They were, however, allowed to wash their hands and faces with eau-de-cologne and perfume, given that there was a shortage of water at Treblinka and only Wachmänner and the S.S. were allowed to wash with it. And while the still-living people who had left all these things were preparing to enter the “bathhouse”, the work of the blue squad was nearing completion. Items of value were already being taken away to the storerooms, while the letters, the yellowed wedding announcements, the photographs of newborn babies, brothers and brides, all the thousands of little things that were so infinitely precious to their owners yet the merest trash to the masters of Treblinka were being gathered into heaps and taken away to vast pits already containing hundreds of thousands of similar letters, postcards, visiting cards, photographs and sheets of paper covered in children’s scribbles or children’s first clumsy drawings in crayon. The square was then hurriedly swept and made ready to receive a new contingent of the doomed.
Not always, however, did things go so smoothly. Sometimes, when the prisoners knew where they were being taken, there were rebellions. Skrzeminski, a local peasant, twice saw people smash their way out of trains, knock down the guards and run for the forest. On both occasions every last person was killed by machine-gun fire. The men had been carrying four children, aged four to six; they too were shot. Another peasant, Marianna Kobus, has described similar attempts at escape. Once, when she was working in the fields, she saw sixty people break out of a train and run towards the forest; all were shot before her eyes.
But the contingent of new arrivals has now reached a second square, inside the inner camp fence. On one side of this square stands a single huge barrack, and there are three more barracks to the right. Two of these are used for storing clothes, the third for storing footwear. Further on, in the western section of the camp, are barracks for the S.S., barracks for the Wachmänner, food stores and a small farmyard. There are cars, trucks and an armoured vehicle. All in all, this seems like an ordinary camp, like Treblinka I.
In the south-eastern corner of the compound is an area fenced off with tree branches; towards the front of this area is a booth bearing the sign “Lazarett”. The very old and the decrepit are separated from the crowd waiting for the “bathhouse” and taken on stretchers to this so-called infirmary. A man in a doctor’s white coat, with a Red Cross armband on his left arm, comes out to meet them. Precisely what happened in the Lazarett — how the Germans used their Walther automatic pistols to spare old people from the burden of all possible diseases — I shall describe later.
The main thing in the next stage of processing the new arrivals was to break their will. There was a never-ending sequence of abrupt commands — bellowed out in a manner in which the German army takes pride, a manner that is proof in itself of the Germans being a master race. Simultaneously hard and guttural, the letter “r” sounded like the crack of a whip.
“Achtung!”
After this, in the leaden silence, the crowd would hear words that the Scharführer repeated several times a day for month after month: “Men are to remain where they are. Women and children must go to the barracks on the left and undress.” This, according to the accounts of eyewitnesses, marked the start of heart-rending scenes. Love — maternal, conjugal or filial love — told people that they were seeing one another for the last time. Handshakes, kisses, blessings, tears, brief hurried words into which people put all their love, all their pain, all their tenderness, all their despair… The S.S. psychiatrists of death knew that all this must be cut short, that these feelings must be stifled at once. The psychiatrists of death knew the simple laws that operate in slaughterhouses all over the world, laws which, in Treblinka, were exploited by brute beasts in order to deal with human beings. This was a critical moment: the moment when daughters were separated from fathers, mothers from sons, grandmothers from grandsons, husbands from wives.
Once again, echoing over the square: “Achtung! Achtung!” Once again people’s minds must be confused with hope; once again the regulations of death must be passed off as the regulations of life. The same voice barks out word after word: “Women and children are to remove their footwear on entering the barrack. Stockings are to be put into shoes. The children’s little stockings into their sandals, boots and shoes. Be tidy!” And straight after this: “As you proceed to the bathhouse, take with you your valuables, documents, money, towel and soap. I repeat…”
Inside the women’s barrack was a hairdresser’s. The hair of the naked women was cut with clippers; old women had their wigs removed. This had a strange psychological effect: the hairdressers testify that this haircut of death did more than anything to convince the women that they really were going to the bathhouse. Young women would sometimes stroke their heads and say, “It’s uneven here. Please make it smoother.” Most of the women calmed down after their haircut; nearly all of them left the barrack carrying their piece of soap and a folded towel. Some young women wept over the loss of their beautiful plaits.
Why did the Germans shave women’s hair? To deceive them better? No, Germany needed this hair. It was a raw material. I have asked many people what the Germans did with the hair that they removed from the heads of the living departed. Every witness said that the vast heaps of hair — black, red-gold and fair, straight, curly and wavy — were first disinfected, then packed into sacks and sent off to Germany. All the witnesses confirmed that the sacks bore German addresses. How was the hair used? No-one could answer. There is just one written deposition, from a certain Kohn, to the effect that the hair was used by the navy to fill mattresses and for such things as making hawsers for submarines. Other witnesses claim that the hair was used to pad saddles for the cavalry.
This testimony, in my view, requires further confirmation. In due course, this will be given to humanity by Grossadmiral Raeder, who in 1942 was in charge of the German Navy.
The men undressed outside, in the yard. One hundred and fifty to three hundred strong men from the first contingent of the day would be chosen to bury the corpses; they themselves were usually killed the following day. The men had to undress quickly but in an orderly manner, leaving their shoes, socks, underwear, jackets and trousers in neat piles. These were then sorted out by a second work squad, known as “the reds” because of the red armbands they wore to distinguish them from the squad “on transport duty”. Items considered worth sending to Germany were taken to the store; first, though, any metal or cloth labels had to be carefully removed from them. All other items were burned or buried in pits.
Everyone was feeling more and more anxious. There was a terrible stench, intermingled with the smell of lime chloride.
There were fat and persistent flies — an extraordinary number of them. What were they doing here, among pine-trees, on dry well-trodden ground? Everyone was breathing heavily now, shaking and trembling, staring at every little trifle that might give them some understanding, at anything that might lift the curtain of mystery and let them glimpse the fate that awaited them. And what were those gigantic excavators doing, rumbling away in the southern part of the camp?
Next, though, came another procedure. The naked people had to queue at a “ticket window” to hand over their documents and valuables. And again they heard that terrible, hypnotizing voice: