[ This polite Russian behaviour was to change in time; but at first the Russians behaved in a very disciplined and "correct" way to the Polish peasants.]
People—many of them very humble-looking working people, talked freely about the
German occupation; many had lost friends and relatives at Maidanek; many more had
had members of their families deported as slave labour to Germany; they also talked
about that terrible first winter of 1939-40, when there was a regular trade in children: whole trainloads of children—whose parents had been killed or arrested— children from Poznan and other places taken over by the Germans would arrive in Lublin, and a child—
often starved and half-dead— could be bought for thirty zloty from German soldiers.
They talked of people who were publicly hanged in the main square of Lublin and of the torture chambers of the Lublin Gestapo. "Anyone," said an elderly woman looking like a schoolmistress, "could be taken there: if a German thought, as he passed you in the street, that you had given him a dirty look, that was enough. To kill a human being —it was as easy as stepping on a worm and squashing it." During the German occupation, most people in Lublin had gone hungry, and the peasants had not been helpful; and now there was no certainty that things were going to be much better. Still, to many it had been a pleasant surprise to see real Polish soldiers in Polish uniforms arrive here from Russia; the Germans had always denied that there was a Polish Army in Russia. On the other
hand, there were— especially among the better-dressed people—grave misgivings about
the Russians, and strong AK sympathies; and there was also much talk of 2,000 AK men having been arrested by the Russians in the Lublin area alone. Many questions were, of course, also asked about the Polish troops in Italy and France, and, on many Poles, the arrival of British and American correspondents in Lublin made a particularly strong
impression: dozens of people, with a suggestive look in their eyes, would give us flowers.
One young man, I remember, took me aside and drew my attention to a large inscription painted on a wall; it said "MONTE CASSINO". "Monte Cassino," he said, "that's a Polish victory won on the other side, and we are particularly proud of it... It was our people who painted the inscription." "Your people?" I said, "You mean the Armija Krajowa?" He nodded. "The war seems to be going well," he said, "but you realise there are many buts, many, many buts. .. There's Warsaw, and we don't trust these Lublin Committee people... Well, you know what I mean... And 2,000 arrests." He was a pink-cheeked young man of about twenty-three with carefully-plastered hair which, however, strangely contrasted with his shabby clothes; he had worked as an accountant under the Germans, but was also active in the Polish "London" underground. Now, he said, he was going to be mobilised into the Polish Army. "Seems reasonable enough, I suppose," he said, "to be mobilised to fight the Germans, though I can't say I am particularly delighted to fight under Russian orders... "
Since the end of the war, there have been numerous accounts of various German
Extermination Camps—Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Belsen and others—but the story of
Maidanek has not perhaps been fully told to Western readers; moreover, Maidanek holds a very special place in the Soviet-German war.
As they advanced, the Russians had been learning more and more of German atrocities
and the enormous number of killings. But, somehow, all this killing was spread over
relatively wide areas, and though it added up to far, far more than Maidanek, it did not have the vast monumental, "industrial" quality of that unbelievable Death Factory two miles from Lublin.
"Unbelievable" it was: when I sent the BBC a detailed report on Maidanek in August 1944, they refused to use it; they thought it was a Russian propaganda stunt, and it was not till the discovery in the west of Buchenwald, Dachau and Belsen that they were
convinced that Maidanek and Auschwitz were also genuine...
The Russians discovered Maidanek on July 23, the very day they entered Lublin. About a week later Simonov described it all in Pravda; but most of the Western press ignored his account. But in Russia the effect was devastating. Everybody had heard of Babyi Yar and thousands of other German atrocities; but this was something even more staggering. It brought into sharper focus than anything else had done the real nature, scope and
consequences of the Nazi régime in action. For here was a vast industrial undertaking in which thousands of "ordinary" Germans had made it a full-time job to murder millions of other people in a sort of mass orgy of professional sadism, or, worse still, with the business-like conviction that this was a job like any other. The effect of Maidanek was to be enormous, not least in the Red Army. Thousands of Russian soldiers were made to
visit it.
My first reaction to Maidanek was a feeling of surprise. I had imagined something
horrible and sinister beyond words. It was nothing like that. It looked singularly harmless from outside. "Is that it? " was my first reaction when we stopped at what looked like a large workers' settlement. Behind us was the many towered skyline of Lublin. There was much dust on the road, and the grass was a dull, greenish-grey colour. The camp was
separated from the road by a couple of barbed-wire fences, but these did not look
particularly sinister, and might have been put up outside any military or semi-military establishment. The place was large; like a whole town of barracks painted a pleasant soft green. There were many people around—soldiers and civilians. A Polish sentry opened
the barbed-wire gate to let our cars enter the central avenue, with large green barracks on either side. And then we stopped outside a large barrack marked Bad und Desinfektion II.
"This," somebody said, "is where large numbers of those arriving at the camp were brought in."
The inside of this barrack was made of concrete, and water taps came out of the wall, and around the room there were benches where the clothes were put down and afterwards collected. So this was the place into which they were driven. Or perhaps they were
politely invited to "Step this way, please?" Did any of them suspect, while washing themselves after a long journey, what would happen a few minutes later? Anyway, after the washing was over, they were asked to go into the next room; at this point even the most unsuspecting must have begun to wonder. For the "next room" was a series of large square concrete structures, each about one-quarter of the size of the bath-house, and, unlike it, had no windows. The naked people (men one time, women another time,
children the next) were driven or forced from the bath-house into these dark concrete boxes—about five yards square—and then, with 200 or 250 people packed into each box
—and it was completely dark there, except for a small skylight in the ceiling and the spyhole in the door—the process of gassing began. First some hot air was pumped in
from the ceiling and then the pretty pale-blue crystals of Cyclon were showered down on the people, and in the hot wet air they rapidly evaporated. In anything from two to ten minutes everybody was dead... There were six concrete boxes—gas-chambers—side by
side. "Nearly two thousand people could be disposed of here simultaneously," one of the guides said.
But what thoughts passed through these people's minds during those first few minutes while the crystals were falling; could anyone still believe that this humiliating process of being packed into a box and standing there naked, rubbing backs with other naked
people, had anything to do with disinfection?
At first it was all very hard to take in, without an effort of the imagination. There were a number of very dull-looking concrete structures which, if their doors had been wider, might anywhere else have been mistaken for a row of nice little garages. But the doors—
the doors! They were heavy steel doors, and each had a heavy steel bolt. And in the
middle of the door was a spyhole, a circle, three inches in diameter composed of about a hundred s
mall holes. Could the people in their death agony see the SS-man's eye as he watched them? Anyway, the SS-man had nothing to fear: his eye was well-protected by
the steel netting over the spyhole. And, like the proud maker of reliable safes, the maker of the door had put his name round the spyhole: "Auert, Berlin". Then a touch of blue on the floor caught my eye. It was very faint, but still legible. In blue chalk someone had scribbled the word "vergast" and had drawn crudely above it a skull and crossbones. I had never seen this word before, but it obviously meant "gassed"—and not merely
"gassed" but, with that eloquent little prefix ver, "gassed out". That's this job finished, and now for the next lot. The blue chalk came into motion when there was nothing but a heap of naked corpses inside. But what cries, what curses, what prayers perhaps, had been uttered inside that gas chamber only a few minutes before? Yet the concrete walls were thick, and Herr Auert had done a wonderful job, so probably no one could hear
anything from outside. And even if they did, the people in the camp knew what it was all about.
It was here, outside Bad und Desinfektion II, in the side-lane leading into the central avenue, that the corpses were loaded into lorries, covered with tarpaulins, and carted to the crematorium at the other end of the camp, about half-a-mile away. Between the two there were dozens of barracks, painted the same soft green. Some had notice-boards
outside, others had not. Thus, there was an Effekten Kammer and a Frauen-Bekleidungskammer; here the victims' luggage and the women's clothes were sorted out, before they were sent to the central Lublin warehouse, and then on to Germany.
At the other end of the camp, there were enormous mounds of white ashes; but as you
looked closer, you found that they were not perfect ashes: for they had among them
masses of small human bones: collar bones, finger bones, and bits of skull, and even a small femur, which can only have been that of a child. And, beyond these mounds there was a sloping plain, on which there grew acres and acres of cabbages. They were large luxuriant cabbages, covered with a layer of white dust. As I heard somebody explaining:
"Layer of manure, then layer of ashes, that's the way it was done... These cabbages are all grown on human ashes... The SS-men used to cart most of the ashes to their model farm, some distance away. A well-run farm; the SS-men liked to eat these overgrown cabbages, and the prisoners ate these cabbages, too, although they knew that they would almost certainly be turned into cabbages themselves before long..."
Next we came to the crematorium. It was a great big structure of six enormous furnaces and above them rose a large factory chimney. The wooden structure that used to cover the crematorium, as well as the adjoining wooden house, where Obersturmbannführer
Mussfeld, the "Director of the Crematorium" used to live, had been burned down.
Mussfeld had lived there among the stench of burned and burning bodies, and took a
personal interest in the proceedings. But the furnaces stood there, large, enormous. There were still piles of coke on the one side; on the other side were the furnace doors where the corpses went in... The place stank, not violently, but it stank of decomposition. I looked down. My shoes were white with human dust, and the concrete floor around the
ovens was strewn with parts of charred human skeletons. Here was a whole chest with its ribs, here a piece of skull, here a lower jaw with a molar on either side, and nothing but sockets in between. Where had the false teeth gone? To the side of the furnaces was a large high concrete slab, shaped like an operating table. Here a specialist—a medical man perhaps?—examined every corpse before it went into the oven, and extracted any gold
fillings, which were then sent to Dr Walter Funk at the Reichsbank...
Somebody was explaining the details of the whole mechanism; the furnaces were made
of fibreproof brick, and the temperature had always to be maintained at 1,700°
centigrade; and there was an engineer called Tellener who was an expert in charge of maintaining the right temperature. But the corroded condition of some of the doors
showed that the temperature had been increased above normal to make the corpses burn more quickly. The normal capacity of the whole installation was 2,000 corpses a day, but sometimes there were more corpses than that to deal with, and there were some special days, like the great Jew-extermination day of November 3, 1943, when 20,000 people—
men, women and children—were killed; it was impossible to gas them all that day; so
most of them had been shot and buried in a wood some distance away. On other
occasions many corpses were burned outside the crematorium on enormous funeral pyres soaked in petrol; these pyres would smoulder for weeks and fill the air with a stench...
Standing in front of the great crematorium, with human remains scattered on the ground, one began to listen to all these details with a kind of dull indifference. The "industrial report" was becoming unreal in its enormity...
Besides the charred remains of Mussfeld's house, there lay piles of large black cans, like enormous cocktail shakers, marked "Buchenwald". They were urns and had been brought from that other concentration camp. People from Lublin who had lost a relative at
Maidanek, somebody said, would pay substantial sums to the SS-men for the victim's
remains. It was another loathsome SS racket. Needless to say, the ashes with which the cocktail shakers were filled were nobody's ashes in particular.
Some distance away from the crematorium, a trench twenty or thirty yards long had been re-opened and, looking down through the fearful stench, I could see hundreds of naked corpses, many with bullet-holes at the back of their skulls. Most of them were men with shaved heads; it was said that these had been Russian war prisoners.
I had seen enough, and hastened to join Colonel Grosz, who was waiting beside the car on the road. The stench was still pursuing me; it now seemed to permeate everything—
the dusty grass beside the barbed wire fence, and the red poppies that were naively
growing in the midst of all this.
Grosz and I waited there for the rest of the party to join us. A Polish youngster with tattered clothes and a torn cap, and barefooted, came up and talked to us. He was about eleven, but talked of the camp with a curious nonchalance, with that nil admirari that had become his outlook on fife after living for two or three years in the immediate proximity of the Death Camp... This boy had seen everything, at the ages of nine, and ten and
eleven.
"A lot of people in Lublin," he said, "lost somebody here. In our village people were very worried, because we knew what was going on in the camp, and the Germans threatened
to destroy the village and kill everybody in case we talked too much. Don't know why they should have bothered," the boy said with a shrug, "everybody in Lublin knew anyway." And he recounted a few things he had seen; he had seen ten prisoners being beaten to death; he had seen files of prisoners carrying stones, and had seen those who collapsed being killed with pickaxes by the SS-men. He had heard an old man screaming while he was being chewed up by police dogs... And, looking across the fields of
cabbages growing on human ashes, he said, almost with a touch of admiration:
"Everything is growing well here—cabbages, and turnips and cauliflowers... It's all land belonging to our village, and now that the SS are gone, we'll get the land back."
There was much coming and going on the road—hundreds of men and women were
going into and out of the camp; Russian soldiers were being taken in large parties to be shown the pits and the gas chambers and the crematoria; and Polish soldiers of the 4th Division and new Polish recruits. It was policy to make them see it all, and to impress upon them—in case they were not yet sufficiently impressed—what kind of enemy they
were fighting. A few days before a crowd of German prisoners had been taken through
the camp. Around stood crowds of Polish women and children, and they screamed
at the Germans, and there was a half-insane old Jew who bellowed frantically in a husky voice:
"Kindermörder, Kindermörder!" [ Child-murderers.] and the Germans went through the camp, at first at an ordinary pace, and then faster and faster, till they ran in a frantic panicky stampede, and they were green with terror, and their hands shook and their teeth chattered...
I shall describe only briefly some of the other aspects of that vast industrial enterprise that the Murder Camp represented. There were those trenches in Krempecki Forest, a few miles away, where they murdered 10,000 Jews on that 3rd of November. Here speed was
even more important than business. They shot them, without taking off their clothes, even without taking the women's handbags and the children's toys away. Amongst the stinking corpses, I saw a small child with a teddy-bear... But this was unusual; the great principle of the Murder Camp was that nothing should be wasted. There was, for instance, that
enormous barn-like structure which had contained 850,000 pairs of boots and shoes—
among them tiny baby shoes; now, by the end of August, half the shoes had gone:
hundreds of people from Lublin had come and taken whole bagfuls of shoes.
"How disgusting," somebody remarked.
Colonel Grosz shrugged his shoulders. "What do you expect? After having had the Germans here for years, people stopped being squeamish. They had lived for years
buying and selling and speculating; they are short of shoes, so they say to themselves:
'These are perfectly good shoes; someone will get them eventually; why not grab them while the going's good?'"
And then—perhaps the most horrifying thing of all—there was the enormous building
called the "Chopin Lager", the Chopin Warehouse, because, by a curious irony, it happened to be in a street called after the composer. Outside, there was still a notice, with the swastika on top, announcing a German public meeting:
Kundgebung.
Donnerstag, 20, Juli 1944.
Reichsredner P.G. Geyer.
Russia at war Page 100
