The Road (35 page)

*
Faster into nonexistence!
: Most accounts of Nazi camps mention the guards’ constant demands that the prisoners—both the workers and the condemned—should do everything “
schneller
.”

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the Hell that was Treblinka
: Grossman has underestimated the Nazis’ orderliness. There was a special squad whose duty was to clean the path and sprinkle fresh sand on it after the passage of each batch of victims [Chil Rajchman,
Treblinka: A Survivor’s Memory
(London: MacLehose Press, 2011)].

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“The Road of No Return”
: They more often called it Himmelfahrtstrasse or Himmelweg (“The Road to Heaven”). The alley was also known as
der Schlauch
(the tube); branches were intertwined with the two-meter-high barbed wire so as to make it impossible to see in or out.

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the name of Suchomel
: Unterscharführer Franz Suchomel’s main job at Treblinka was, in fact, the collection and processing of money and valuables. Lanzmann interviews him at length in the film
Shoah
(Eureka, 1985). Most survivors consider Suchomel to have been one of the less vicious of the guards. One of ten Treblinka personnel tried in 1965, he was sentenced to six years in prison—a relatively light sentence.

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what I had heard was true
: Joseph Hirtreiter (nicknamed “Sepp”) was tried in Frankfurt in 1951 and sentenced to life imprisonment. Among the crimes of which he was found guilty was “killing many young children ages one and one-half to two, during the unloading of the transports, by seizing them by the feet and smashing their heads against the boxcars.” [In Donat, 277.]

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flowers in large pots
: Above the door were a Star of David and a Hebrew inscription: “Through this gate only the righteous pass.” [Chrostowski, 61.] The building—razed to the ground thirteen months before the Red Army reached Treblinka—was in fact made of brick. It would have been difficult to achieve a hermetic seal with stone.

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in charge of the complex
: Arad confirms that Scharführer Fritz Schmidt was in charge of the gas-chamber engines [Arad, 121]. Schmidt was arrested in Saxony. Sentenced in December 1949 to nine years in prison, he escaped to West Germany and was never retried.

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a strong dose of quinacrine
: An anti-malarial drug.

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holding a saber
: It was, in fact, the shorter man, Nikolaj Marchenko, who tortured people with a thick pipe, and the taller man, Ivan Demjanjuk, who hacked at people with his saber. In 1986 Demjanjuk, known as “Ivan the Terrible” was deported from the United States to Israel. Two years later, he was sentenced to death for crimes against humanity. In 1993, however, Israel’s highest court overturned the sentence, finding “reasonable doubt” as to whether Demjanjuk truly was “Ivan the Terrible.” He was returned to the United States. On April 2, 2009, it was announced that he would be deported to Germany to face trial on charges of accessory to 29,000 counts of murder in Sobibor, where he had served as a guard before being transferred to Treblinka. On May 11, 2009, he was deported by plane to Germany. His trial, in Munich, began on November 30, 2009.

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something of a theoretician
: Kurt Franz’s rank was the equivalent of second lieutenant. Although officially deputy to Hauptsturmführer Franz Stangl (camp commandant from September 1942 to August 1943), Franz was effectively in charge of the day-to-day running of the camp. Young and handsome, with a round, almost babyish face, he was nicknamed Lalke (Yiddish for “doll”). He was, however, a sadist, and many accounts of Treblinka mention his vicious dog. According to Rajchman, Franz would order Barry, “Man, bite that dog!” [Rajchman] In 1959, in Düsseldorf, Franz was arrested. During a search of his apartment, police found a photograph album labeled “The Best Years of My Life” (
Die schönsten Jahre meines Lebens
), which contained pictures of the camp, of Stangl, of Barry, of the excavator, etc. [Chrostowski, 103]. In 1965, in Düsseldorf, Franz was sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in an old people’s home in Wuppertal on July 4, 1998.

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of spectators
: Henry Noel Brailsford was a left-wing British journalist and the author of
Our Settlement with Germany
(1944). He was in no sense a defender of Hitler. He had, however, been one of the relatively few left-wing writers in Britain to criticize the Soviet show trials—and this had made him unpopular with the Soviet authorities. Grossman seldom repeats Soviet propaganda so unthinkingly.

