Treblinka

 Treblinka - Hell on Earth 

 Arrival at Treblinka:

Treblinka was in two Phases, the first was an ordinary concentration camp, whereas the other was built specifically to turn human beings into ash as part of Operation Reinhard, which was located about three-miles (4.8km) south of the Bug River, and some fifty-miles (80km) east of Warsaw. 

The two camps, when fully built were close to each other. The first camp [Treblinka I] was built to be used as a slave labour camp, which came into existence in December 1941.  Later, the Nazis built a second camp [Treblinka II], which was designed to act as a human abattoir, and had gas chambers built into it came into existence in July 1942. 

Originally the gas used to kill inmates within the gas chambers was carbon monoxide which was generated by engines used from damaged trucks and tanks that the Germans had captured.  But these engines had a habit of breaking down, and as such, added another layer of torture for those already in the gas chambers.

Of course, the camp authorities wanted the entire killing process to go without any hiccups, and because the engines struggled to keep going, a more efficient way was sought to replace this killing method.  The camp authorities soon learnt about the gas that was being used within Auschwitz to kill its inmates, and because it proved more effective, and therefore didn’t rely on engines, the camp authorities began to use Zyklon-B, which was made up of bluish crystals of hydrogen cyanide, which when exposed to the air, produced a poisonous gas [Prussic acid].  

With the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto, on 22^nd July1942, the Jews were sent to Treblinka to be disposed of. 

Every transport of prisoners was first reassured that everything was fine and that they had nothing to worry about, and that they would be expected to go through a delousing process before moving onto the next stage of their resettlement. They were expected to hand over all money and valuables, and strip in preparation of a shower. The women and children were then separated from the men and then herded into a nearby building, whilst the men were forced to remove their clothing. The women and girls, now also naked had their hair shaved off, and then they were taken to another part of the camp complex where they had to wait their turn, sometimes for hours, to be escorted into the gas chambers regardless of weather conditions. Some of the children and the elderly simply died whilst waiting due to the extreme conditions imposed upon them. The sadist guards also added to their misery with whips, rifle butts, dogs and the bayonet. In some instances, when the gas chamber doors were swung open, there were still some victims still barely alive that had to be dealt with.

The prisoners, who made up the Sonderkommandos, would be forced to remove the dead from the gas chambers, throw them onto wooden litters and then run as fast as they can with their loads to a large pit where the corpses were thrown into, and sand poured over them by another Kommando unit, and whilst they were running back and forth, the SS would constantly beat them with their whips and even summarily execute some of them simply because they were deemed slow. Other Kommando members would quickly extract gold teeth and dentures from the dead before they were thrown into the pits.

On 2^nd August 1943, and with the help of having secured stolen weapons from the camp’s weapon’s store, some prisoners staged an uprising.  Out of about seven-hundred inmates, anywhere up to two-hundred managed to escape, and out of those two-hundred, only twelve managed to keep from being recaptured.

Though the exact number of Jews murdered in Treblinka will never be truly known, the estimate sits around 925,000[i].

‘At that moment, I hear, to the left of the barracks, the miserable survivors standing and saying the evening prayers, and after praying they recite Kaddish for the dead with tears in their eyes.  Kaddish wakes me up.  I look closely: yes, all who are here are wretched orphans and accursed individuals.  I become almost wild and shout at them: - To whom are you reciting Kaddish? You still believe?  In what do you believe, whom are you thanking?  Are you thanking the Lord for his mercy in taking away our brothers and sisters. our fathers and mothers? No, no! It is not true; there is no God.  If there was a God, he would not allow such miss fortune, such transgression, where innocent small children, only just born, are killed, where people who want only to do honest work and make themselves useful to the world are killed!  And you, living witnesses of the great misfortune, remain thankful.  Whom are you thanking? 

