Sometimes the screams would suddenly fall silent, only to break out again equally suddenly, as all-penetrating as before, piercing bones, boring through skulls and souls… And this was repeated three or four times a day.
I questioned one of the executioners whom we had taken prisoner. He explained that the women began to scream when the dogs were set on them and the entire contingent of doomed people was being driven into the house of death: “They could see death.
Besides, it was very crowded in there, and the dogs were tearing at them, and they were being badly beaten by the Wachmänner.” The sudden silence was when the doors of the gas chamber were closed. And the screams began again when a new contingent was brought there. This was repeated three, four, sometimes five times each day. After all, the Treblinka executioner’s block was no ordinary executioner’s block. It was a conveyor-belt executioner’s block; it was run according to the same principles as any other large-scale modern industrial enterprise.
Like any other industrial enterprise, Treblinka grew gradually, developing and acquiring new production areas; it was not always as I have described it above. In the beginning there were three small gas chambers. While these were still under construction, a number of transports arrived, and the people they brought were murdered with “cold” weapons: axes, hammers and clubs.
The Germans did not want to use guns, since this would have revealed the true purpose of Treblinka to the surrounding population. The first three concrete chambers were relatively small, five metres by five metres and 190 centimetres high.
Each chamber had two doors: one through which the living were admitted, one through which the corpses of the gassed were dragged out. The second door was very wide, about 2.5 metres. The three chambers stood side by side on a single foundation.
These three chambers lacked capacity; they could not generate the conveyor-belt power required by Berlin.
The construction of a larger building was begun straightaway.
The officials in charge of Treblinka took pride and joy in the fact that, in terms of power, handling capacity and production floor space, this would far surpass the other S.S. death factories: Majdanek, Sobibór and Bełżec.
Seven hundred prisoners worked for five weeks on the construction of the new death facility. When the work was in full swing, an engineer arrived from Germany with a team of workers and began to install the equipment. The new gas chambers, ten in all, were symmetrically located on either side of a broad concrete corridor. Each chamber — like the three earlier chambers — had two doors: one from the corridor, for the admission of the living, the other in the opposite wall, so that the corpses of the gassed could be dragged out. These doors opened on to special platforms on either side of the building. Alongside these platforms were narrow-gauge tracks. The corpses were thrown out on to the platforms, loaded on to trolleys and then taken away to the mass graves that the vast excavators were digging day and night. The floor of each chamber sloped down from the central corridor towards the platform outside, and this greatly facilitated the work of unloading the chambers. In the earlier chambers the unloading methods had been primitive — the corpses had been carried out on stretchers or dragged out with the help of straps.
Each new gas chamber was seven metres by eight metres. The floor area of the ten new chambers totalled 560 square metres.
Including the three old chambers, which went on being used for smaller contingents, there was thus a total death-producing area of 635 square metres. From four hundred to six hundred people were loaded into each gas chamber; working at full capacity, the ten new chambers were therefore able to destroy four thousand to six thousand lives at once. The chambers of the Treblinka Hell were loaded at least two or three times a day (there were days when they were loaded six times). A conservative estimate indicates that a twice-daily operation of the new gas chambers alone would have meant the death of ten thousand people a day, three hundred thousand a month. Treblinka was functioning every day for thirteen months on end. But even if we allow ninety days for stoppages and repairs, and for delays on the railway, this still leaves us with ten months of uninterrupted operation. If the aver-age number of deaths a month was three hundred thousand, then the number of deaths in ten months would have been three million. Once again we have come to the same figure: three million — the figure we arrived at before through a deliberately low estimate of the number of people brought to Treblinka by train. We will return to this figure a third time.[2]
The death process in the gas chambers took from ten to twenty-five minutes. When the new chambers were first put into 2 Grossman is also mistaken with regard to the number of people killed during a single operation of the gas chambers. The true figure was probably between two thousand and three thousand operation and the executioners were still determining how best to administer the gas and which poisons to use, the victims sometimes remained alive for two to three hours, undergoing terrible agony. During the very first days there were serious problems with the delivery and exhaust systems, and the victims were in torment for anything up to nine or ten hours. Various means were employed to effect death. One was to force into the chambers the exhaust fumes from the engine, taken from a heavy tank, that was used to generate electricity for the camp. Such fumes contain 2 to 3 per cent of carbon monoxide, which combines with the haemoglobin in the blood to form a stable compound known as carboxyhaemoglobin. Carboxyhaemoglobin is far more stable than the compound of oxygen and haemoglobin that is formed in the alveoli during the respiratory process. Within fifteen minutes all the haemoglobin in the blood has combined with carbon monoxide, and breathing ceases to have any real effect. A person is gasping for air, but no oxygen reaches their organism and they begin to suffocate; the heart races frenziedly, driving blood into the lungs, but this blood, poisoned as it is with carbon monoxide, is unable to absorb any oxygen. Breathing becomes hoarse and laboured, and consciousness dims. People show all the agoniz-ing symptoms of suffocation, and they die just as if they were being strangled.
A second method, and the one most generally employed at Treblinka, was the use of special pumps to remove the air from the chambers. As with the first method, death resulted from oxygen deprivation. A third method, employed less often, was the use of steam. This too brought about death from oxygen deprivation, since the steam had the effect of expelling the air from the chambers. Various poisons were also employed, but only on an experimental basis; it was the first and second of these methods that were employed for murder on an industrial scale.
The conveyor belt of Treblinka functioned in such a way that beasts were able methodically to deprive human beings of everything to which they have been entitled, since the beginning of time, by the holy law of life.
First people were robbed of their freedom, their home and their motherland; they were transported to a nameless wilderness in the forest. Then, on the square by the station, they were robbed of their belongings, of their personal letters, and of photographs of their loved ones. After going through the fence, a man was robbed of his mother, his wife and his child. After he had been stripped naked, his papers were thrown on to a fire; he had been robbed of his name. He was driven into a corridor with a low stone ceiling; now he had been robbed of the sky, the stars, the wind and the sun.
Then came the last act of the human tragedy — a human being was now in the last circle of the Hell that was Treblinka.
2
Hershl Polyanker, a lesser-known Soviet journalist, gives the same mistaken estimate of three million deaths in an article written, like Grossman’s, in September 1944. His “Treblinka — Hell on Earth”, probably originally written in Yiddish, was translated into Spanish and sent by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee to newspapers in Cuba, Mexico and Uruguay [G.A.R.F., fond 8114 (Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee), opis’ 1, delo 346, pp. 162–72].