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the entire staff of his Vatican
: The intensity of Grossman’s venom may seem startling. Recent research, however, suggests that his criticism of the pope is justified. Susan Zuccotti has established that, during the Holocaust, Pope Pius XII and the Vatican knew what the Nazis were doing yet chose to keep silent [Susan Zuccotti,
Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000)]. Sereny also discusses the culpability of the pope and the Vatican [Sereny, 64–77, 140–42, and 277–86].

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stabbing an SS officer
: On September 10 or 11, 1942, Meir Berliner, a citizen of Argentina, jumped out from the ranks of the prisoners and stabbed Max Bialas with a knife. Berliner and at least ten other prisoners were shot on the spot; Bialas died en route to the military hospital, and another 160 prisoners were shot in reprisal. The Wachmänner’s barracks were then named the Max Bialas Barracks.

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no one can honor it
: These stories are exaggerated, but some parts, at least, are confirmed by other sources. [For example, see Samuel Willenberg,
Surviving Treblinka
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 127; and Wiernik, in Donat, 172.] Rajchman records that, on November 10, 1942, a transport of Jews from Ostrowiec was—unusually—forced to enter the gas chambers at night. A group of thirty or forty men resisted. Naked, they fought with their fists before being brought down by automatic rifles.

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Majdanek, Sobibor, and Bełzec
:
Christian Wirth, the gassing expert, had aimed at the destruction of 25,000 people a day, but this proved impossible [Donald James Wheal and Warren Shaw,
Dictionary of the Third Reich
(London: Penguin, 2002), 288]. Aktion Reinhard was evidently imbued with a sense of manic urgency at every level—from that of strategic planning to that of the day-to-day running of the camps. According to Mark Mazower, “A sense of excitement and urgency coursed among those charged with the secret killing, and they felt under constant pressure to accelerate it and finish before the news leaked out. Globocnik believed that ‘the whole Jewish action should be carried out as quickly as possible to avoid the danger of one day finding ourselves stuck in the middle of it in the event of difficulties forcing us to halt the action.’ Victor Brack, a leading figure in the programme, noted that Himmler himself wanted them to ‘work as fast as possible if only for reasons of concealment.’” [Mark Mazower,
Hitler’s Empire
(London: Penguin, 2008), 386.] Himmler told Wirth that he expected him and his men to be “inhuman to a superhuman degree” (
Ich mute ihnen Übermenschlich-Unmenschliches zu
). [In Donat, 273.]

*
with the help of straps
: There was indeed a period during which the bodies were taken to the grave pits by trolleys pushed along a narrow-gauge track. This system, however, proved impractical; the
Totenjuden
went back to carrying the corpses on stretchers. [This information available at www. deathcamps.org/treblinka/treblinka.html.]

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on an industrial scale
: There are no other accounts of the use of steam or pumps to remove the air from the chambers. According to Rajchman, however, “On days when they had been warned by the Extermination High Command in Lublin that there would be no transport arriving the following day, the executioners, out of pure sadism, left people shut in the gas chambers until they died from suffocation, simply from lack of air.” [Rajchman.]

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a single human being
: Arad writes: “When the doors were opened, all the corpses were standing; because of the crowding and the way the victims grasped one another, they were like a single block of flesh.” [Arad, 86.] Rajchman, himself one of the
Totenjuden
, writes, “This compression results from people being terrorized and pressed against one another when they are forced to enter the gas chamber. They hold their breath in order to squeeze in. After suffocation and the death agony, the bodies swell up and so the corpses form a single mass.” [Rajchman.]

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breathing for longest
: In Auschwitz, at least, where the Germans used Zyklon B rather than carbon monoxide, children and weaker people fell to the ground, while those who were stronger climbed over them, trampling and crushing them as they tried instinctively to claw their way to the more breathable air up above.

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important Gestapo officials
: Himmler visited Aktion Reinhard headquarters and the death camps of Sobibor and Treblinka in late February or early March 1943. By this time, nearly all the Jews of Poland had been exterminated, and Auschwitz-Birkenau had, in any case, greatly increased its killing capacity. Sobibor and Treblinka had fulfilled their purpose.

