When a Crocodile Eats the Sun

by Peter Godwin

  The train from Warsaw is made up of fifty to sixty freight cars, packed eighty people to a car for the four-hour journey. The small vents are wrapped with barbed wire, and the smell of chlorine is overwhelming. Many vomit or faint. The train crosses the Bug River and stops at Treblinka Village Station, where it is uncoupled and the locomotive pushes twenty railway cars at a time down a specially built spur line to the camp itself.

  The doors open and everyone is ordered out onto a ramp. On the walls are signs for a ticket office, a restaurant, a telephone kiosk, and train schedules, posters of vacation destinations, and a clock. All are fake. The hands of the clock are always at three o’clock. The windows don’t open, they are painted on the walls. The German SS officers, who designed and oversee Treblinka, are trying to postpone the passengers’ understanding of their fate, for once the full horror becomes plain, they will panic and try to escape, or to commit suicide, and killing them will take longer. So the SS officers tell them that this is just a transit camp from which they will shortly be transported to the east, to work in factories.

  But sometimes the deadly charade is impossible to maintain, especially when the pace of the arrivals accelerates to twelve thousand Jews a day. Then many deportees die of exhaustion or suffocation in the cattle cars. And those who have realized what awaits them have to be forced to disembark. In his testimony, Abraham Goldfarb, our namesake, records the mayhem of his own arrival.

  When we reached Treblinka and the Germans opened the freight-car doors, the scene was ghastly. The cars were full of corpses. The bodies had been partially consumed by chlorine. The stench from the cars caused those still alive to choke. The Germans ordered everyone to disembark from the cars; those who could were half dead. SS and Ukrainians waiting nearby beat us and shot at us.

  On the scale model, with a red cross on a white flag in front of it, is the infirmary. If you feel unwell on arrival, you are escorted here, joining the elderly and the handicapped. Though the “doctors” wear white aprons and red crosses on their sleeves, this is not an infirmary. Patients are told to sit on a long wooden bench facing a ditch. Guards come behind them and shoot them in the back of the head, and they topple over into the ditch. When it is heaped with bodies, the guards pour on gasoline and set the bodies on fire.

  The rest are divided, males from females and children, and sent to separate disrobing sheds where they are told to undress and hand over all their valuables, wedding rings and other jewelry, cash; all must be surrendered, and they are given receipts to prolong the illusion of a future.

  The barbers arrive in the women’s disrobing shed to shave their heads. Hair falls to the floor where it is collected in big bags to be used to make insulation felt for U-boats and the boots of German soldiers. I think of Halina’s glossy dark hair — that exuberant mane in her family portrait, disciplined by a headband in front and a long plait down her back. Does Janina know yet that their deaths are imminent? Does she still try to reassure her daughter that all will be well soon?

  Now the naked women and girls are told they are going to shower, and they are herded into a long tunnel that the SS guards have nicknamed the Himmelfahrtstrasse — the “road to heaven.” The women and girls are made to run up an incline to raise their heart rates. An attendant yells at them to hurry before the water gets cold. The guards have even allowed some women to bring towels and soap, to prolong the illusion. The entrance they arrive at is decorated to look like a mikvah, a ritual Jewish bathhouse, with a large Star of David on the gable, and an Aron Kodesh curtain. It bears a Hebrew inscription: “This Is the Gateway to God, Righteous Men Will Pass Through.” Naked and bald, the women and girls climb five wide steps, between potted plants, to reach the showers. The Nazis call this Jew Town.

  As they arrive, most of the women know now, beyond all doubt, what lies in store. They are terrified in those final minutes, panicked by the imminence of their own deaths, and many lose control of their bowels.

  The men are usually killed first, and as soon as their bodies are dragged out of the gas chambers, the guards force the women in — arms raised above their heads so more of them will fit. The ten gas chambers, five on each side of a central corridor, can accommodate over two thousand people.

