Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (18 page)

§
The timing reported here by Stangl is contradicted by documents on record, in particular Christian Wirth’s personnel file which states that he was Kommandant of Belsec until August 1942, when he was appointed
Inspektor
for the Sonderkommando (special command)
Einsatz Reinbard.

*
The system of forcing physically stronger Jews to despoil and bury their own people before they in turn were killed.

*
Hodder, London, 1945.

*
Josef Oberhauser was sentenced on January 21, 1965 in Munich, to 4 1/2 years of imprisonment. Following his release, he was said to be working in a Munich wine cellar where my request for information about him, however, met with blank refusal.

3

T
HE EXACT
date on which Sobibor became fully operational is not quite certain; it was either May 16 or May 18, 1942. It is certain, however, that in the first two months, the period when Stangl was administering the camp, about 100,000 people were killed there. Soon after that, the machinery broke down for a while and exterminations did not recommence until October.

I drove to Sobibor by way of Lublin on a cold Friday in March 1972, and we passed the camp-site before we realized what it was. It is marked by a light-brown stone monument, ten feet tall, on which are engraved the words: “In this place from May 1942 until October 1943 there existed a Hitler extermination camp. At this camp 250,000 Russian, Polish, Jewish and Gypsy prisoners were murdered.
*
On the 14th of October 1943 an armed rebellion took place, with several hundred prisoners taking part who, after a battle with the Hitler guards, escaped.” Facing the monument is Sobibor railway station. The station building has probably been improved, but the forester’s cottage – built of timber and painted green and dark brown – in which Stangl lived, appears to be unchanged. It is now inhabited by the families of two foresters, and the little room in which Stangl worked and slept is still a bedroom. It overlooks the railway track, which was known in the camp as “the ramp”. Transports may have halted slightly further back rather than directly opposite his window, but it would still have been impossible for Stangl to avoid seeing them.

The site – about 160 acres of forest – is quiet. The big clumps of pines and other trees are thick enough even in March to hide all open spaces. It is dark in the woods, with a musty, damp smell. “In Sobibor,” Franz Suchomel had said, “one couldn’t do any killing after the snow thawed because it was all under water. It was very damp at the best of times, but then it became a lake.”

There is a road about thirty feet wide, still in good condition, stretching from the railway track into the woods. It was constructed under either Stangl or his successor Reichleitner, and the
SS
called it the
Himmelfahrtsstrasse
– the Road to Heaven. The area adjoining the disembarkation ramp, no larger than a medium-sized football ground, was called Camp II. Cunningly divided by means of blind fences into squares and corridors, with many narrow “doors” from one square into another, it allowed the systematic separation of the arriving deportees, usually without arousing their suspicion. From the arrival point at the ramp, all that was visible were the fences, tightly camouflaged with evergreen branches, the distant trees, and – to the left – the small cluster of barracks (now a bare and open space) known as Camp I where the
SS
staff, the Ukrainian guards and the “work-Jews” lived and worked. This was all the 250,000
†
who were killed in Sobibor ever saw.

I walked along the road they had to take – except that now there was complete solitude and silence. After perhaps half a mile it ends in a large tract of open land. In the centre, facing the road, is a huge mound of earth, an artificial hill thirty feet high, the bottom half of which is faced with glass laid over millions of tiny pebbles. Inset in the middle is a small square filled with dried wild flowers. This mound, now overgrown with grass and bushes, marks the place where the three gas chambers stood and symbolizes the grave of those who died there.

The air is clear and clean. There is the sound of birds, the occasional whistle and clatter of a train, the far-away clucking of chickens; familiar sounds which, thirty years ago, must have offered momentary illusions of reassurance. But the earth round the mound is dark and terribly fine while the soil over the rest of Sobibor is a light brown sand which gives underfoot. And one is jolted out of any effort at detachment by the sickening shock at realizing that – even these three decades later – one must be walking on ashes.

The custodian of the site is Wladzimier Gerung, head forester of the region, who lives with his wife in a new house on the other side of the railway, about twenty-five yards from the station. We went to see them, unannounced. The Gerungs, tall, easy-moving people with open faces and quietly courteous manners, came to Sobibor eighteen years ago. But as a girl, throughout the war, Pani Gerung lived near Chelm. “Oh yes,” she said, “people in Chelm knew what was going on in Sobibor – how could they not? They could smell it – the air was rancid even though it was twenty miles away. And the sky lit up in the night with their terrible fires.”

I asked whether she and the people who lived around her had feelings against the Jews. She shook her head. “No – it was just … there was nothing one could do. Except, I think sometimes, what our neighbours did.”

The neighbours – farmers – had taken in two children of a Jewish pedlar when their parents were put into a ghetto; a girl of five and a boy of fourteen. The boy, on hearing that his parents and all the rest of the ghetto “had been taken away”, had disappeared, but the farmer adopted the girl legally and kept her as his own child. The little girl, said Pani Gerung, looked very Jewish, and to start with both children had to be passed from one house to another to keep them hidden: “Relatives and friends, everyone took them,” said Pani Gerung. “The little girl’s name was Elisabetta. In 1947 relations turned up and took her to Israel. She wrote to the farmers for several years. Then the letters stopped. Now they are old and deaf. They missed her terribly.”

Any Pole who, during the occupation, was found assisting or hiding a Jew was summarily shot; the
Sondergerichte
– special courts – who tried such people accepted no pleas in defence. The penalty was automatic. None the less, in spite of the strong anti-Semitism of large sections of the population, there are a number of documented examples of families – like the one quoted by Pani Gerung – who did extend such help. And there were also some Jewish children who were hidden by nuns in convents although the Catholic Church in Poland was immeasurably more pressured than anywhere else in Europe; ninety-five per cent of the priests held in concentration camps were Poles. In the government-sponsored
History of Help to the Jews In Occupied Poland
, the Polish writer Wladyslaw Bartoszewski (who is by no means only wedded to the party-line) cites a number of examples; the account he gives is, perhaps, made all the more convincing because the figure he finally has to cite for the number of Polish Jews actually rescued by his compatriots is so pitifully small that it heavily underlines the heroism of the relatively few who were willing or felt able to take the risk.

It was difficult to remember Polish anti-Semitism when talking to these two people who belonged to the very region – the extreme east of Poland – where it was most rampant. Their manner of speaking, their caring for the Sobibor Memorial and their protectiveness of the mementos they have collected (two flags, some documents, a map of the camp, and the visitors’ book with its pathetically few signatures) has a reverent, tender quality.

At Stangl’s trial, his activities at Sobibor were, for administrative reasons, not included in the prosecution’s case. But even so, his behaviour and attitude while there became part of the trial record and one of the matters brought up by each of the few Sobibor survivors who came to Düsseldorf as witnesses, was the fact that he often attended the unloading of transports “dressed in white riding clothes”. It was when he tried to explain this to me that I became aware for the first time of how he had lived – and was still living when we spoke – on two levels of consciousness, and conscience.

“When I came to Poland,” he said, “I had very few clothes: one complete uniform, a coat, an extra pair of trousers and shoes, and an indoor jacket – that’s all. I remember, during the very first week I was there, I was walking from the forester’s hut – my quarters – to one of the construction sites and suddenly I began to itch all over. I thought I was going crazy – it was awful; I couldn’t even reach everywhere at once to scratch. Michel said, ‘Didn’t anybody warn you? It’s sandflies, they are all over the place. You shouldn’t have come out without boots.’ [This would appear to indicate that Michel
was
there ahead of him.] I rushed back to my room and took everything off – I remember just handing all the stuff to somebody out of the door, and they boiled and disinfected everything. My clothes and almost every inch of me was covered with the things; they attach themselves to all the hair on your body. I had water brought in and bathed and bathed.”

