And so, under this man’s direction, furnaces were constructed.
Furnaces of a special kind, since neither the furnaces at Majdanek nor those of any of the largest crematoria in the world would have been able to burn so vast a number of corpses in so short a time.
The excavator dug a pit 250–300 metres long, 20–25 metres wide and 6 metres deep. Three rows of evenly spaced reinforced-concrete pillars, 100–120 centimetres in height, served as a support for giant steel beams that ran the entire length of the pit.
Rails about five to seven centimetres apart were then laid across these beams. All this constituted a gigantic grill. A new narrow-gauge track was laid from the burial pits to the grill pit. Two more grill pits of the same dimensions were constructed soon afterwards; each took 3,500 to 4,000 corpses at once.
Another giant excavator arrived, soon followed by a third. The work continued day and night. People who took part in the work of burning the corpses say that these grill pits were like giant volcanoes. The heat seared the workers’ faces. Flames erupted eight or ten metres into the air. Pillars of thick black greasy smoke reached up into the sky and stood there, heavy and motionless. At night, people from villages thirty or forty kilometres away could see these flames curling above the pine forest that surrounded the camp.
The smell of burnt human flesh filled the whole area. If there was a wind, and if it blew in the direction of the labour camp three kilometres away, the people there almost suffocated from the stench. More than eight hundred prisoners — more than the number of workers employed in the furnaces of even the hugest of iron and steel plants — were engaged in the work of burning the bodies. This monstrous workshop operated day and night for eight months, without interruption, yet it still could not cope with the millions of human bodies. Trains were, of course, delivering new contingents to the gas chambers all the time, which added to the work of the grill pits.
Transports sometimes arrived from Bulgaria. These were a particular joy to the S.S. and the Wachmänner, since the Bulgarian Jews, who had been hoodwinked both by the Germans and by the Fascist Bulgarian government of the time, had no idea of the fate that awaited them and brought with them large quantities of valuables and plenty of tasty food, including white bread. Then there were transports from Grodno and Białystok, and — after the uprising — from the Warsaw Ghetto. There was a transport of rebels from other parts of Poland — peasants, workers and soldiers. There was a contingent of Bessarabian Gypsies: around two hundred men, with eight hundred women and children. They had come on foot, a string of horses and carts trailing behind them. They too had been hoodwinked; they were escorted by only two guards — and even these guards had no idea that they were leading these people to their death. I have been told that the Gypsy women clapped their hands in delight when they saw the handsome exterior of the gas chamber, and that they had no inkling until the very last minute of what lay in store for them.
This greatly amused the Germans.
The S.S. singled out for particular torment those who had participated in the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto. The women and children were taken not to the gas chambers but to where the corpses were being burned. Mothers crazed with horror were forced to lead their children on to the red-hot grid where thousands of dead bodies were writhing in the flames and smoke, where corpses tossed and turned as if they had come back to life again, where the bellies of women who had been pregnant burst from the heat and babies killed before birth were burning in open wombs. Such a spectacle was enough to rob the most hardened man of his reason, but its effect — as the Germans well knew — was a hundred times greater on a mother struggling to keep her children from seeing it. The children clung to their mothers and shrieked, “Mama, what are they going to do to us? Are they going to burn us?” Not even Dante, in his Hell, saw scenes like this.
After amusing themselves for a while with this spectacle, the Germans burned the children.
It is infinitely painful to read this. The reader must believe me when I say that it is equally hard to write it. “Why write about it then?” someone may well ask. “Why recall such things?”
It is the writer’s duty to tell the terrible truth, and it is a reader’s civic duty to learn this truth. To turn away, to close one’s eyes and walk past is to insult the memory of those who have perished. Only those who have learned the whole truth can ever understand against what kind of monster our great and holy Red Army has entered into mortal combat.
The S.S. had begun to feel bored in Treblinka. The procession of the doomed to the gas chambers had ceased to excite them. It had become routine. When the cremation of the corpses began, the S.S. men spent hours by the grill pits; this new sight amused them. The expert who had just come from Germany used to stroll around between the grill pits from morning till night, always animated and talkative. People say they never saw him frown or even look serious; he was always smiling. When the corpses were thrown down on to the bars of the grill, he would repeat: “Innocent, innocent”. This was his favourite word.
Sometimes the S.S. organized a kind of picnic by the grill pits; they would sit upwind from them, drink wine, eat and watch the flames. The “infirmary” was also re-equipped. During the first months the sick and the aged had been taken to a space screened off by branches — and murdered there by a so-called doctor. Their bodies had then been carried on stretchers to the mass graves.
Now a round pit was dug. Around this pit, as if the infirmary were a stadium, was a circle of low benches, all so close to the edge that anyone sitting on them was almost dangling over the pit. On the bottom of the pit was a grill, and on it corpses were burning. After being carried into the “infirmary”, sick and decrepit old people were taken by “nurses” to these benches and made to sit facing the bonfire of human bodies. After enjoying this sight for a while, the Nazi barbarians shot the old people in the back, or in the backs of their grey heads. Dead or wounded, the old people fell into the bonfire.
German humour has never been highly valued; we have all heard people speak of it as heavy-handed. But who on earth could have imagined the humour, the jokes, the entertainments of the S.S. at Treblinka? They organized football matches between teams of the doomed, they made the doomed play tag, they organized a choir of the doomed. A small zoo was set up near the Germans’ sleeping quarters. Innocent beasts from the forest — wolves and foxes — were kept in cages, while the vilest and cruellest predators ever seen on earth walked about in freedom, sat down for a rest on little benches made of birch wood and listened to music. Someone even wrote a special anthem for the doomed, which included the words:
A few minutes before their death, wounded, bleeding people were forced to learn idiotic and sentimental German songs and sing them in unison:
The chief commandant selected a few children from one contingent. He killed their parents, dressed the children up in fine clothes, gave them lots of sweets and played with them. A few days later, when he had had enough of this amusement, he gave orders for them to be killed.