  “Ivan, water!” shouts a guard. This is the signal for the gassing to begin. It is done with exhaust fumes from the engines of captured Soviet tanks, and it can take up to twenty-five minutes for the carbon monoxide to do its job, turning the women yellow as it kills them. The gas chambers have low ceilings, only six feet high. The less air in there, the quicker the women will die. But sometimes the engine malfunctions, and asphyxiation can take longer. There is a little peephole next to the doors for the guards to check if those inside are dead yet. When they finally die, they do not fall. They remain standing, packed up against one another.

  The Sonderkommando, Jewish prison workers, open the doors to remove the bodies, many of which are bloodied and disfigured, their faces scratched and ears bitten off, in the terminal frenzy to escape. The prisoners shine flashlights into the mouths of the corpses and wherever they see the gleam of a gold filling, they must take the corpse to waiting “dentists” who wrench out those teeth with pliers. They sort the pulled teeth into cairns, according to the amounts of gold they contain.

  As the bodies are dragged out, the fresh air starts to revive some of them, especially children. The guards shoot or club them with rifles, or simply jump on their necks to snap them, and their bodies are taken with the rest, and thrown onto giant grids made of railway tracks on concrete pillars, under which fires are lit. A thousand bodies can be burned at a time, sending up a billowing black tower of smoke with a stench that can be smelled ten miles away. The bodies take five hours to incinerate. Then the ashes are sifted again for valuables, and shoveled into huge pits.

  For wealthy Jews from Warsaw, like my family, the whole experience could be even worse, writes Yankel Wiernik:

  The Warsaw people were treated with exceptional brutality, the women even more harshly than the men. Women with children were separated from the others, led up to the fires, and, after the murderers had had their fill of watching the terror-stricken women and children, they killed them right by the pyre and threw them into the flames. This happened quite frequently. The women fainted from fear, and the brutes dragged them to the fire half dead. Panic-stricken, the children clung to their mothers. The women begged for mercy, with eyes closed so as to shut out the grisly scene, but their tormentors only leered at them and kept their victims in agonizing suspense for minutes on end. While one batch of women and children were being killed, others were left standing around, waiting their turn. Time and time again children were snatched from their mothers’ arms and tossed into the flames alive, while their tormentors laughed, urging the mothers to be brave and jump into the fire after their children and mocking the women for being cowards.

  In the summer of 1943, after fifteen months, Treblinka is being wound down. Yankel Wiernik helps to lead a Sonderkommando breakout on August 2, and the last gassing is carried out on August 21. German courts later calculate that the death toll was at least nine hundred thousand people. Some of the Treblinka guards put the figure at above one million. One third of those killed are children like Halina. Among them are all 192 children from the Warsaw Ghetto orphanage, led by their founder, the author Henryk Goldschmit, who — under his Gentile pseudonym, Janusz Korczak — wrote the King Matt books my father was given as a child. Goldschmit is offered a way out of the transports but refuses. Instead, he marches at the head of his column of kids to the railway station. One of the children holds the banner of the boy-King Matt. On the reverse side is the Zionist flag, now the flag of Israel.

  By the time Vasily Grossman, a Jew himself, from the Ukraine, arrives at Treblinka as a correspondent with the advancing Red Army in the summer of 1944, there is little to see. It has been demolished and planted over with lupines. He walks across the unsteady earth of the leveled camp and finds a sack of human hair
that has been left behind. “Some yellow hair, wavy, fine and light, glowing like brass, is trampled into the earth, and blond curls next to it, and then heavy black plaits on the light colored sand, and then more and more.”

  At the sight of it his heart breaks.

  The last, lunatic hope that everything was only a dream is ruined. And lupine pods are tinkling, tinkling, little seeds are falling, as if a ringing of countless little bells is coming from under the ground. And one feels as if one’s heart could stop right now, seized with such sorrow, such grief, that a human being cannot possibly stand it.

  ONLY A HANDFUL of perpetrators are brought to trial for the genocide at Treblinka. Among them is Kurt Franz, its last commandant. When police search his apartment in Düsseldorf in 1959, they find a photo album from his Treblinka days. Inside are the only photographic records of Treblinka, souvenir snapshots taken by SS officers — pictures of themselves jogging, riding, sunbathing. Pictures of the little zoo they made the prisoners build for them, in which they kept foxes, rabbits, doves. Pictures of themselves posing jauntily on the iron-clawed bucket of the giant crane excavator they used to dig the mass graves.

  On the cover of the album Franz has written a title, Schöne Zeiten — “Pleasant Times.”

  Nineteen

  December 2003

  MY SAFARIS SWEEP BY in a flash. At MalaMala we are charged by a bull elephant. The late sun reflecting on the moisture at his temporal gland shows he is in musth, and mad with lust, and we have inadvertently separated him from the breeding cows of his desire. I try to see if his ears are flapping out for a mock charge. They are folded back. This one’s no box elephant; it’s for real. The ranger has his .375 bolt-action rifle clipped across the dash but no time to reach it, chamber a round, turn, and fire as the dully gleaming arcs of tusk bear down on us. I shrink back in my seat, awaiting impact. Then the vehicle is lurching forward, engine gunning us over the bush and out of danger. The whole thing has lasted less than fifteen seconds. Fifteen life-affirming seconds. Even the taciturn Shangaan tracker is impressed. “That was close,” he admits.

  At Singita Lebombo on the eastern edge of Kruger National Park, we drive up onto the Lebombo Mountain Range in the late afternoon for sundowners. These are the mountains that in 1986 claimed the life of Samora Machel, Mozambique’s first black president, the one who told Mugabe that you might as well keep your whites, they can be useful. The Russian pilots of his presidential plane en route back from South African peace talks to the Mozambique capital, Maputo, descended prematurely and hit the ridge — lured, some still suspect, by a South African decoy radar beacon.

  The border with Mozambique here is marked by a huge fence — five strong cables webbed with diamond wire stretched taut between ten-foot lengths of railroad track anchored in concrete. Parallel to the fence on this side, I notice little clumps in the ground, regularly spaced every few feet. I ask the ranger what they are. In the old days, he says, the South African army planted a double row of sisal bushes along much of the 250-mile border between Kruger National Park and the badlands of Mozambique to prevent insurgents and refugees from crossing over, just as my parents have done along their bougainvillea hedge. But the architects of this strategy didn’t realize that elephants like nothing more than a baby sisal plant to snack on. The little clumps are all that survive.

  MY LAST STOP is on the very northern tip of the Kruger, in Makuleke, where I camp on the banks of the Luvuvhu River under a giant sycamore fig tree that also serves as a baboon roost. Across the river are the ruins of Thulamela, a drystone citadel, an offshoot from Great Zimbabwe, built by one of the Shona-speaking peoples. The local Venda say it was ruled over by a mystical khosi — the sacred leader, who never left his high-walled enclosure and was called “the crocodile that does not leave its pool.”

  The valley is scattered with huge baobabs, some over a thousand years old, and with acacias and appleleafs, corkwoods, silver cluster leaves, and mountain aloes. The trees are filled with turtledoves and Cape parrots and gray hornbills. Mosque swallows dart across the sky catching flying ants, and golden-tailed woodpeckers tap at baobabs to encourage bugs to come out and be eaten. Thulamela is set among red-tinted sandstone mountains, the eastern edge of the Soutpansberg Range. To the north I can see across to a ridge on the other side of the Limpopo that is Zimbabwe.

  Early in the morning I drive down to Crooks’ Corner on the river’s edge, where Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe meet up in a three-way border. It was once a hideout for fugitives like the famous ivory poacher Bvekenya Barnard, who could hop across the frontier when being pursued by the law. White traders would come here to barter provisions and hard liquor with the Makuleke tribesmen in return for ivory. The concrete foundation of their old trading post is still visible, marked now with a faded white H from its use as a heliport by the South African army in its war against African National Congress guerrillas. In the flesh of a nearby baobab is the graffiti of one army unit, “Alpha Coy — 1979.”

  I scramble down the riverbank, and there before me is the wide, sandy Limpopo riverbed, several miles across. It is mostly dry today, as it has been for nearly two years of drought. In an isolated pool at the confluence of the Luvuvhu, a pod of hippo are squeezed shoulder to shoulder, sixteen of them, just nostrils and eyes and ears and humps of back. There are crocodiles here too, and one is slowly approaching an Egyptian goose, which has moulted and so is temporarily unable to fly. The crocodile glides up behind the goose and takes a snap at it; feathers fill the air, but the honking goose manages to paddle away, and the chase continues around the pool.

  During the night the wind rises, flapping the sides of my tent and unsettling the baboons above; it is raining to the west, upstream. In the distance, lions roar in expectation of the rain. It will wash away their territorial urine markings, so they must bellow to warn off rivals. The next morning, when I return to the Limpopo, it is just beginning to flow; muddy fingers of water are creeping along the sand, joining up and filling the dips and overflowing into new streams. The hippo snort and whinny and heft themselves up out of the confines of their pool.

  There are huge elephant herds here too that migrate back and forth across the Limpopo. But these days, when they return from the Zimbabwe side, the elephants are often agitated and skittish. Poaching has surged there as the people grow hungry and the law breaks down. Most of the privately owned game conservancies have been jambanja’d, along with the farms, their wildlife largely eradicated, their trees hacked down for firewood. The taupe eland that used to graze so securely on Pork Pie Mountain in Chimanimani Game Sanctuary are gone, some of them shot and roasted on the orders of the ruling party to feed supporters at a political rally. Emboldened wovits have marched into Victoria Falls National Park and tried to demolish the statue of David Livingstone. Thwarted by the monument’s size, they contented themselves with prying off its big bronze plaque — the one that reads: “Liberator. Explorer. Missionary.” — and flinging it down the rushing torrents of Devil’s Cataract.

  On the Zimbabwe side of Crooks’ Corner, the wovits are deliberately herding elephants toward the old border minefields, which are still littered with live, unstable mines. They follow the bloody footprints of the injured animals and harvest the ivory.

  Today, the old elephant trails are being used by desperate Zimbabweans searching for food and refuge in South Africa. They cut across the wildlife reserve to avoid the authorities who will arrest them and send them back. Up against the electrified fence along the Zimbabwe border, we find logs jammed by the refugees to form makeshift ladders. Once across the border some of the Johannesburg-bound refugees follow the corridor under the power lines, where the bush is cleared. But lions, lazy predators who sleep twenty out of every twenty-four hours, have taken to waiting along the route and picking off Zimbabwean refugees. Once lions become man-eaters, the rangers must shoot them. When we drive around the bush, we come across odd shoes and remnants of clothing, miles from anywhere: all that remains of som
e fleeing Zimbabweans.

  Just last week, the locals tell me, they came across a Zimbabwean man trying to coax his ninety-year-old mother through the game park. He had returned home to Zimbabwe to find her starving and was trying to bring her back with him to Johannesburg. So enfeebled was the old woman that she had managed to move only a few hundred yards in several hours. The trackers tell of other, terrible sights too. Young girls who have been raped when they stopped to ask for help. One girl was barely fifteen years old, her clothes torn off her, weeping copiously, so traumatized she could scarcely talk. She had been serially raped and had turned back, walking north through the wildlife reserve, desperately trying to go back to the home she fled. They tried to help her, but she just kept weeping and walking, through the bush. The rangers say too that some of the guards at the border fence see it as their “rent” to rape women who cross over, and so do groups of black-market traders who happen upon them.

  THE NEXT DAY, I am back in Zimbabwe. I collapse into bed early, exhausted from all the predawn starts required on safari. But I am awoken in the middle of the night from a deep sleep. All is confusion — shouting, flashing, crackling, the smell of smoke, our dogs barking in the garden. I hear Mum calling out. I pull the curtains aside and see that our bougainvillea hedge is on fire. Flames, already tall, are dancing up toward the fir trees. Spark showers are bursting up into an indigo sky. The weaverbird nests that hang on the ends of the bougainvillea branches are burning too, the little yellow birds swooping above them and calling in alarm.