10
Until 15 December [1942] the transports arrived regularly, approx-imately ten thousand people a day. If a transport arrived after 6.00
in the evening, its passengers were not gassed that day. The transport was kept at Treblinka station and only on the next day was it brought into the camp.
As it happened, on 10 December a transport of Jews from Ostrowice was waiting at the station. The camp administration was advised that the next morning a new transport would be brought to Treblinka. The Kommandant gave the order that the Jews of Ostrowice should be brought in at night. The order was carried out. By then we were locked in our barracks and could see nothing. We only heard the usual screams. But when we went out to work the next morning, we saw traces of the events of the previous night. The ramp men opened the rear doors and began to pull out the corpses. The carriers carried them to the pits. But this time the carriers and cleaning crew of the so-called Schlauch commando had an additional task.
The whole corridor of the structure with the three smaller gas chambers was filled with dead bodies. The floor was covered with ankle-deep dried blood. We learned from the Ukrainians what had happened there. A group of about ten men who were being driven into the chambers had refused to go. They resisted and, naked as they were, defended themselves with their fists and did not allow themselves to be shoved into the chambers. Whereupon the S.S. men opened fire with automatic weapons, killing them on the spot.
The ramp men carried out the corpses, the cleaning crew washed down the corridor, the painters as always whitewashed the walls that had been covered with the blood and brains of the dead, and the building once again stood ready to receive new victims.
Afterwards the section chief, Mathias, came over to us, the dentists, and called out to our group leader, Dr Zimmermann: — Did you know, Doctor, that those chaps tried to cheat us?
Mathias was truly astonished. He could not grasp why the Jews did not willingly let themselves be murdered. He found this an abnormal development.
That day was extraordinarily difficult. Soon after the first transport a second one arrived, and, as it happened, in that transport there were many gold and false teeth to extract.
After a certain number of corpses had been dealt with, the teeth were collected in two bowls, and two dentists would take them to the well and wash them before bringing them into our shed to be worked on. In our shed there was always a supply of teeth stored in chests, and if we had not cleaned them of blood and of the bits of flesh that stuck to them, they would begin to stink.
When there was a short pause in the work, when the cleaning crew had finished in one of the gas chambers but the second one was not yet done gassing and the victims inside still showed signs of life or one could still hear their screams, the beasts forced us to dance and sing songs to the accompaniment of the Jewish orchestra that stood next to our barracks and played without interruption.
In December the transports grew less frequent. Some of the Germans were on leave. Mathias had left even earlier and did not return till after New Year 1943. When he came back he looked much worse than he had before. It seems he felt better in Treblinka than he did at home. The air of Treblinka suited him. During the two days of Christmas there were no transports at all.
The transports began to arrive regularly once more around 10 January. That was a very difficult day. On that day fresh transports arrived. At the same time a “guest” came to us from Camp 1, Obersturmführer Franz, nicknamed “Lyalke” (Doll). Together with him came his dog, Barry, who was just as notorious as his master.
Once work had resumed, the Germans began to apply new methods.
Around 10 January, transports began arriving from the border-lands of eastern Poland, from Białystok, Grodno and the surrounding areas. It was a hard winter with freezing temperatures. Now the sadists thought up a new form of entertainment. At a temperature of -20 Celsius they would keep rows of naked young women outdoors, not allowing them to enter the gas chambers. The men and the older women having already been asphyxiated, the rows of young women, half frozen, stood barefoot in the snow and ice, trembling, weeping, clinging to one another and begging in vain to finally be allowed into the “warmth” where death awaited them.
The Ukrainians and Germans looked on with pleasure and mockery at the pain of the young bodies, joking and laughing, until at last they mercifully allowed them to enter the “baths”. Such scenes were repeated in the following days and continued throughout the winter.
It is worth mentioning that in winter the extraction of teeth became much more difficult. Whether it was because the corpses froze when the doors were opened, or the result of the freezing of the victims on the way to the gas chambers, the opening of their clenched mouths was fiendishly difficult for us. The more we struggled, the more the murderers knocked us over and beat us.
In general, even in summer, the victims tried to arrive at the gas chambers as quickly as they could during the final passage along the Schlauch. The gas chambers offered protection from the beatings, and people wanted to get everything over with as quickly as possible.
In February 1943 great piles of ash began to accumulate as a result of the decision to begin burning the corpses. A special ash commando was organized. In the morning, when everyone went out to work, the carriers, working in stages, would put the ashes from the furnace grills into crates that were attached to the litters. (These crates were also used when corpses taken from the pits to be incinerated were in such a state of decomposition that they could not be placed on the ladder-shaped litters but had to be thrown piece by piece into the crates.) The carriers dumped the ashes in piles, and it was at these piles that the specially organized ash commando now worked. The work of the ash commando was as follows:
The body parts of the corpses that had been incinerated in the ovens often kept their shape. It was not uncommon to take out whole charred heads, feet, bones etc. The workers of the ash commando then had to break up these body parts with special wooden mallets which recalled the iron mallets used to pound gravel on motorways. Other instruments resembled the tools used when working with sand and stone. Near the heaps of ash stood thick, dense wire meshes, through which the ashes were sifted, just as sand is sifted from gravel. Whatever did not pass through was beaten once more. The beating took place on sheet metal which lay nearby. The carriers were not allowed to bring bones from the grills that had not been completely incinerated. They remained lying next to the furnaces and were thrown on top of the next layer of corpses that were brought in. The definitive “finished” ash had to be free of the least bit of bone and as fine as cigarette ash.
When great piles of this kind of finished ash had accumulated, the Germans began to carry out various experiments with a view to getting rid of it and erasing every trace of the murders that had taken place. They tried in the first instance to convert the ash into “earth” with the help of special liquids. Experts arrived and, standing over the ash heaps, mixed the ashes with sand in various proportions. Then they poured in some sorts of liquids out of bottles. But the results did not satisfy them. After the experiments they decided to bury the ash deep in the ground under thick layers of sand.