By the time it had been fully destroyed, the prisoners could already hear the distant rumble of Soviet artillery. Early in the morning of 23 July, the S.S. men and the Wachmänner fortified themselves with a stiff schnapps and set to work to wipe out every last trace of the camp. By nightfall all the prisoners had been killed and buried. Max Levit, a Warsaw carpenter, managed to survive; he lay wounded beneath the corpses of his comrades until it grew dark, and then he crawled off into the forest. He told us how, as he lay in the pit, he heard thirty boys from the camp singing “Broad is my Motherland!” just before they were shot.
He heard one of the boys shout, “Stalin will avenge us!” He told us how the red-headed Leib — one of the most popular of the prisoners and the leader of this group of boys — fell down on top of him after the first volley, raised his head a little and called out, “Panie Wachman, you didn’t kill me. Shoot again, please! Shoot again!”
It is now possible to describe the regime of this labour camp in some detail; we have testimonies from dozens of Polish men and women who escaped or were released at one time or another. We know about work in the quarry; we know how those who failed to fulfil their work norm were thrown over the edge of a cliff into an abyss below. We know about the daily food ration: 170–200 grams of bread and half a litre of some slop that passed for soup.
We know about the deaths from starvation, about the hunger-swollen wretches who were taken outside the camp in wheel-barrows and shot. We know about the wild orgies; we know how the Germans raped young women and shot them immediately afterwards. We know how people were thrown from a window six metres high. We know that a group of drunken Germans would sometimes take ten or fifteen prisoners from a barrack at night and calmly demonstrate different killing methods on them, shooting them in the heart, the back of the neck, the eyes, the mouth and the temple. We know the names of the S.S. men in the camp; we know their characters and idiosyncracies. We know that the head of the camp was a Dutch German named van Euppen, an insatiable murderer and sexual pervert with a passion for good horses and fast riding. We know about a huge young man named Stumpfe who broke out into uncontrollable laughter every time he murdered a prisoner or when one was executed in his presence. He was known as “Laughing Death”. The last person to hear him laugh was Max Levit, on 23 July of this year, when thirty boys were shot on Stumpfe’s orders and Levit was lying at the bottom of the pit. We know about Svidersky, a one-eyed German from Odessa who was known as “Master Hammer” because of his supreme expertise in “cold murder”, i.e. killing without firearms. It took him only a few minutes — with no weapon but a hammer — to kill fifteen children, aged eight to thirteen, who had been declared unfit for work. We know about Preifi, a skinny S.S. man who looked like a Gypsy and whose nickname was “The Old One”. He was sullen and taciturn. He would relieve his melancholy by sitting on the camp rubbish dump and waiting for a prisoner to sneak up in search of potato peelings; he would then shoot the prisoner in the mouth, having forced him or her to hold their mouth open.
We know the names of the professional killers Schwarz and Ledeke. They used to amuse themselves by shooting at prisoners returning from work in the twilight. They killed twenty, thirty or forty every evening.
None of these beings was in any way human. Their distorted brains, hearts and souls, their words, acts and habits were like a caricature — a terrible caricature of the qualities, thoughts, feelings, habits and acts of normal Germans. The orderliness of the camp; the documentation of the murders; the love of monstrous practical jokes that recall the jokes of drunken German students; the sentimental songs that the guards sang in unison amid pools of blood; the speeches they were constantly delivering to their victims; the exhortations and pious sayings printed neatly on special pieces of paper — all these monstrous dragons and reptiles were the progeny of traditional German chauvinism. They had sprung from arrogance, conceit and egotism, from a pedantic obsession with one’s own little nest, from a steely indifference to the fate of everything living, from a ferocious, blind conviction that German science, German music, poetry, language, lawns, toilets, skies, beer and homes were the finest in the entire universe. These people’s vices and crimes were born of the vices of the German national character, and of the German State.
Such was life in this camp, which was like a lesser Majdanek, and one might have thought that nothing in the world could be more terrible. But those who lived in Treblinka I knew very well that there was indeed something more terrible — a hundred times more terrible — than this camp. In May 1942, three kilometres away from the labour camp, the Germans had begun the construction of a Jewish camp, a camp that was, in effect, one vast executioner’s block. Construction proceeded rapidly, with more than a thousand workers involved. Nothing in this camp was adapted for life; everything was adapted for death. Himmler intended the existence of this camp to remain a profound secret; not a single person was to leave it alive. And not a single person — not even a field marshal — was allowed near it. Anyone who happened to come within a kilometre of the camp was shot without warning. German planes were forbidden to fly over the area.
The victims brought by train along the spur from Treblinka village did not know what lay in wait for them until the very last moment. The guards who had accompanied the prisoners during the journey were not allowed into the camp; they were not allowed even to cross its outer perimeter. When the trains arrived, S.S. men took over from the previous guards. The trains, which were usually made up of sixty freight wagons, were divided into three sections while they were still in the forest, and the locomotive would push twenty wagons at a time up to the camp platform.
The locomotive always pushed from behind and stopped by the perimeter fence, and so neither the driver nor the fireman ever crossed the camp boundary. When the wagons had been unloaded, the S.S. Unteroffizier on duty would signal for the next twenty wagons, which would be waiting two hundred metres down the line. When all sixty wagons had been fully unloaded, the camp Kommandantur would phone the station to say they were ready for the next transport. The empty train then went on to the quarry, where the wagons were loaded with gravel before returning to Treblinka and then on to Małkinia.
Treblinka was well located; it was possible to bring transports from all four points of the compass: north, south, east and west.
Trains came from the Polish cities of Warsaw, Miedzyrzecz, Czestochowa, Siedlce and Radom; from Łomza, Białystok, Grodno and other Belorussian cities; from Germany, Czechoslovakia and Austria; and from Bulgaria and Bessarabia.
Every day for thirteen months the trains brought people to the camp. In each train there were sixty wagons, and a number chalked on the side of each wagon — 150, 180, 200 — indicated the number of people inside. Railway workers and peasants secretly kept count of these trains. Kazimierz Skarzunśki, a sixty-two-year-old peasant from the village of Wólka (the nearest inhabited point to the camp), told me that there were days when as many as six trains went by from Siedlce alone, and that there was barely a day during these thirteen months without at least one train. And the line from Siedlce was only one of the four lines that supplied the camp. Lucjan Zukowa, who was enlisted by the Germans to work on the spur from Treblinka village, said that throughout the time he worked on this line, from 15 June, 1942 until August 1943, one to three trains went to the camp each day. There were sixty wagons in each train, and at least 150 people in each wagon.
We have collected dozens of similar testimonies. Even if we were to halve the figures provided by these observers, we would still find that around two-and-a-half to three million people were brought to Treblinka during these thirteen months. We shall, however, return to this figure.