The Road

by Vasily Grossman

  Once again, echoing over the square: “Achtung! Achtung!” Once again people’s minds must be confused with hope; once again the regulations of death must be passed off as the regulations of life. The same voice barks out word after word: “Women and children are to remove their footwear on entering the barrack. Stockings are to be put into shoes. The children’s little stockings into their sandals, boots, and shoes. Be tidy!”

  And straight after this: “As you proceed to the bathhouse, take with you your valuables, documents, money, towel, and soap. I repeat...”

  Inside the women’s barrack was a hairdresser. The hair of the naked women was cut with clippers; old women had their wigs removed. This had a strange psychological effect: the hairdressers testify that this haircut of death did more than anything to convince the women that they really were going to the bathhouse. Young women would sometimes stroke their heads and say, “It’s uneven here. Please make it smoother.” Most of the women calmed down after their haircut; nearly all of them left the barrack carrying their piece of soap and a folded towel. Some young women wept over the loss of their beautiful plaits.

  Why did the Germans shave women’s hair? To deceive them better? No, Germany needed this hair. It was a raw material. I have asked many people what the Germans did with the hair that they removed from the heads of the living departed. Every witness said that the vast heaps of hair—black, red-gold, and fair, straight, curly, and wavy—were first disinfected, then packed into sacks and sent off to Germany. All the witnesses confirmed that the sacks bore German addresses. How was the hair used? No one could answer. There is just one written deposition, from a certain Kohn, to the effect that the hair was used by the navy to fill mattresses and for such things as making hawsers for submarines. Other witnesses claim that the hair was used to pad saddles for the cavalry.

  This testimony, in my view, requires further confirmation. In due course, this will be given to humanity by Grossadmiral Raeder, who in 1942 was in charge of the German navy.

  The men undressed outside, in the yard. One hundred and fifty to three hundred strong men from the first contingent of the day would be chosen to bury the corpses; they themselves were usually killed the following day. The men had to undress quickly but in an orderly manner, leaving their shoes, socks, underwear, jackets, and trousers in neat piles. These were then sorted out by a second work squad, known as “the reds” because of the red armbands they wore to distinguish them from the squad “ on transport duty.” Items considered worth sending to Germany were taken to the store; first, though, any metal or cloth labels had to be carefully removed from them. All other items were burned or buried in pits.

  Everyone was feeling more and more anxious. There was a terrible stench, intermingled with the smell of lime chloride. There were fat and persistent flies—an extraordinary number of them. What were they doing here, among pine trees, on dry well-trodden ground? Everyone was breathing heavily now, shaking and trembling, staring at every little trifle that might give them some understanding, at anything that might lift the curtain of mystery and let them glimpse the fate that awaited them. And what were those gigantic excavators doing, rumbling away in the southern part of the camp?

  Next, though, came another procedure. The naked people had to stand in line at a “ticket window” to hand over their documents and valuables. And again they heard that terrible, hypnotizing voice: “Achtung! Achtung!” The penalty for concealing valuables is death. “Achtung! Achtung!”

  The Scharführer sat in a small wooden booth. Other SS men and Wachmänner stood nearby. On the ground were a number of wooden boxes into which they threw valuables. One was for paper money; one was for coins; a third was for watches, rings, earrings, and brooches with precious stones and bracelets. Documents were just thrown on the ground, since no one had any use for the documents of the living dead who, within an hour, would be lying crushed in a pit. Gold and valuables, however, were carefully sorted; dozens of jewelers were engaged in ascertaining the quality of the metal, the value of the stones, the clarity of the diamonds.

  Astonishingly, the brute beasts were able to make use of everything. Leather, paper, cloth—everything of use to man was of use to these beasts. It was only the most precious valuable in the world—human life—that they trampled beneath their boots. Powerful minds, honorable souls, glorious childish eyes, sweet faces of old women, proudly beautiful girlish heads that nature had toiled age after age to fashion—all this, in a vast silent flood, was condemned to the abyss of nonbeing. A few seconds was enough to destroy what nature and the world had slowly shaped in life’s vast and tortuous creative process.

  This booth with its small “ticket window” was a turning point. It marked the end of the process of torture by deception, the end of the lie that held people in a trance of ignorance, in a fever that hurled them between hope and despair, between visions of life and visions of death. This torture by deception aided the SS men in their work; it was an essential feature of the conveyor-belt executioner’s block. Now, however, the final act had begun; the process of plundering the living dead was nearly completed, and the Germans changed their style of behavior. They tore off rings and broke women’s fingers; earlobes were ripped off along with earrings.

  At this point a new principle had to be implemented if the conveyor-belt executioner’s block was to continue to function smoothly. The word “Achtung” was replaced by the hissing sounds of “ Schneller! Schneller! Schneller! Faster! Faster! Faster! Faster into nonexistence!”

  We know from the cruel reality of recent years that a naked man immediately loses his powers of resistance. He ceases to struggle. Having lost his clothes, he loses his instinct of self-preservation and starts to accept whatever happens to him as his inevitable fate. Someone with an unquenchable thirst for life becomes passive and apathetic. Nevertheless, to make doubly sure that there were no mishaps, the SS found a way to stun their victims during this last stage of the conveyor belt’s work, to reduce them to a state of complete psychic paralysis.

