The door of the concrete chamber slammed shut. The door was secured by every possible kind of fastening: by locks, by hooks, by a massive bolt. It was not a door that could be broken down.
Can we find within us the strength to imagine what the people in these chambers felt, what they experienced during their last minutes of life? All we know is that they cannot speak now…
Covered by a last clammy mortal sweat, packed so tight that their bones cracked and their crushed ribcages were barely able to breathe, they stood pressed against one another; they stood as if they were a single human being. Someone, perhaps some wise old man, makes the effort to say, “Patience now — this is the end .” Someone shouts out some terrible curse. A holy curse — surely this curse must be fulfilled? With a superhuman effort a mother tries to make a little more space for her child: may her child’s dying breaths be eased, however infinitesimally, by a last act of maternal care. A young woman, her tongue going numb, asks, “Why am I being suffocated? Why can’t I love and have children?” Heads spin. Throats choke. What are the pictures now passing before people’s glassy dying eyes? Pictures of childhood? Of the happy days of peace? Of the last terrible journey? Of the mocking face of the S.S. man in that first square by the station: “Ah, so that’s why he was laughing…” Consciousness dims. It is the moment of the last agony… No, what happened in that chamber cannot be imagined. The dead bodies stand there, gradually turning cold. It was the children, according to witnesses, who kept on breathing for longest. After twenty to twenty-five minutes Schmidt’s assistants would glance through the peepholes. It was time to open the second doors, the doors to the platforms. Urged on by shouting S.S. men, prisoners in overalls set about unloading the chambers. Because of the sloping floor, many of the bodies simply tumbled out of their own accord. People who carried out this task have told me that the faces of the dead were very yellow and that around 70 per cent of them were bleeding slightly from the nose and mouth; physiologists, no doubt, can explain this.
S.S. men examined the bodies, talking to one another as they did so. If anyone turned out to be still alive, if anyone groaned or stirred, they were finished off with a pistol shot. Then a team of men armed with dental pliers would extract all the platinum and gold teeth from the mouths of the murdered people waiting to be loaded on to the trolleys. The teeth were then sorted according to value, packed into boxes and sent off to Germany. Had the S.S. found it in any way more convenient or advantageous to extract people’s teeth while they were still alive, they would, of course, have done this without hesitation, just as they removed women’s hair while they were still alive. But it was evidently easier and more convenient to extract people’s teeth when they were dead.
The corpses were then loaded on to the trolleys and pushed along the narrow-gauge tracks towards long grave pits. There they were laid out in rows, packed closely together. The huge pit was not filled in; it was still waiting. In the meantime, as soon as the work of unloading the chambers had begun, the Scharführer “on transport duty” would have received a short order by telephone. The Scharführer would then blow his whistle — a signal to the engine driver — and another twenty wagons would be brought up slowly to the platform of a make-believe railway station called Ober-Majdan. Another three or four thousand people carrying suitcases, bundles and bags of food would get out and walk to the station square. Mothers were holding little children in their arms; elder children clung to their parents as they looked intently around. There was something sinister and terrifying about this square that had been trodden by millions of feet. And why did the railway line end just beyond the station? Why was there only yellow grass and three-metre-high barbed wire?
The processing of the new contingent was carefully timed; they set out along “The Road of No Return” just as the last corpses from the gas chambers were being taken towards the grave pits.
The pit had not been filled in; it was still waiting.
A little later, the Scharführer would blow his whistle again — and another twenty wagons would slowly be brought up to the station platform . More thousands of people carrying suitcases, bundles and bags of food would get out and walk to the station square and look around. There was something sinister and terrifying about this square that had been trodden by millions of feet.
And the camp commandant, sitting in his office amid heaps of papers and charts, would telephone the station in Treblinka village — and another sixty-car train escorted by S.S. men with sub-machine guns and automatic rifles would pull heavily out of a siding and crawl along a single track between rows of pines.
The vast excavators worked day and night, digging vast new pits, pits that were many hundreds of metres long and many dark metres deep. And the pits were waiting. Waiting — though not for long.
2
As the winter of 1942–3 was drawing to an end, Himmler came to Treblinka, together with a group of important Gestapo officials.
Himmler’s party flew to a landing strip in the area and was then taken in two cars to the camp, which they entered by the main gate.
Most of the visitors were in army uniform; some — perhaps the various scientific experts — seemed like civilians, in fur coats and hats. Himmler inspected the camp in person, and one of the people who saw him has told us that the minister of death walked up to a huge grave pit and, for a long time, stared silently into it.
His retinue waited at a respectful distance as Heinrich Himmler contemplated the colossal grave, already half full of corpses.
Treblinka was the most important of all the factories in Himmler’s empire. Later that same day the S.S. Reichsführer flew back. Before leaving Treblinka, he issued an order that dumbfounded the three members of the camp command: Hauptsturmführer Baron von Pfein, his deputy Karol and Captain Franz Stangl. They were to start work immediately on digging up the corpses and burning every last one of them; the ashes and cinders were to be removed from the camps and scattered over fields and roads. Since there were already millions of corpses in the ground, this would be an extraordinarily complex and difficult task. In addition, the newly gassed were to be burnt at once, instead of being buried.
What was the reason for Himmler’s visit and his personal categorical order? The answer is very simple: the Red Army had just defeated the Germans at Stalingrad. This must have been a terrifying blow for the Germans. Within a matter of days men in Berlin were, for the first time, showing concern about being held to account, about possible retribution, about the revenge to which they might be subjected; within a matter of days Himmler himself had flown to Treblinka and issued urgent orders calculated to hide the traces of crimes committed within sixty kilometres of Warsaw. Himmler’s orders were an echo, a direct repercussion of the mighty blow that the Red Army had just struck against the Germans, far away on the Volga.
At first there was real difficulty with the process of cremation; the corpses would not burn. There was, admittedly, an attempt to use the women’s bodies, which burned better, to help burn the men’s bodies. And the Germans tried dousing the bodies with petrol and fuel oil, but this was expensive and turned out to make only a slight difference. There seemed to be no way around this problem, but then a thickset man of about fifty arrived from Germany, a member of the S.S. and a master of his trade. Hitler’s regime, after all, had the capacity to produce experts of all kinds: experts in the use of a hammer to murder small children, expert stranglers, expert designers of gas chambers, experts in the scientifically planned destruction of large cities in the course of a single day. The regime was also able to find an expert in the exhumation and cremation of millions of human corpses.