Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (39 page)

“Not while I was there. I would never have permitted it. Of course, even I wouldn’t take a visitor into the camp; just my quarters, or the
SS
mess.”

“
Even so – it meant he saw what was going on, didn’t it?
”

“In the lower camp – which is what he could see through the barbed wire – as I told you, after eleven or so in the morning, nothing really went on except routine work in the work-shops. Of course up in the top camp they’d have their fires – they’d burn what was left over; there was always something going on there,” he shrugged his shoulder. “But anyway, by this time everybody knew what was going on.”

“
Did they? Even during your trial any number of people denied having known anything at all about these things.
”

“I know,” he said bitterly. “None of them knew anything, saw anything, guessed anything. But hundreds of soldiers and civilians used to come up to our gate, stand along the fences, gawk, and try to buy things off us because it was known that there was all this stuff around. For a while we even had planes circling around overhead and flying low so that they could watch what was going on. I rang through to
HQ
about that finally and they told us to shoot at them. So we did, and that stopped that. But we never could stop the others – not quite, ever. They saw dead Jews on the ground and being carried away from the station. They photographed them. The whole place stank to high heaven from kilometres away. For two weeks after coming through there – or ‘visiting’ there – many used to say they couldn’t eat. But no, they saw nothing and knew nothing. Of course.…

“Anyway, this officer from Kossov was sitting in my room with me that Monday after lunch. My windows looked out on to the street – that’s the street I had them build you know, 800 metres, all bordered with flowers. And to the right was the guards’ house we built, in Tyrolean style. I tell you, I had the best carpenters in the world – everybody envied me. It was all done in wood – stylistically perfect. Of course we built all these things to create work,” he said, without undue emphasis. “The more people we could legitimately employ at useful work, the more survived, at least for a while. Anyway, that’s where the shooting began, at 2 p.m., at this blockhouse. My batman, Sacha, he was Ukrainian, he came running. Looking out of my window I could see some Jews on the other side of the inner fence – they must have jumped down from the roof of the
SS
billets and they were shooting. I told the fellow from Kossov to stay put and took my pistol and ran out. By that time the guards had begun to shoot back but there were already fires all over the camp.…”

“At 2 p.m.,” said Richard Glazar, “an order came through from the committee that from that moment no Jew would be allowed to die; if there was any threat from anyone, the balloon would have to go up earlier than planned. At ten minutes to four Kuba said something to Küttner and shortly afterwards Küttner started to beat a young boy. That was what started it – at three minutes to four, probably about two hours early.…”

In a subsequent letter Richard confirmed these timings and – replying to my question what it was that had prematurely triggered off the revolt – said, “Probably none of us can know what Kuba said to Küttner. But”, he added, “this Kuba was the ‘barrack-elder’ of Barrack II and an informer like Blau, and that was quite enough to convince us [that something wrong was going on].”

Suchomel has another idea about what started the uprising prematurely. “There was a man called Salzberg,” he said. “He had two sons. Both the boys were cleaners in our barracks. Father Salzberg was storekeeper in the tailor-shop, therefore under me. He was very intelligent and worried about his boys. He told me his wife had died in Kielce before he came to Treblinka. Salzberg was on the so-called ‘committee’, and it was upon his urging that the revolt began an hour earlier than planned, and thus insufficiently prepared. The reason why Salzberg insisted on this may be because his older boy, two days before the revolt, had done something – I don’t know what – that annoyed Küttner. I had pleaded with Kurt Franz for the boy’s life and it seemed all right, but Salzberg was still afraid that Küttner would take him. That boy was fifteen–that’s what his father told me – the younger one was twelve and his name was Heinrich. He was a nice boy. The older one I didn’t know because he worked in the other barrack.”

Richard Glazar too had written to me about Salzberg, but spoke of him as only having one son, sixteen years old. “The only case,” he said, “where father and son were selected together from a transport. The young Salzberg”, he said, “worked as a cleaner in the
SS
barracks with Edek, the accordion player. I hear he is supposed to have survived and be living somewhere in Spain.”

