Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (38 page)

“That racial business,” said Stangl, “was just secondary. Otherwise, how could they have had all those ‘honorary Aryans’? They used to say General Milch was a Jew, you know.”

“
If the racial business was so secondary, then why all that hate propaganda?
”

“To condition those who actually had to carry out these policies; to make it possible for them to do what they did.”

“
Well
, you
were part of this: did
you
hate?
”

“Never. I wouldn’t let anybody dictate to me who to hate. Anyway, the only people I could ever hate would be those who were out to destroy me – like Prohaska.”

“
What is the difference to you between hate, and a contempt which results in considering people as ‘cargo’?
”

“It has nothing to do with hate. They were so weak; they allowed everything to happen – to be done to them. They were people with whom there was no common ground, no possibility of communication – that is how contempt is born. I could never understand how they could just give in as they did. Quite recently I read a book about lemmings, who every five or six years just wander into the sea and die; that made me think of Treblinka.”

“
If you didn’t feel an overriding sense of loyalty to the Party or its ideas, what did you believe in during that time in Poland?
”

“Survival,” he said immediately. “In the midst of all that death – life. And what sustained me most was my fundamental faith in the existence of just retribution.”

“
But you knew your own position. You were so afraid of a few men like Globocnik, Wirth, Prohaska. How is it that you were not as afraid of this ‘just retribution’ you were certain existed and which, when it came, was bound to include you?
”

“It was all part of the way I construed it for myself; I am responsible only to myself and my God. Only
I
know what I did of my own free will. And for that I can answer to my God. What I did without, or against my free will, for that I need not answer.… Yes, I knew the day would come when the Nazis would go under and that I’d probably go under with them. If it did happen, it just couldn’t be helped. At the time of the worst degradations in the East,” he said (wording it rather ambiguously, I thought, leaving me in some doubt as to whether he was referring to his own sentiments in connection with Treblinka, or to the rout of the German army in Russia), “I went on leave and we spent it at a priest’s house: Pfarrhof Klaus in the Steyrthal, with Father Mario, a friend of my wife’s family. We went to Mass every morning.…”

14

“I
DIDN’T
see Paul again until July,” Frau Stangl said. “And that was a terrible time – he stayed almost a month. By that time I had thought more about Treblinka. Of course I was pregnant, that probably also influenced my state of mind. At Christmas, you see, he had told me again that he was the ‘highest ranking’ officer in Treblinka and I had asked him – again – what that meant. Because he’d never mentioned being Kommandant – never. He answered that it meant everyone had to defer to him, and do what he said. I said, ‘But then … my God, Paul, then you are
in charge?
’ But he answered, ‘No, Wirth is
in charge.
’ And again I had believed him, I suppose because I needed to – I
had
to believe. How could I have gone on otherwise? As it was, I often looked at him and thought to myself, ‘Who are you? Oh my God, what are you that you can bear even to
see
this? What – oh God,
what
are you seeing with these eyes which look at me?’ Still, that Christmas I had still believed him: he said so often, so firmly that he wanted only to get out, that he could ask for nothing better. And even when
I
said, ‘If you are really doing only administrative things and nothing bad, well, at least you are not at the front’ – because, yes, I did say that – he answered, ‘No, no, I must get out of it.’

“It is true, you know, although I cried, oh so many times when I thought of those people they were killing, I never never knew there were children too, or even women. I, too, rationalized it I suppose; I told myself, I suppose, that we were at war and that they were killing the men; men, you know: enemies. I suppose I thought – or told myself – that the women and children were being left at home. I know it isn’t logical, but I suppose I just didn’t dare to think further. What I did know and did think was already more than I could bear. But it’s true, I also said to myself many times: if he did refuse, if he did just run away, throw away his life and ours, it would still go on. There would not be just hundreds, there would be thousands only too happy to take his place. Well, that’s how I thought until July. Because until then I still kept believing that he was trying to get out, as he told me, and that he would succeed in getting a transfer.

