A Writer at War (44 page)

Even though Grossman was on the spot, his rival Konstantin Simonov, who had replaced him at Stalingrad, was brought in to write about Nazi crimes there for
Krasnaya Zvezda
. Simonov, a favourite of the regime, avoided any emphasis on the Jewish identity of victims in his article. The Main Political Department of the Red Army also brought in Western journalists from Moscow, and the Kremlin set up a Special Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Committed by Germans at the Extermination Camp of Majdanek. Since many non-Jewish Poles and Russian prisoners had also suffered at Majdanek, the Soviet authorities felt able to use the camp for their own propaganda.

The site of Treblinka, further north, was reached by other troops from the 1st Belorussian Front almost at the same time as Majdanek. This was the first
Aktion-Reinhard
extermination camp to be reached, but the SS, on Himmler’s direct order, had attempted to destroy all traces of its existence.
¹
The Red Army managed to locate about forty survivors from the camp – some were hiding in the surrounding pine forests. Grossman, who was allowed to go there, lost no time in interviewing these survivors and also local Polish peasants. His account, a careful reconstruction from these interviews of the experience undergone by the 800,000 victims, is generally regarded as his most powerful piece of writing. Grossman instinctively seems to have sensed the main theme of his piece. How did a camp staff of roughly twenty-five SS men and around a hundred Ukrainian auxiliary
Wachmänner
manage to kill so many people? He soon discovered that they achieved their goals by deceit, followed by psychological disorientation and then sheer terror. The article was published in November in
Znamya
under the title ‘The Hell Called Treblinka’. It was quoted later at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal.

Thrift, thoroughness and pedantic cleanliness – all these are good qualities typical of many Germans. They prove effective when applied in agriculture and industry. But Hitler has put these qualities of the German character to work committing crimes against humanity. In the labour camps in Poland, the SS acted as if it was all about growing cauliflowers or potatoes.

Majdanek as Grossman would have seen it in July 1944.

The camp was divided into rectangles. Barracks were built in absolutely straight lines. Birch trees were planted along the sand-covered paths. Asters and dahlias grew in the fertilised soil. Concrete pools were made for the water fowl, there were pools for washing with comfortable steps, outbuildings for the German personnel, a model bakery, a barber’s shop, garage, petrol station, warehouses. The camp of Lublin-Majdanek and dozens of other labour camps where the Gestapo had planned a long and serious operation were organised according to the same formula, with little gardens, drinking fountains and concrete roads.

Camp No. 1 existed from the spring of 1941 until 23 July 1944. Surviving prisoners were annihilated when they could already hear an indistinct faraway rumble from Soviet artillery. In the early morning on the 23 July, guards and SS soldiers drank some schnapps for courage and began the liquidation of the camp. By the evening, all prisoners at the camp were killed and buried.

A carpenter from Warsaw, Max Levit, survived. He was wounded and lay under the corpses of his comrades until it was dark, and then he crawled into the forest. He told us how, when he was already lying in the trench, he heard the team of thirty boys from the camp sing the song ‘My Motherland is Vast’ just before the execution. He heard how one of the boys shouted: ‘Stalin will avenge us!’ He heard how the leader of the boys, the camp favourite, red-haired Leib, who fell down into the trench after the salvo, lifted himself a little and asked: ‘Papa guard, you’ve missed. Please could you do it once again, one more time?’

Round-up of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto.

Now we know the whole story about German
Ordnung
at this labour camp . . . We know about the work at the sand quarry, about those who did not fulfil the norm and were thrown into the pit from the cliff. We know about the food ration: 170 grams of bread and half a litre of slops which they called soup. We know about death from starvation, about the swollen people who were taken outside the barbed wire on wheelbarrows and shot. We know about incredible orgies of the Germans, about how they raped girls and shot their forced lovers immediately afterwards, how a drunken German cut off a woman’s breast with a knife, how they threw people down from a top-floor window six metres from the ground, how a drunken company would take ten to fifteen prisoners from the barracks during the night and practise different methods of killing, without haste, shooting the
doomed men in the heart, back of the head, eye, mouth, temple . . . We know about the chief of the camp, the Dutch German Zan Eilen,
²
a murderer, lover of good horses, a fast rider and lecher. We know about Stumpfe, who was seized by fits of involuntary laughter every time he killed one of the prisoners, or when an execution was carried out in his presence. He had the nickname ‘Laughing Death’ . . . We know about the one-eyed German from Odessa, Svidersky, whose nickname was ‘Master Hammer’. He was considered the unsurpassed specialist in ‘cold’ death, and it was he who had killed, in the course of several minutes, fifteen children aged from eight to thirteen, who had been declared unfit for work. We know about the thin SS man Preie who looked like a Gypsy, whose nickname was ‘Old Man’. He was gloomy and reticent. He worked off his boredom by sitting by the camp’s rubbish pit and waiting for prisoners who came secretly to eat potato peelings. He made them open their mouths and shot into their open mouths. We know the name of professional murderers Schwarz and Ledeke. It was they who amused themselves by shooting at prisoners walking back from work at dusk. They killed twenty, thirty or forty people every day. All these people had nothing human in them. Their distorted brains, hearts and souls, words and deeds, their habits were like a frightening caricature barely reminiscent of the features, thoughts, feelings, habits and deeds of normal Germans.