“My main memory of the revolt”, Richard said, “is one of utter confusion; the first moments were of course madly exciting; grenades and bottles of petrol exploding, fires almost at once, shooting everywhere. Everything was just that much different from the way it had been planned, so that we were thrown into utter confusion.…”

“Of course, we were on the telephone,” Stangl said, “and in an emergency like that my first duty was to inform the chief of the external security police. By the time I’d done that, our petrol station blew up – that too had been built just like a real service station, with flower-beds round it. Next thing the whole ghetto camp was burning, and then Matthes, the German in charge of the
Totenlager
, arrived at a run and said everything was burning up there too. Later we found out that they’d begun earlier than planned – probably because Franz and twenty men were out of the camp and they thought it was the best moment to get at our munition dump. But actually the shooting lasted only about another ten minutes – perhaps half an hour altogether. By that time there was hardly anybody left.…”

(Kurt Franz, by all accounts the most viciously sadistic killer of the lot and now serving a life sentence in West Germany, had
his
say at Stangl’s trial about his own part in these events and made a most extraordinary and ludicrous claim. “On August 2,” he said, “I arranged that, as a result of the absence of two-thirds of the guards – who with the permission of the accused [Stangl] had gone swimming – the revolt could take place at all. I sensed what the work-Jews were planning and what was ahead of us, and it is for this reason that I left my submachine-gun in my quarters.…”)

“Within minutes,” Glazar said, “it was more or less each man for himself. There were groups who escaped together as planned, but of each group only a few made it. Of the twenty-five of us in the camouflage unit who had planned to stay together, six, possibly eight, got out. Only four of us are alive today.…”

*
A curious slip, because by that time there
were
no more Jewish transports from Warsaw; there were no more Jews.

16

“O
H YES
,” said Berek Rojzman during our visit to Treblinka, “I knew the revolt was being planned, but I wasn’t one of the planners. There were just a few [and he used the word for ‘gentlemen’] on the committee. I was assigned to get rid of the Ukrainian guard on one of the watch-towers near where I worked.”

He showed it to me; it was at the extreme eastern end of the camp (adjoining the fields, some of which were worked by Polish peasants, others by prisoners like himself, for the
SS
staff) and overlooking the
Totenlager.

“The man on duty on that watch-tower that day was called Mira,” he said. “He was sitting on the tower dressed only in his shorts, getting the sun. When he heard the first shots from the lower camp and realized there was trouble, he jumped down, in his shorts. I ran up to him and said, ‘Mira, run, the Russians are coming.’ I took his gun away from him and he didn’t make a move to stop me. ‘You run,’ I said, ‘but I must have the gun.’ He ran.”

Rojzman had made an arrangement with a cousin for the escape – all the prisoners had made individual arrangements like this; the cousin was to carry their funds. He had been given a large sum; he was not to participate in the fighting so as not to jeopardize these funds. They had arranged a meeting-place just inside the perimeter of the camp, and until they met there at a prearranged time just after the revolt had started, the cousin was to remain in hiding. In fact the cousin never appeared; Rojzman still thinks he went off with the money, although he admits he’s never heard of him being seen since. (This is highly unlikely as all the survivors are known to the Polish and West German judicial authorities – and of course, to each other. No doubt the cousin died in the revolt.)

Rojzman finally left with several other men, one of them a young prisoner called Leon who said he knew “a Pole” who lived in a cottage deep in a forest; he wanted to get to this man because he trusted him and he thought he would be willing to take a message to his wife in Warsaw who was a gentile and who would bring him clothes and perhaps false papers.