'Treblinka A Survivor's Memory'

Chil Rajchman

Machlehose Press. Quercus. London 2011 (p.30-31)

An eyewitness Account

Jankiel Wiernik (1889 -1972) a Polish Jew and slave labourer within one of Treblinka's Sonderkommandos witnessed many a depraved act committed by the SS within the death camp - one such incident in which he witnesses occurred in April 1943 - he watched in horror as a group of terror stricken Jewish women and children, after being separated, were led to one of the burning pits that had been specifically dug to burn victims bodies, some of the women fainted in fear as they watched their fellow captives being murdered in front of them and their bodies tossed into the burning pits, the women who had collapsed were simply dragged to the edge of the pit and thrown in alive. The SS would also, for fun, snatch a screaming child from their mother's clutches and throw them into the fire and then dare the mother to jump in and save her burning child. And when the distraught women didn't jump in after them, their tormentors would laugh and mock them and accuse them of cowardice. Jankiel Wiernik would write down his experiences in Treblinka after the war in a pamphlet size book called ’A Year in Treblinka’.

Treblinka’s Sonderkommandos.

Note: Where the German word is used to note the name of the Kommando, it comes from a survivors account[ii], otherwise they are names placed to describe individual Kommandos’ tasks.

Barbers: Barbers were employed to remove all the hair from the victims and this hair was collected and sent to the Reich to be used in the making of socks that U-boat crews would wear as well as for other things. 

Corpse Carriers:  Schlauch-Kolonne Dentists: This Kommando were employed to extract any valuable metals and dentures found within the teeth of those who have just been gassed.  before they could be either buried in a mass grave later thrown into the ovens of outdoor crematoria.   They would have to stop those would carry the bodies in a litter from the gas chambers to the pits, but later a narrow-gauge track was laid and the corpses were transported to the pits in trollies.  Occasionally a corpse with a gold tooth would be missed and thrown into the grave, when the SS nearby noticed this, the dentist who was closest would receive a severe beating.  The teeth once extracted by pliers and they would be collected together and taken to the dentists shed close the gas chambers where the remnants of blood and dead flesh would be removed and the precious metals would be extracted from the tooth, cleaned again and put into another container.  The precious metals, if not stolen by the SS men themselves, were then sent to the Reichsbank in Berlin where they were melted down into ingots.

After The Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler ordered that all bodies be exhumed and burnt in an effort to hide the murderous activities of the SS  Survivors of the Warsaw ghetto uprising who had been recaptured by the Nazis were transported to Treblinka to be disposed of, and when they were being taken to the gas chambers, the SS forced them to walk past the burning of the bodies, mothers tried their hardest to prevent their child seeing such things, but some children, clinging desperately to their mothers and wept as they asked  if they too were going to be thrown into the fire and burnt.

Schlauch-Kolonne [Hose Column]: This group of prisoners were assigned to clean the ‘Schlauch’, (feeder tube), which were the roads and paths that the transport victims were forced to run naked under heavy blows from the SS to the gas chambers.  Fresh sand would be spread to cover up the blood-soaked ground so that new arrivals wouldn’t see what had happened to the previous transport until it was too late. 

Knochen-Kolonne [Bone Column]:  Earmarked within Camp II to pick up the bones that lay scattered around the improvised outside crematoriums so that they can be smashed up into a fine power so that no evidence of mass remains. 

In Treblinka, prisoners were forced to exist on ersatz bread, which was between 170-200 grams and a small label spoon of thin soup that was made from rotting vegetables and as such many prisoners grew weaker as their bodies consumed their own body fat and muscle just to survive. Those too weak and emaciated and were too weak to stand up or to walk, where put into wheel barrows and taken outside the camp and murdered.  And prisoners who worked within the quarry who didn’t fulfil their daily quota of carrying rocks, were taken to the edge of one of the cliffs within the quarry and simply thrown off.

It is also well known that the SS and Ukrainian guards systematically raped women and when they had their full, simply killed them, and sometimes they even engaged in wild orgies with these women.

We even have testimonies from those who managed to survive this hell on earth that tell us how drunken SS officers would sometimes drag at least a dozen prisoners from their bunks and take them outside where they would show each other how they execute their prisoners: a bullet in the temple or a bullet in the heart, or one through the eyes, or one bullet in the back of their head, this kind of behaviour of the guards was done simply or amusement.