  How did they achieve this?

  Through a sudden recourse to pointless, alogical brutality. The naked people—people who had lost everything but who obstinately persisted in remaining human, a thousand times more so than the creatures around them wearing the uniforms of the German army—were still breathing, still looking, still thinking; their hearts were still beating. All of a sudden their towels and pieces of soap were knocked out of their hands. They were lined up in rows of five.

  “Händer hoch! Marsch! Schneller! Schneller!”

  They were then marched down a straight alley, 120 meters long and two meters wide, bordered by flowers and fir trees. This led to the place of execution. There was barbed wire on either side of the alley, which was lined by SS men and Wachmänner standing shoulder to shoulder, the former in gray uniforms, the latter in black. The path was sprinkled with white sand, and those who were walking in front with their hands in the air could see on this loose sand the fresh imprint of bare feet: the small footprints of women, the tiny footprints of children, the heavy footprints of the old. This faint trace in the sand was all that remained of the thousands of people who had not long ago passed this way, who had walked down this path just as the present contingent of four thousand people was now walking down it, just as another contingent of thousands, already waiting on the railway spur in the forest, would walk down it in two hours’ time. Those whose footprints could be seen on the sand had walked down this path just as people had walked down it the day before, just as people had walked down it ten days before, just as people would walk down it the next day and in fifty days’ time, just as people walked down it throughout the thirteen months of the existence of the Hell that was Treblinka.

  The Germans referred to this alley as “The Road of No Return.” A smirking, grimacing creature by the name of Suchomel used to shout out, deliberately garbling the German words: “Children, children, schneller, schneller, the water’s getting cold in the bathhouse! Schneller, ch
ildren, schneller!” This creature would then burst out laughing; he would squat down and dance about. Hands above their heads, the people walked on in silence between the two rows of guards, who beat them with sticks, submachine-gun butts, and rubber truncheons. The children had to run to keep up with the adults. Everyone who witnessed this last sorrowful procession has commented on the savagery of one particular member of the SS: Sepp. This creature specialized in the killing of children. Evidently endowed with unusual strength, it would suddenly snatch a child out of the crowd, swing him or her about like a cudgel, and then either smash their head against the ground or simply tear them in half.

  When I first heard about this creature—supposedly human, supposedly born of a woman—I could not believe the unthinkable things I was told. But when I heard these stories repeated by eyewitnesses, when I realized that these witnesses saw them as mere details, entirely in keeping with everything else about the hellish regime of Treblinka, then I came to believe that what I had heard was true.

  Sepp’s actions were necessary. They helped to reduce people to a state of psychic shock. They were an expression of the senseless cruelty that crushed both will and consciousness. He was a useful, necessary screw in the vast machine of the Fascist State.

  What should appall us is not that nature gives birth to such monsters—there are, after all, any number of monsters in the physical world. There are Cyclops, and creatures with two heads, and there are corresponding psychic monstrosities and perversions. What is appalling is that creatures which should have been isolated and studied as psychiatric phenomena were allowed to live active lives, to be active citizens of a particular State. Their diseased ideology, their pathological psyches, their extraordinary crimes are, however, a necessary element of the Fascist State. Thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of such creatures are pillars of German Fascism, the mainstay and foundation of Hitler’s Germany. Dressed in uniforms and carrying weapons, decorated with imperial orders, these creatures lorded it for years over the peoples of Europe. It is not they that should appall us but the State that summoned them out of their holes, out of their underground darkness—the State that found them useful, necessary, and even irreplaceable in Treblinka near Warsaw, in Majdanek near Lublin, in Bełzec, Sobibor, and Auschwitz, in Babi Yar, in Domanevka and Bogdanovka near Odessa, in Trostyanets near Minsk, in Ponary in Lithuania, and in hundreds of other prisons, labor camps, penal camps, and camps for the destruction of life.

  A particular kind of State does not appear out of nowhere. What engenders a particular regime is the material and ideological relations existing among a country’s citizens. It is to these material and ideological relations that we need to devote serious thought; the nature of these relations is what should appall us.

  The walk from the “ticket window” to the place of execution took only sixty to seventy seconds. Urged on by blows and deafened by shouts of “Schneller! Schneller!,” the people came out into a third square and, for a moment, stopped in astonishment.

  Before them stood a handsome stone building, decorated with wooden fretwork and built in the style of an ancient temple. Five wide concrete steps led up to the low but very wide, massive, beautifully ornate doors. By the entrance there were flowers in large pots. Everything nearby, however, was in chaos; everywhere you looked there were mountains of freshly dug earth. Grinding its steel jaws, a huge excavator was digging up tons of sandy yellow soil, raising a dust cloud that stood between the earth and the sun. The roar of the vast machine, which was digging mass graves from morning till night, mingled with the fierce barks of dozens of Alsatian dogs.

  On either side of the house of death ran narrow-gauge tracks along which men in baggy overalls were pushing small self-tipping trolleys.

  The wide doors of the house of death slowly opened, and in the entrance appeared two of the assistants to Schmidt, who was in charge of the complex. Both were sadists and maniacs. One, aged about thirty, was tall, with massive shoulders, black hair, and a swarthy, laughing, animated face. The other, slightly younger, was short, with brown hair and pale yellow cheeks, as if he had just taken a strong dose of quinacrine. The names of these men who betrayed humanity, their Motherland, and their oaths of loyalty are known.

  The tall man was holding a whip and a piece of heavy gas piping, about a meter long. The other man was holding a saber.

  Then the SS men would unleash their well-trained dogs, who would throw themselves into the crowd and tear with their teeth at the naked bodies of the doomed people. At the same time the SS men would beat people with submachine-gun butts, urging on petrified women with wild shouts of “Schneller! Schneller!”

  Other assistants to Schmidt were inside the building, driving people through the wide-open doors of the chambers.

  At this point Kurt Franz, one of the camp commandants, would appear, leading on a leash his dog, Barry. He had specially trained this dog to leap up at the doomed people and tear out their sexual organs. Franz had done well for himself in the camp, starting as a junior SS Unteroffizier and attaining the fairly high rank of Untersturmführer. This tall, thin, thirty-five-year-old member of the SS was not only a gifted organizer who adored his work and could not imagine any better life for himself than his life at Treblinka, where nothing escaped his tireless vigilance; he was also something of a theoretician. He loved to explain the true significance of his work. Really, only one thing was missing during these last terrible moments by the doors of the chambers: the pope himself, and Mr. Brailsford, and other such humane defenders of Hitlerism should have put in an appearance, in the capacity, it goes without saying, of spectators. Then they would have learned new arguments with which to enrich their humanitarian preachings, books, and articles. And while he was about it, the pope, who kept so reverently silent while Himmler was settling accounts with the human race, could have worked out how many batches his staff would have constituted, how long it would have taken the Treblinka SS to process the entire staff of his Vatican.

  Great is the power of true humanity. Humanity does not die until man dies. And when we see a brief but terrifying period of history, a period during which beasts triumph over human beings, the man being killed by the beast retains to his last breath his strength of spirit, clarity of thought, and passionate love. And the beast that triumphantly kills the man remains a beast. This immortality of spiritual strength is a somber martyrdom—the triumph of a dying man over a living beast. It was this, during the darkest days of 1942, that brought about the beginning of reason’s victory over bestial madness, the victory of good over evil, of light over darkness, of the forces of progress over the forces of reaction. A terrible dawn over a field of blood and tears, over an ocean of suffering—a dawn breaking amid the cries of dying mothers and infants, amid the death rattles of the aged.

  The beasts and the beasts’ philosophy seemed to portend the sunset of Europe, the sunset of the world, but the red was not the red of a sunset, it was the red blood of humanity—a humanity that was dying yet achieving victory through its death. People remained people. They did not accept the morality and laws of Fascism. They fought it in all ways they could; they fought it by dying as human beings.

  To hear how the living dead of Treblinka preserved until the last moment not only the image and likeness of human beings but also the souls of human beings is to be shaken to one’s very core; it is to be unable to find sleep or any peace of mind. We heard stories of women trying to save their sons and thus accomplishing feats of hopeless bravery. We heard of women trying to hide their little babies in heaps of blankets and trying to shield them with their own bodies. Nobody knows, and nobody ever will know, the names of these mothers. We heard of ten-year-old girls comforting their sobbing parents with divine wisdom; we heard of a young boy shouting out by the entrance to the gas chamber, “Don’t cry, Mama—the Russians will avenge us!” Nobody knows, and nobody ever will know, what these children were called. We heard about dozens of doomed people, fighting alone against a band of S
S men armed with machine guns and hand grenades—and dying on their feet, their breasts riddled with bullets. We heard about a young man stabbing an SS officer, about a youth who had taken part in the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto and who by some miracle managed to hide a hand grenade from the Germans; already naked, he threw it into a group of executioners. We heard about a battle that lasted all through the night between a group of the doomed and units of SS and Wachmänner. All night long there were shots and explosions—and when the sun rose the next morning, the whole square was covered with the fighters’ bodies. Beside each lay a weapon: a knife, a razor, a stake torn from a fence. However long the earth lasts, we will never know the names of the fallen. We heard about a tall young woman who, on “The Road of No Return,” tore a carbine from the hands of a Wachmann and fought back against dozens of SS. Two of the beasts were killed in this struggle, and a third had his hand shattered. He returned to Treblinka with only one arm. She was subjected to terrible tortures and to a terrible execution. No one knows her name; no one can honor it.

  Yet is that really so? Hitlerism took from these people their homes and their lives; it wanted to erase their names from the world’s memory. But all of them—the mothers who tried to shield their children with their own bodies, the children who wiped away the tears in their fathers’ eyes, those who fought with knives and flung hand grenades, and the naked young woman who, like a goddess from a Greek myth, fought alone against dozens—all these people, though they are no longer among the living, have preserved forever the very finest name of all, a name that no pack of Hitlers and Himmlers has been able to trample into the ground, the name: Human Being. The epitaph History will write for them is: “Here Lies a Human Being.”