The fenced-off area of the camp proper, including the station platform, storerooms for the executed people’s belongings and other auxiliary premises, is extremely smalclass="underline" 780 by 600 metres.
If for a moment one were to entertain the least doubt as to the fate of the millions transported here, if one were to suppose for a moment that the Germans did not murder them immediately after their arrival, then one would have to ask what has happened to them all. There were, after all, enough of them to populate a small State or a large European capital. The area of the camp is so small that, had the new arrivals stayed alive for even a few days, it would have been only a week and a half before there was no more space behind the barbed wire for this tide of people flowing in from Poland, from Belorussia, from the whole of Europe. For thirteen months — 396 days — the trains left either empty or loaded with gravel. Not a single person brought by train to Treblinka II ever made the return journey. The terrible question has to be asked: “Cain, where are they? Where are the people you brought here?”
Fascism did not succeed in concealing its greatest crime — but this is not simply because there were thousands of involuntary witnesses to it. It was during the summer of 1942 that Hitler took the decision to exterminate millions of innocent people; the Wehrmacht was enjoying its greatest successes and Hitler was confident that he could act with impunity. We can see now that it was during this year that the Germans carried out their greatest number of murders. Certain that they would escape punishment, the Fascists showed what they were capable of. And had Hitler won, he would have succeeded in covering up every trace of his crimes. He would have forced every witness to keep silent. Even had there been not just thousands but tens of thousands of witnesses, not one would have said a word. And once again one cannot but pay homage to the men who — at a time of universal silence, when a world now so full of the clamour of victory was saying not a word — battled on in Stalingrad, by the steep bank of the Volga, against a German army to the rear of which lay gurgling, smoking rivers of innocent blood. It is the Red Army that stopped Himmler from keeping the secret of Treblinka.
Today the witnesses have spoken; the stones and the earth have cried out aloud. And today, before the eyes of humanity, before the conscience of the whole world, we can walk step by step around each circle of the Hell of Treblinka, in comparison with which Dante’s Hell seems no more than an innocent game on the part of Satan.
Everything written below has been compiled from the accounts of living witnesses; from the testimony of people who worked in Treblinka from the first day of the camp’s existence until 2 August, 1943, when the condemned rose up, burnt down the camp and escaped into the forest; from the testimony of Wachmänner who have been taken prisoner and who have confirmed the witnesses’ accounts and often filled in the gaps. I have seen these people myself and have heard their stories, and their written testimonies lie on my desk before me. These many testimonies from a variety of sources are consistent in every detail — from the habits of Barry, the commandant’s dog, to the technology used for the conveyor-belt executioner’s block.
Let us walk through the circles of the Hell of Treblinka.
Who were the people brought here in trainloads? For the main part, Jews. Also some Poles and Gypsies. By the spring of 1942 almost the entire Jewish population of Poland, Germany and the western regions of Belorussia had been rounded up into ghettoes. Millions of Jewish people — workers, craftsmen, doctors, professors, architects, engineers, teachers, artists and members of other professions, together with their wives, daughters, sons, mothers and fathers — had been rounded up into the ghettoes of Warsaw, Radom, Czestochowa, Lublin, Białystok, Grodno and dozens of smaller towns. In the Warsaw ghetto alone there were around half a million Jews. Confinement to the ghetto was evidently the first, preparatory stage of Hitler’s plan for the extermination of the Jews.
The summer of 1942, the time of Fascism’s greatest military success, was chosen as the time to put into effect the second stage of this plan: physical extermination. We know that Himmler came to Warsaw at this time and issued the necessary orders.
Work on the construction of the vast executioner’s block proceeded day and night. By July the first transports were already on their way to Treblinka from Warsaw and Czestochowa. People were told that they were being taken to the Ukraine, to work on farms there; they were allowed to take food and twenty kilo-grams of luggage. In many cases the Germans forced their victims to buy train tickets for the station of “Ober-Majdan”, a code word for Treblinka. Rumours about Treblinka had quickly spread through the whole of Poland, and so the S.S. had to stop using the name when they were herding people on to the transports. Nevertheless, people were treated in such a way as to be left with little doubt about what lay in store for them. At least 150 people, but more often 180 to 200, were crowded into each freight wagon. Throughout the journey, which sometimes lasted two or three days, they were given nothing to drink. People’s thirst was so terrible that they would drink their own urine. The guards would offer a mouthful of water for a hundred zloty, but they usually just pocketed the money. People were packed so tightly together that sometimes they only had room to stand. In each wagon, especially during the stifling days of summer, a number of the old or those with weak hearts would die. Since the doors were kept shut throughout the journey, the corpses would begin to decompose, poisoning the air inside. And someone had only to light a match during the night for guards to start shooting through the walls. A barber by the name of Abram Kon states that in his wagon alone five people died as a result of such incidents, and a large number of people were wounded.
The conditions on the trains arriving from Western Europe were very different. The people in these trains had never heard of Treblinka, and they believed until the last minute that they were being taken somewhere to work. The Germans told them charming stories of the pleasures and comforts of the new life awaiting them once they had been resettled. Some trains brought people who were convinced that they were being taken to a neutral country; they had, after all, paid the German authorities large sums of money for the necessary visas.
Once a train arrived in Treblinka bringing citizens of Canada, America and Australia who had been stranded in Western Europe and Poland when the war broke out. After prolonged negotiations and the payment of huge bribes, they were allowed to travel to neutral countries. All the trains from Western Europe were without guards; they had the usual staff, along with sleeping and dining cars. The passengers brought large trunks and cases, as well as ample supplies of food. When trains stopped at stations, children would run out and ask how much further it was to Ober-Majdan.
There were a few transports of Gypsies from Bessarabia and elsewhere. There were also a number of transports of young Polish workers and peasants who had taken part in uprisings or joined partisan units.
It is hard to say which is the more terrible: to go to your death in agony, knowing that the end is near, or to be glancing unsus-pectingly out of the window of a comfortable coach just as someone from Treblinka village is phoning the camp with details of your recently arrived train and the number of people on it.
In order to maintain until the very end the deception of the Western European passengers, the railhead at the death camp was got up to look like an ordinary railway station. On the platform where a batch of twenty carriages was being unloaded stood what seemed like a station building with a ticket office, a left-luggage office and a restaurant. There were arrows everywhere, with signs reading “To Białystok”, “To Baranowicze”, “To Wojkowice”, etc. An orchestra played in the station building to greet the new arrivals, and the musicians were well dressed. A station guard in railway uniform collected tickets and let the passengers through on to a large square.