The testimonies of these survivors even tell us about the names and behaviours of many camp personnel, for example, SS-Unterscharführer Chanke was known as ‘The Whip’, because the whip seemed to be his best friend when beating up the inmates; Zacke-Zacke, [Boom Boom] got his nickname because he used to shout Zacke-Zacke every time he beat a prisoner. Another guard, a Ukrainian, Mikolai maintained the engines that were used to pump the gas fumes into the gas chambers gas, and Ivan would, for personal pleasure cut off the ears of prisoners and order these wretched souls back to work immediately after removing their ears, and after a while he would then force the prisoners to strip naked next to the pit and then simply execute them, simply for fun.  Another incident concerning Ivan, was when he ordered a dentist by the name Finkelstein to spread eagle on the ground, and as a joke, he drilled into the man’s buttocks with an auger tool.  (Finkelstein would survive to see the prisoner revolt), another sadist by the name Stumpf was called ‘Laughing Death’ because he couldn’t stop laughing every time, he killed a prisoner or saw a prisoner getting killed. His last victim was a boy named 'Max Levit' whom was killed on the 23^rd of July 1944 and whom he [Stumpf] had ordered to be shot alongside other boys within the camp. When the shots rang out, the bodies of the boys fell into the pit together, Levit survived the execution and managed to crawl out of the grave before they covered the bodies with sand and therefore survived. We also have testimony concerning a German guard who had only one eye, who was labelled ‘Master Hammer’ because of his love of killing his prisoners with a hammer. According to one testimony given, a group of children between the ages of 8-13 were battered to death by this man and his hammer, and that he killed them all within a few minutes, why?  Because these children were no longer useful workers and therefore, they all had to go. And there is the guard called Preifi, nicknamed the ‘Old One’ who used to hide somewhere near the camp’s rubbish dump and pounce on any prisoner who rummaged through it in search of discarded potato peelings and other edible things.  He would place the muzzle of his weapon into the mouths of all those he caught and pull the trigger.  To amuse their boredom, some guards simply shot prisoners as they returned to the camp after toiling all day in some work Kommando[iii].

Other Known German guards:

SS-Unterscharführer Loeffler

SS-Scharführer Karl Spetzinger

Treblinka Slang

The SS used to call little children who had been killed “Trinkets”[iv]

[i] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/gallery/treblinka-maps

[ii] Treblinka A Survivor’s Memory. Chil Rajchman Maclehose Press Quercus- London reprint 2009.

[iii] A Writer at War with the Red Army 1941-1945. Vasily Grossman. Plimco, London. 2006 p.280-305

[iv] Treblinka A Survivor’s Memory. Chil Rajchman Maclehose Press Quercus- London reprint 2009. p.87

'Like any other industrial enterprise, Treblinka grew gradually, developing and acquiring new production areas; it was not always as I described it above.  In the beginning there were three small gas chambers.  While these were still under construction, a number of transports arrived, and the people they brought were murdered with "cold" weapons: axes, hammers and clubs.'

                             Treblinka A Survivor's Memory

                                     Chil Rajchman

                          Maclehose, Quercus (2009) p.152

Death in the Chambers

It would generally take anything from 10- 20 minutes for the victims to die within the chamber, and sometime not all would be dead by the time they reopened the large doors to remove the bodies.  In other cases, the engine that created and pumped the gas into the chambers would break down have way through the process and victims, would have to remain within the locked chambers until the problem was fixed, thus causing more stress and agony for the victims.

The deadly fumes that was created came from the engines of a tank, or truck, which was utilised for the task, contained carbon monoxide, which when inhaled combined with the individuals haemoglobin in the blood, which in turn created a compound known as carboxyhaemoglobin, and it is through process that causes the victim to have breathing difficulties as it restricts oxygen reaching vital organs and therefore they begin to suffocate and after a short period, they would lose consciousness and then die. It is akin to being strangled to death.

Another way that the SS would kill their victims whilst they were inside the chambers was simply to extract all the air by the use of special pumps.  Suffocation would result and the victims would die.

It has also been stated that steam was sometimes pumped into the chamber thus causing the oxygen to be expelled, again causing death through suffocation. This technique was rarely used.

An SS officer would look through the peep holes within the doors to ascertain if everyone inside was dead before commanding the other doors to be opened and the dead taken out.