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far away on the Volga
:
It seems that Himmler had always intended the corpses to be cremated and that, during this visit, he merely reiterated a previous order that the camp command had failed to carry out [Arad, 167]. Grossman may, however, be right in a broader sense. Arad writes: “In January 1944, the question of hiding his crimes began to bother Globocnik, whereas a year and a half earlier, in August 1942, when asked by visiting SS officers whether it would not be better, for reasons of secrecy, to cremate rather than to bury the corpses...Globocnik had answered, ‘We ought, on the contrary, to bury bronze tablets stating that it was we who had the courage to carry out this gigantic task.’” [Ibid., 376.] It has been suggested that it was the German discovery of the mass graves of Katyn that made Himmler decide to cover up traces of Nazi crimes. (In 1940 the Soviet NKVD had shot about 22,000 Polish officers and other members of the country’s elite. The Wehrmacht found the mass graves in 1943 and tried to exploit this discovery for anti-Soviet propaganda.) This hypothesis, however, is untenable: Himmler visited Treblinka in mid-March 1943, and the Katyn massacre was discovered only in April 1943.

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cremation of millions of human corpses
: Mazower writes that “
Standartenführer
Paul Blobel, who had...been responsible for the SS death squad which organized the Babi Yar massacres outside Kiev, was the man Himmler chose for the job. Starting with Auschwitz and Chelmno, Blobel ordered that the huge burial pits be uncovered and their remains burned, either in special crematoria or on huge bonfires. He issued similar instructions for Bełzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, and his underlings visited the camps to make sure the burning of the hundreds of thousands of bodies proceeded according to instructions.” [Mazower, 410.] Grossman may, however, have been thinking of one of these “underlings,” Scharführer Herbert Floss, who served successively at Bełzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka as the cremation “expert” [Arad, 173].

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the pine forest that surrounded the camp
: Compare the words of Richard Glazar, a Czech Jew who survived Treblinka: “Suddenly...flames shot up. Very high. In a flash, the whole countryside, the whole camp, seemed ablaze...We knew that night that the dead would no longer be buried, they’d be burned.” [Claude Lanzmann,
Shoah: The Complete Text
(New York: Da Capo, 1995), 9–10.]

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burning the bodies
: As noted, there were in fact around two hundred
Totenjuden.

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from Bulgaria
: No Jews were deported from Bulgaria proper. It is possible that these were Greek Jews from Thrace. Thrace was occupied by Bulgaria, and Jews were deported from there. My thanks to Jean-marc Dreyfus for this suggestion.

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including white bread
: In
Shoah
, Richard Glazar describes how, after a period during which there had been few transports and, as a result, very little food in the camp, transports began to arrive from the Balkans: “These were rich people; the passenger cars bulged with possessions. Then an awful feeling gripped us, all of us...a feeling of helplessness, of shame. For we threw ourselves on their food...The trainloads from the Balkans brought us to a terrible realization: we were the workers in the Treblinka factory, and our lives depended on the whole manufacturing process, that is, the slaughtering process at Treblinka.” [Lanzmann, 137; also Sereny, 212–14.]

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his favorite word
: Grossman has misunderstood the German word
tadellos.
This does not mean “blame-free” in the sense of “innocent” but “blameless” in the sense of “beyond reproach” or, more colloquially, “first-class.” Auerbach notes that one German official document stated: “The burning of corpses received the proper incentive only after an instructor had come down from Auschwitz.” She goes on to say that the Jews nicknamed this instructor Tadellos, since that was his favorite expression: “‘Thank God, now the fire’s perfect [
tadellos
],’ he used to say when...the pile of corpses finally burst into flame.” [In Donat, 38.]

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Das unser Schiksal ist
: “For us today there is only Treblinka. This is our Fate.”

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Geliebte Mädelein
: “I picked the little flower and gave it to the most beautiful and beloved maiden.” Grossman has misspelled several words in these lines quoted from songs. These may simply be mistakes on his part or he may have been trying to reproduce the words as he heard them pronounced.

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orders for them to be killed
: Grossman is not the only person to have made this allegation, but Sereny argues convincingly that it is false [Sereny, 259].