 107].

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when the war broke out
: There was no such train, though there were indeed cases of “enemy alien” Jews being used as hostages.

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the number of people on it
: Sereny comments on the “astuteness” with which the Nazis “recognized the capacity of the Western Jews individually to grasp the monstrous truth and individually to resist it, and therefore ordered that great pains be taken to mislead and calm them until, naked, in rows of five and running under the whiplash, they had been made incapable of resistance. By the same token they recognized that these precautions were unnecessary with the Eastern Jews.” [Sereny, 199.]

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to woŁkowice, etc.
: Ticket windows and various timetables and arrows were painted on the façade of the barracks used for sorting clothes and valuables. There was also a clock with numerals permanently indicating six o’clock.

*
Warsaw, and Wołkowice?
: Arad cites an anonymous account: “We held one another’s hands and jumped down into the sand...Everyone went toward the wall of crowded pine trees. Suddenly I had a strange thought. Those trees aren’t growing, they’re dead. They had made a fence, a tight fence that looked like a forest, made out of trees that were cut down. I looked at the fence and saw something else—barbed wire between the branches. I thought—concentration camp.” [Arad, 83.]

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the entrance to a slaughterhouse
: Richard Rhodes has written: “One place Holocaust historians seem not to have looked for models of the killing process is the history and anthropology of the slaughtering of animals for food. The parallels are compelling.” [Richard Rhodes,
Masters of Death: The Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust
(New York: Vintage, 2003), 280–82.] Rhodes points out that the aim of the industrialization of slaughter—whether of animals or of people—was not only to improve efficiency but also to absolve individuals of responsibility. Grossman, however, was well aware of this parallel, and he develops it in “Tiergarten” (1955).

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were considered quiet
: According to Chrostowski, the maximum number to arrive in a single day was probably around 16,000, but this was unusual. Even during busy periods, it was more often around 6,000 or 7,000 [Chrostowski, 99–100].

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threaded with branches
: Trees planted around the perimeter and branches woven into barbed-wire fences served as camouflage, blocking any view into the camp from outside, as well as between different parts of the camp.

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and so is New York
: This sentence was omitted from the published versions, as well as from that prepared for
The Black Book.
Grossman’s criticism, however, is justified: both British and American governments had received reliable reports of the exterminations as early as August 1942.

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removing straps from bedrolls
: Most of the camp work was performed by 700 to 800 Jewish prisoners, organized into special squads (
Sonderkommandos
). The blue squad was responsible for unloading the train, cleaning out the wagons, and clearing the platform and the station square. The red squad supervised the prisoners as they undressed and then took their clothes to the storerooms. The
Geldjuden
(money Jews) were in charge of handling money and jewelry, melting down gold teeth, etc. The
Totenjuden
(Jews of death), of whom there were about 200, lived in a barrack in the extermination area; their job was to carry the dead from the gas chambers to the grave pits. Later they had to dig up the corpses, carry them to the grill pits to be burned, sift through their ashes, grind up recognizable parts, and then bury these ashes. Other groups took care of the general maintenance of the camp. New workers (usually the young and strong) were selected from transports and pressed into these various
kommandos
. The guards repeatedly whipped and beat them. Most were shot after a few days and replaced by new arrivals. From the spring of 1943, however, when fewer new transports were arriving, members of these squads survived longer. This made it possible to organize the August 1943 uprising.

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children’s toy building blocks
: According to Korotkova, Grossman kept on his writing desk a child’s building block from Treblinka. It was covered in scratches, and the pictures were almost erased. [See www.lechaim.ru/ARHIV/193/LKL.htm.]

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sent to Germany
: In her article “In the Fields of Treblinka,” Rachel Auerbach writes: “We must remember that
the killing of Jews was primarily a crime of robbery with murder.
The utilization of gold and valuables...was organized in a first-rate manner.” She quotes a Treblinka survivor, Alexander Kudlik: “From the sorting of garments, we proceeded to the sorting of gold pens. I spent about six months going through gold pens—ten hours a day, for six months, just sorting pens.” Auerbach also quotes notes recorded by three of the prisoners: “The following items were shipped out: about 25 carloads of hair packed in bales, 248 carloads of men’s suits, about 100 carloads of shoes, 22 carloads of ready-made textile goods...Over 40 carloads of medicines, medical equipment and dentists’ metal were sent off. Twelve carloads of artisans’ tools, 260 carloads of bedding, feathers, down, quilts, blankets. In addition, about 400 carloads of miscellaneous items, such as dishes, baby carriages, ladies’ handbags, valises, pens, eyeglasses, shaving gear, toilet articles and other small items. Several hundred carloads of various types of clothing, underwear, and other used textile items.” [In Alexander Donat, ed.,
The Death Camp Treblinka
(New York: Holocaust Library, 1979), 68 and 56–67.] Sereny, on the other hand, points out that the sum of DM 178,745,960 netted by the three Aktion Reinhard camps is—in the context of a large nation’s income and expenditure—“a trivial sum” [Sereny, 101]. She argues convincingly that the Nazis were motivated primarily by ideology, not by financial considerations.

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allowed to wash with it
: Workers who looked weak or unhealthy were likely to be shot. It was essential to appear well and strong. The Treblinka survivor Abraham Krzepicki writes: “We would get up every morning before reveille and wash and make ourselves look as youthful and vigorous as possible...Everybody shaved every morning and washed their faces with cologne taken from packages abandoned by the Jewish prisoners. Some even put on powder or rouge.” [In Donat, 100.]

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shot before her eyes
: Wachmänner with rifles and machine guns were stationed on the roofs of the barracks.

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the
Scharführer
: An SS rank equivalent to that of staff sergeant.

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“Achtung! Achtung!”
: In his manuscript Grossman writes these words with particular emphasis. Each letter is two or three times its usual size. His exclamation marks are thick vertical wedges.

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saddles for the cavalry
: The hair was used for a variety of purposes: in the uniforms of soldiers and railway workers, in carpets and mattresses, in ropes and cords on ships, and in socks and gloves for submariners.

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“on transport duty”
: Another mistake with regard to numbers. There were only between 20 and 35 SS men working in the death camp as a whole. And since there were only 90 to 120 Wachmänner in the entire camp, there could not have been so many “on transport duty” at any one time.

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trampled beneath their boots
: An elaboration of Jankiel Wiernik’s thoughts in “A Year in Treblinka”: “Everything the Jews left behind had its value and its place. Only the Jews themselves were regarded as worthless.” [In Donat, 168.]

*
“Schneller! Schneller!”
: “Hands up! March! Quicker! Quicker!” Like “
Achtung
,” these words are written in huge letters in Grossman’s manuscript, and they are followed by still bigger, wedge-shaped exclamation marks.