It was difficult at that point not to recall that in these camps the prisoners retained as “work-Jews” had to stand at rigid attention, caps off, whenever a German passed. Anyone who moved, for any reason whatever – cramps, itches or anything else – was more likely than not to be hit or beaten with a whip, and the consequences of being struck could go far beyond momentary pain: any prisoner who, at the daily roll-call, was found to be – as they called it – “marked” or “stamped”, was a candidate for immediate gassing.

“
These sandflies must have been an awful problem for the prisoners, weren’t they?
” I asked.

“Not everyone was as sensitive to them as I. They just liked me,” he said, and smiled. “Anyway, what I wanted to tell you, with all this wear and tear, and the heat – it was very hot you know – my clothes fell apart. Well, one day, in a small town not far away, I found a weaving mill; I was interested in it because, you remember, that had been my profession once. So I went in. They were making very nice linen – off-white. I asked whether they’d sell me some. And that’s how I got the white material; I had a jacket made right away and a little later jodhpurs and a coat.”

“
But even so, how could you go into the camp in this get-up?
”

“The roads were very bad,” he explained blankly. “Riding was the best mode of transport.”

I tried once more: “Yes, but to attend the unloading of these people who were about to die, in white riding clothes …?”

“It was hot,” he said.

*
In
They Fought Back
(survivors’ recollections edited by Ury Suhl, Crown, New York, 1967) Alexander Pechersky, a Russian prisoner at Sobibor and former officer in the Soviet army who led the October rising, contested this figure. He said that more than half a million people were murdered at Sobibor between May 1942 and October 1943. Accounts by survivors also deny that any non-Jewish Poles were killed there.

†
The official Polish figure.

4

O
F ALL
the survivors of Treblinka and Sobibor who were brought to Germany by the prosecution (or defence) to testify at Stangl’s trial, perhaps the only one Stangl really identified – who he remembered clearly as an individual and whose testimony, as he said to me, “hurt him deeply”, was Stanislaw Szmajzner, like the Stangls an immigrant to Brazil. Stangl appeared almost to feel that Szmajzner had betrayed him.

“My family,” Stangl said to me, “were never anti-Semitic: remarks against Jews were unknown in our house. But after Szmajzner’s testimony, first to the police in Brazilia, to the Brazilian press, then his book – he wrote forty pages about me – and then in Düsseldorf at the trial, they did feel rather bitter.” (Actually there are only two pages directly concerning Stangl in Stanislaw Szmajzner’s book
Hell in Sobibor: the Tragedy of a Jewish Adolescent.
*
)

Frau Stangl, too, always emphasized to me how friendly she and the girls felt about the Jews – and indeed, how friendly Jews had been to them, in Brazil. At one moment during the week I spent with her, she pointed at some particularly splendid flowers that had arrived that morning, orchids I believe, on the table in her living room – this was the day after her family had celebrated her thirty-sixth wedding anniversary – and said, “These were sent to us by Jews.” And she, too, repeatedly referred bitterly to Szmajzner.

Stan Szmajzner, slight in build, with an expressive face, firm wiry hands, intelligent eyes and a warm smile, lives now in Goiania, a thriving industrial town in Central Brazil. He was a boy of fifteen when he broke out of Sobibor in October 1943; so he was still only forty-three when we met. (It was the second uprising in a death-camp, just as extraordinary as the first one, in August in Treblinka. Four hundred to five hundred people managed to get out but only thirty-two survived.) Stan Szmajzner has succeeded in creating for himself a new life on a new continent, in a new language and amongst people who could not possibly be further removed from his native environment but have accepted him as one of their own. He has married a Brazilian, has a child, and his closest friends, almost his adoptive parents, are one of the best-known liberal families in Brazil. Senator Pedro Ludovico was Governor of the province of Goiás until a fairly recent government change, and founded the city of Goiania. My meeting with Stan Szmajzner was at the Senator’s house; the Senator referred to Szmajzner at lunch repeatedly as his “extra son”, and Stan works, in a position approaching that of a partner, in a paper factory owned by the Senator’s son. Stan’s book, with a preface by Senator Ludovico, sold 10,000 copies – a considerable achievement in a country so far removed from Europe’s troubles.