Before they reached the cottage, they were several days in the woods, hiding first from the security police and their dogs, then from Ukrainians and Poles who continued the chase even after the Germans had given up. The man, Staszek, when they got to him,
was
willing to help. “When we asked him to go and get Leon’s wife,” said Rojzman, “some of our group weren’t all that sure of him. Of course, we had a
lot
of money. Staszek had a little distillery going next to his cottage. I asked him how much his distillery was netting him and told him I’d double that sum if he would really go to Warsaw and bring Leon’s wife. Some of the others still thought he wouldn’t, but Leon trusted him and so did I. I’d given him half the money and said he would get the other half when he came back. I bet the others he’d be back by the next day, Saturday. And he was, and brought Leon’s wife who had the suit, hat and papers for Leon. They went and that left just six of us in the forest.”

They stayed in the forest for a year. “We built a very nice shelter underground, not far from Staszek’s cottage,” he said. “Staszek was cooking for us – in the evenings we’d often go and drink with him in the cottage. One night I got drunk and said something silly like ‘I could kill you all’. The youngest of our group got scared and ran away into the woods. He came back late that night and asked the others whether I was asleep before he dared come in.”

Berek Rojzman’s story about this year in the forest is full of such examples of tension within the group and of his dominance, and their fear of him. “We often argued about money,” he said. “We were buying food and clothes through Staszek. Two of the group didn’t have money; I didn’t mind, but the others said they weren’t going to feed them if they couldn’t contribute, and told them to get out.

“We used to go to the village to buy things. I had grown a long moustache and looked like a Polish farmer. One day we were stopped by a group of young boys; they wanted our guns, but we didn’t let them take them; we said we were partisans. There was a lot of curiosity about us.”

He said Staszek, too, had become “too curious”, always asking where their shelter was. “But we didn’t think he should know. After that we cooked for ourselves. We had serious arguments about who should do the cooking. In the end I assigned the duties; there would be those who would cook and those who would stand guard and I was going to decide who would do what, when.

“We got to know from people around that the Germans were sending Ukrainians who pretended to be partisans, into the woods to look for Jews. No, we didn’t actually
do
anything as partisans – our purpose was to survive. After about a year we learned from people in the village that the Russians were approaching. That day, while we were foraging around for food, Janiek [one of the group] had been left to guard the shelter, and when we got back we found he had taken it apart searching for money. He didn’t find it. I gave him a good beating.”

Shortly after this they left the shelter and made their way to the town of Otwock. Rojzman said no more about the man Staszek, thanks to whom they had survived. The implication was that he was paid for what he did. (He probably was, but considering the risk he had taken, one did wonder whether
that
degree of help could ever be paid for in money.)

“When we got to Otwock,” Rojzman said, “we’d been walking for a long time and my feet hurt. I asked Janiek to help me take my shoes off. But he said, ‘In the woods I
had
to do it. Now I don’t.’ So I said, ‘In the woods we
had
to live together – here we don’t. So get out.’

“We had 400 dollars left amongst the four of us and we divided them equally and parted. In Otwock I met again the wife of that Polish couple who had been our friends in Warsaw. The Germans had killed her husband and she was left with two children. She was trading a little and I was trading too, so we became good friends and later I married her.…”

Richard Glazar broke out of Treblinka in what he described as a frenzy of elation, carrying nothing except his old shaving kit, a soap-box with two small remnants of soap (he still has it, and the soap, all cracked and mouldy), money and a few pieces of jewellery: some gold rings and two small diamonds. “Two of the Czech gold-Jews gave Karel and me these things the evening before the uprising – in case we got out. Both of us still have the diamonds; we held on to them throughout our escape and until now.”

Joe Siedlecki told me that although he was not on the committee, he too knew about the revolt. “I had arranged to go with another man and a bag full of diamonds,” he said.

I asked him about a girl friend I had heard he had in the camp.

“Well, girl friend in a manner of speaking,” he said. “There were nine girls for fifteen hundred men [actually the work force consisted of a thousand men, but by the time of the revolt it had been reduced to about eight hundred]. The one you mean, I talked with her, but I didn’t sleep with her. No, she didn’t escape with me, she escaped with Samuel Rajzman. I saw her later in the forest, though. No, I don’t know what happened to her.”