“But by the time he came on leave in July I had ceased to believe; it had been too long. Arid now I began to see the terrible change in him. No one else saw this. And I too had only glimpses; occasional glimpses of another man, somebody with a different, a totally changed face; someone I didn’t know; that face that you too saw later, in the prison – red, suffused, swollen, protruding veins, coarse – he who was never coarse or vulgar, who was always loving and kind. That was when I began to nag him – at least he called it that. I asked him again and again, ‘Paul, why are you still there? It’s a year now, more than a year. All the time you said you’d manage it, you’d wangle a transfer. Paul,’ I’d say, ‘I’m afraid for you. I am afraid for your soul. You
must
leave. Run away if must be. We will come with you, anywhere.’ – ‘How?’ he said. ‘They’d catch me. They catch everybody. And that would be the end for all of us. I in a concentration camp, you in
Sippenhaft
[detention for compromised relatives of unreliables] – perhaps the children too; it’s unthinkable.’ That’s what he said. Well, you understand, I wasn’t thinking of Germany’s victory or defeat, I was only thinking of him, my man, and what was happening to him inside, and I went on nagging him. He’d get terribly angry, quite out of character for him. ‘Is this what my whole leave is going to be like?’ he’d shout. ‘Aren’t you ever going to stop pestering me?’

“I … I could no longer be with him … you know … near him. It was quite terrible, for both of us. We were staying in the mountains with this friend of my mother’s, a priest, Father Mario; she had arranged for us to stay there, for our holiday. And one day I couldn’t stand it any longer; I no longer knew where to turn, I
had
to talk to somebody. So I went to see Father Mario. I said, ‘Father, I must talk to you. I want to talk to you under the seal of the confessional.’ He is dead now. I can tell you about it. And I told him about Treblinka. I said, ‘I know you won’t believe it but there is this terrible place in Poland and they are killing people there – they are killing the Jews there. And my Paul,’ I said, ‘my Paul is there. He is working there. What shall I do?’ I asked him. ‘Please tell me. Please help us. Please advise us.’

“You see, I thought – I suppose – the priests had ways; there were convents up in the mountains where one could disappear, hide – I had heard things.

“He gave me such a terrible shock. I remember, he brushed his face with his hand and then he said, ‘We are living through terrible times, my child. Before God and my conscience, if I had been in Paul’s place, I would have done the same. I absolve him from all guilt.’

“I walked away like a zombie, in a dream, in a nightmare. How could he? Then I told myself, he is old, perhaps he is senile; it was the only explanation. But afterwards … I don’t know … after all, he was a priest … I had carried this awful thing around with me for a year, I had thought and thought and cried and worried myself sick over what would happen to my Paul, if not on earth, then after his death … and then he, a priest, had taken it so … not calmly, but, well, matter-of-factly. I don’t know. I could no longer think at all. And that night, I told Paul that I had told Father Mario and what he had answered. All Paul said was, ‘You took a terrible risk telling him.’ He wasn’t angry, he didn’t rave at me like I thought he might. I think I was grateful for that. I had been so lonely and so frightened.… Well, his leave came to an end soon after that. And then, of course, as you know, it was all over within a few days after his return to Treblinka.…”

15

I
T IS
very difficult to assess now to what extent the prisoners at Treblinka (or later at Sobibor) really believed an uprising could succeed. What is mostly likely is that although it was carefully planned, the most intelligent amongst them – in fact the planners themselves – in the final analysis believed least in the possibility of success. It was, however, they who were most determined to see that at least
some
would escape, even if not they themselves; that a maximum of damage would be done to the installations, and that – and this was part of the plan they failed to bring off – the three worst murderers amongst the
SS
, Kurt Franz, Miete and Mentz (significantly enough
not
Stangl), would be “executed” by the insurgents. The details of the uprising vary greatly in the memories of different survivors, which may explain why there is hardly any reliable record of what must be one of the most heroic efforts of the war-time years in East or West: a revolt undertaken by people who had virtually no contact with any underground movement “outside”, no hope of help from the Poles or the Western Allies, virtually no arms except what they might hope to capture at the moment of the uprising, and who bore the responsibility for a large group of men and women only a very small minority of whom were considered capable of being “active insurgents”.

