I spend about two weeks that way. Every evening I come to the house of these good people and they hand me food through the window. But then the owner of the barn arrives and unloads some grain there. I suspect that he has seen me and therefore decide to leave my hiding place for Warsaw come what may.
That evening I go to my friends and tell them of my decision.
They try to dissuade me out of fear that I may fall into the hands of the police patrolling the roads. But I cannot be talked out of it and bid them goodbye. The peasant tells me that the nearest railway station is Kostki, about 7 kilometres away.
The trip is a difficult one, as the trains are full of police. Nevertheless I am able to get to Warsaw without incident, and thence to Piastów, where my friend Jarosz, a Pole, resides. At first he does not recognize me and tries to give me 5 zlotys. Then, when he realizes who I am, he is happy to see me and helps me with necessities. He also provides Aryan papers for me.
After spending several days with him, I break down physically and spiritually. I lose my appetite and am convinced that I have no right to be alive after all I have seen and experienced. My friends care for me and try to convince me that there are few witnesses left like me and that I need to live in order to tell it all.
Yes, I lived for a year in Treblinka under the most difficult conditions. After the revolt I wandered for two months, lived for a year as a Pole with false papers, then after the Warsaw Uprising I hid in a bunker for three and a half months until I was liberated on 17 January, 1945.
Yes, I remained alive and find myself among free people. But why, I often ask myself. Is it so that I might tell the world about the millions of innocent murdered victims, to be a witness to the innocent blood that was spilled by the hands of the murderers?
Yes, I remained alive to bear witness against the slaughterhouse of Treblinka!
THE HELL OF TREBLINKA
by Vasily Grossman
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To the east of Warsaw, along the Western Bug, lie sands and swamps, and thick evergreen and deciduous forests. These places are gloomy and deserted; there are few villages. Travellers try to avoid the narrow roads, where walking is difficult and cartwheels sink up to the axle in the deep sand.
Here, on the branch line to Siedlce, stands the remote station of Treblinka. It is a little over sixty kilometres from Warsaw and not far from the junction station of Malkinia, where the lines from Warsaw, Białystok, Siedlce and Łomza all meet.
Many of those who were brought to Treblinka in 1942 may have had reason to pass this way in peaceful times. Gazing abstractedly at the dull landscape — pines, sand, sand and more pines, heather and dry shrubs, dismal station buildings and the intersections of tracks — bored passengers may have let their gaze settle for a moment on a single-track line running from the station into the middle of the dense pine forest around it. This spur led to a quarry where gravel was extracted for industrial and municipal construction projects.
This quarry is about four kilometres from the station, in a stretch of wilderness surrounded on all sides by pine forest. The soil here is poor and barren, and the peasants do not cultivate it.
And so the wilderness has remained wilderness. The ground is partly covered by moss, with thin pines here and there. Now and then a jackdaw flies by, or a bright-coloured crested hoopoe. This miserable wilderness was the place chosen by some official, and approved by S.S. Reichsführer Himmler, for the construction of a vast executioner’s block — an executioner’s block such as the human race has never seen, from the time of primitive barbarism to our own cruel days. An executioner’s block, probably, such as the entire universe has never seen. This was the site of the S.S.’s main killing ground, which surpassed those of Sobibór, Majdanek, Bełżec and Auschwitz.[1]
There were two camps at Treblinka: Treblinka I, a penal camp for prisoners of various nationalities, chiefly Poles; and Treblinka II, the Jewish camp.
Treblinka I, a labour or penal camp, was located next to the quarry, not far from the edge of the forest. It was an ordinary camp, one of the hundreds and thousands of such camps that the Gestapo established in the occupied territories of Eastern Europe. It appeared in 1941. Many different traits of the German character, distorted by the terrible mirror of Hitler’s regime, find expression in this camp. Thus the delirious ravings occasioned by fever are an ugly, distorted reflection of what the patient thought and felt before he was ill. Thus the acts and thoughts of a madman are a distorted reflection of the acts and thoughts of a normal person. Thus a criminal commits an act of violence; his hammer blow to the bridge of his victim’s nose requires not only a sub-human cold-bloodedness but also the keen eye and firm grip of an experienced foundry worker.
Thrift, precision, calculation and pedantic cleanliness are qualities common to many Germans, and they are not bad qualities in themselves. They yield valuable results when applied to agriculture or industry. Hitler’s regime, however, harnessed these qualities for a crime against humanity. In this Polish labour camp the S.S. acted as if they were doing something no more out of the ordinary than growing cauliflowers or potatoes.
The camp was laid out in neat uniform rectangles; the barracks were built in straight rows; birch trees lined the sand-covered paths. Asters and dahlias grew in the fertilized soil.
There were concrete ponds for the ducks and geese; there were small pools, with convenient steps, where the staff could do their laundry. There were services for the German personneclass="underline" an excellent bakery, a barber’s, a garage, a petrol pump with a glass ball on top, stores. The Majdanek camp outside Lublin was organized along the same principles — as were dozens of other labour camps in eastern Poland where the S.S. and the Gestapo intended to settle in for a long time; there were the same little gardens, the same drinking fountains, the same concrete roads.
Efficiency, precise calculation, a pedantic concern for order, a love of detailed charts and schedules — all these German qualities were reflected in the layout and organization of these camps.
People were sent to the labour camp for various periods of time, sometimes as little as four to six months. There were Poles who had infringed the laws of the General Government — usually this was a matter of minor infringements, since the penalty for major infringements was immediate death. A slip of the tongue, a word overheard on the street, a failure to make some delivery, someone else’s random denunciation, a refusal to hand over a cart or a horse to a German, a young girl being so bold as to refuse the advances of a member of the S.S., the merest unproven hint of suspicion of being involved in some act of sabotage at a factory, these were the offences that brought thousands of Polish workers, peasants and intellectuals — the old and the young, mothers, men and young girls — to this penal camp. Altogether, about fifty thousand people passed through its gates. Jews ended up in this camp only if they were unusually skilled craftsmen: bakers, cobblers, cabinet-makers, stonemasons, tailors. There were all kinds of workshops in the camp, including a substantial furniture workshop that supplied the headquarters of German armies with tables, upright chairs and armchairs.
Treblinka I existed from the autumn of 1941 until 23 July, 1944.
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