The order in the camp, and the documentation of murders, and love of monstrous jokes that somehow reminded one of those of drunken German soldiers, and the singing in chorus of sentimental songs among the puddles of blood, and the speeches with which they constantly addressed the doomed men, and their preaching, and religious sayings printed neatly on special pieces of paper – all these were the monstrous dragons and reptiles that developed from the embryo of traditional German chauvinism, arrogance, egoism, self-assurance, pedantic care for one’s own little nest, and the iron-cold indifference to the destiny of all that is living on the Earth, from the ferocious belief that German music, poetry, language, lawns, toilets, sky, buildings are the greatest in the Universe . . .

But those living in Camp No. 1 knew well that there was something a hundred times more terrible than their camp. In May 1942,
Germans began to construct another camp, an executioner’s block.

The construction proceeded rapidly. More than a thousand workers were involved. According to Himmler’s plan, the building of this camp had to be kept top secret, and not a single soul should be given a chance to leave it alive . . . Guards opened fire without warning if someone passed the camp by accident a kilometre away . . . The victims who were brought in trains on a special railway line did not know what their fate would be until the last moment. Even guards who accompanied the trains were forbidden to enter the area within the second fence of the camp . . .

When the carriages were fully unloaded, the
Kommandantur
of the camp would telephone for a new train, and the empty train would go further along the railway to the quarry, where the carriages were loaded with sand [for the return journey]. The advantage of Treblinka’s location became clear: trains full of victims came from all directions, from the west, east, north, and south.

The trains had come over a period of thirteen months. There were sixty carriages in each train, and there was a number written on each carriage: 150, 180 or 200. This was the number of people in the carriage. People working on the railroad and peasants kept a secret count of these trains. Peasants from the village of Wulka (the closest one to the camp) . . . said to me that there were days when six trains passed on the Sedletz line alone, and there was almost not a single day when at least one train did not pass. And the Sedletz line was only one of those which supplied Treblinka.

The camp itself, with its perimeter, warehouses for the executed people’s belongings, the platform and other auxiliary premises, covers a very small area, just eighty metres by six hundred. And if one would have the slightest doubt about the fate of the millions
³
of people who had been brought here, one could have reflected that if these people had not been killed by Germans straight upon arrival, then where would they have lived? These people could have been an entire population of a small country or a small European capital city. The area of
the camp is so small that if the people who were brought here would have continued to live even a few days after their arrival, there would not be enough room behind the barbed wire for the tide of people flowing in from all over Europe, from Poland and Belorussia. For thirteen months, 396 days, the trains left loaded with sand or empty, not a single man from all those who reached Camp No. 2 ever returned . . . Cain, where are they, those whom you brought here?

The summer of 1942, the period of the fascists’ great military successes, was declared a good time to carry out the second part of the scheme of physical annihilation . . . In July, the first trains started coming to Treblinka from Warsaw and Chenstohova. People were told that they were being taken to the Ukraine to work in agriculture. They were allowed to take twenty kilograms of luggage and food. In many cases, Germans had forced their victims to buy railway tickets to the station of Ober-Maidan, which was the cover name the German authorities had given to Treblinka. The point of giving Treblinka this name was that rumours about the terrible place had soon started to circulate all over Poland, and the SS men stopped using the word Treblinka when putting people on trains. However, the way people were treated on the trains left no doubt about the future fate of the passengers. At least 150, but usually 180–200 people were forced into a single freight car. During the journey, which lasted sometimes two or three days, prisoners were given no water. People were suffering so much from thirst that they drank their own urine. Guards charged one hundred zloty for a mouthful of water, and usually just took the money giving people no water in return. The people were squashed against one another, and sometimes had to stand up all the way. A number of old people with heart problems would usually die before the end of the journey, particularly during the hot days of summer. As the doors were kept shut all the time until the end of the journey, the corpses would begin to decay, poisoning the air in the wagon . . . If one of the passengers lit a match during the night, guards would start shooting at the side of the freight car . . .

Trains from other European countries arrived at Treblinka in a very different manner.
⁴
The people in them had never heard of
Treblinka, and believed until the last minute that they were going there to work . . . These trains from European countries arrived with no guards, and with the usual staff. There were sleeping cars and restaurant cars in them. Passengers had big trunks and suitcases, as well as substantial supplies of food. The passengers’ children ran out at the stations they passed and asked whether it was still a long way to Ober-Maidan . . .

It is hard to tell whether it is less terrible to go towards one’s own death in the state of terrible suffering, knowing that one was getting closer and closer to one’s death, or to be absolutely unaware, glance from a window of a comfortable passenger car right at the moment when people from the station at Treblinka are telephoning the camp to pass on details about the train which has just arrived and the number of people in it.