“The revolt was planned for the late afternoon of August 2,” said Richard Glazar, “so as to give people the maximum chance to escape in the dark. The Saturday before, we of the camouflage unit were ordered out to gather juniper branches; light and good for camouflage. There were twenty-five of us in this unit, all terrifically disciplined, and organized into three groups each with its own foreman; he held the money – the gold – with which we bribed the Ukrainians to bribe the Poles to allow us to pay them for food! And when food was obtained, only he, the foreman, could distribute it. One of our lot, a Pole, did all the talking to the Ukrainians. That day he told them that he wanted enough food for everybody to eat their fill. Oh yes, there was an
SS
with us – there always was. But he didn’t care – he was all right. The Ukrainians said, for forty dollars in gold they’d get us all the food we could eat. So we gave them forty dollars in gold. And they came back with a peasant who was leading a horse and cart, and it was full, absolutely chock-a-block full with food – ham and sausage, salami, bread – all kinds of bread; cream and vodka. The Poles tell you now there was no food; but of course there was, in the country. And there was nothing you couldn’t buy for gold. That peasant with his horse and cart; the field and the woods; and the multi-coloured food – it looked like a Breughel, you know; anyway, we ate ourselves stupid. The
SS
didn’t say anything much; he got some ham and vodka and ate too. Only at the end he called one of the three foremen over and said he had no objection to our eating, but not this amount, ever again. It didn’t mean anything, he just said it to show how good he was being to us. Of course by then the
SS
had changed; they saw the writing on the wall.

“Of course the Ukrainians hadn’t always been so accommodating either. Ordinarily, on these forages all they did was get drunk and even meaner than usual. I remember once – long before that day – one of them brought a whore into the forest and told Kuba – there were three Kubas at Treblinka; this one was a big chap – to … well, you know what. Kuba couldn’t make it and they laughed themselves sick. That’s the kind of joke they appreciated. Many of us young men ceased to have any sexual feelings whatever; Karel and I, during all the time we were in Treblinka, and for long afterwards, were men in name only.”

(By the same token, many women in camps ceased to menstruate. The rumour was that in
concentration camps
something was put in the food. But it is unlikely that this happened in places such as Treblinka; the number of girls kept alive didn’t warrant such precautions, and anyway this particular aspect of life only afforded the Ukrainians and the
SS
one more opportunity for sadistic humour. There were, of course, no sanitary napkins, or even newspapers, and the girls used large leaves – burdock leaves if they could find them – to protect themselves. But any blood showing on a dress meant death; it was unaesthetic, and the
SS
were very keen on aesthetics.)

“August 2,” said Stangl, “was a very hot day. A Monday. Mondays were always days of rest – because of course on Sundays nobody worked in Warsaw, so they didn’t load transports.
*
Kurt Franz had taken a swimming party of twenty down to the River Bug straight after lunch; four Germans and the rest Ukrainians. I had a visitor, a Viennese. He was an army political officer who was temporarily stationed in Kossov, six kilometres away. He had rung to say hello and ask whether he could drop by.”

(“On the day of the revolt,” says Suchomel, “drinking had been going on in Stangl’s quarters since mid-morning. Mätzig was in on it too. Stangl’s guest was his old friend Greuer, the lieutenant from a Vlassov unit in Kossov. Franz was not in Treblinka that day – that’s true enough – but neither was he swimming, though perhaps Stangl thought he was. In fact he was with his tart in Ostrow. By the time the revolt started in the afternoon, Stangl and his friend were both drunk as lords and didn’t know which end was up. I remember seeing him stand there, just stand and look at the burning buildings …”)

“
Was it usual for you and the other officers
,” I asked Stangl, “
to receive visitors in the camp?
”