A Writer at War

by Vasily Grossman

  Men undressed in the yard. Usually, Germans selected 150–300 strong men from the first lot to arrive in the morning. They were used to bury corpses and were generally killed on the second day. Men had to undress very quickly and tidily, leaving their shoes and socks in order, folding their underwear, jackets and trousers. Clothes and shoes were sorted by the second team of workers, who wore red armbands that distinguished them from those working ‘on the transport’.

  Clothing and shoes considered suitable for dispatch to Germany were immediately taken to the warehouse. All metal and fabric labels had to be removed from them carefully. The remaining things were burned or buried in the ground. The feeling of anxiety grew every minute. There was a strange, disquieting smell, which was at times overpowered by the smell of chlorine. Huge quantities of importunate flies seemed strange, too. Where were they all coming from, here, among pines and the trampled earth? People were breathing noisily, afraid, shuddering, peering at every insignificant little object that they thought could explain, help understand, lift slightly the curtain of secret about the fate that lay ahead for them. And why are gigantic excavators rattling so loudly there, further to the south?

  A new procedure would then begin. Naked people were led to the cash office and asked to submit their documents and valuables. And once again, a frightening, hypnotising voice would shout: ‘Achtung! Achtung!’ . . . Concealing valuables was punishable by death . . . ‘Achtung! Achtung!’ A Scharführer was sitting in a little booth knocked up from timber. SS men and Wachmänner were standing next to him. By the booth stood wooden boxes, into which the valuables had to be thrown: a box for banknotes, a box for coins, a box for watches, rings, earrings and brooches, for bracelets. And documents, which no one on earth any longer needed, were thrown on the ground – these were the documents of naked people who would be lying in the earth an hour later. But gold and valuables were subject to a careful sorting – dozens of jewellers determined the pureness of metal, value of jewels, water of the diamonds. And an amazing thing was that the swine utilised everything, even paper and fabric – anything which could be useful to anyone, was important and useful to these swine. Only the most precious thing in the world, a human life, was trampled by their boots.

  Here, at the cash office, came the turning point. The tormenting of people with lies ended; the torture of not knowing, a fever that threw them within minutes from hope to despair, from visions of life to visions of death . . . And when the time came for the last stage of robbing the living dead, the Germans changed their style of treating their victims abruptly. They tore rings off their victims’ fingers, tore earrings out of their earlobes. At this stage, the conveyor executioner’s block required a new principle for functioning efficiently. This is why the word ‘Achtung!’ was replaced by another one, flapping, hissing: ‘Schneller! Schneller! Schneller!’ Quick, hurry up! Run into the non-existence!

  We know from the cruel reality of recent years that a naked person immediately loses the strength to resist, to struggle against his fate. When stripped, a person immediately loses the strength of the instinct to live and one accepts one’s destiny like a fate. A person who used to have an intransigent thirst for life becomes passive and indifferent. But to reassure themselves, the SS men applied additionally at this final stage of the conveyor execution work the method of monstrous stupefaction, of sending people into the state of complete psychological, spiritual shock. How did they do that? By applying a senseless, illogical cruelty, suddenly, sharply. Naked people who had lost everything, but still were a thousand times more human than the beasts in German uniform were still breathing, watching, thinking, their hearts were still beating. The guards knocked pieces of soap and towels out of their hands and lined them up in rows, five people in each. ‘Hände hoch! Marsch! Schneller! Schneller! Schneller!’

  They stepped into a straight alley, with flowers and fir trees planted along it. It was 120 metres long and two metres wide and led to the place of execution. There was wire on both sides of this alley, and guards in black uniforms and SS men in grey ones were standing there shoulder to shoulder. The road was sprinkled with white sand, and those who were walking in front with their hands up could see the fresh prints of bare feet in this loose sand: small women’s feet, very small children’s ones, those left by old people’s feet. These ephemeral footprints in the sand were all that was left of thousands of people who had walked here recently, just like the four thousand that were walking now, like the other thousands who would walk here two hours later, who were now waiting for their turn at the railway branch in the forest. People who’d left their footprints had walked here just like those who walked here yesterday, and ten days ago, and a hundred days ago, like they would walk tomorrow, and fifty days later, like people did throughout the thirteen hellish months of Treblinka’s existence.

  The Germans called this alley ‘The Road of No Return’. A little man, who was making faces all the time and whose family name was Sukhomil, shouted with grimaces, in a deliberately broken German: ‘Children, children! Schneller, schneller! The water’s getting cold in the bathhouse. Schneller, Kinder, schneller!’ And he exploded with laughter, squatted, danced. People, their hands still raised, walked in silence between the two lines of guards, under the blows of sticks, sub-machine-gun butts, rubber truncheons. Children had to run to keep up with the adults. Speaking about this last, sorrowful passage, all witnesses mentioned the atrocities of one humanlike creature, an SS man called Zepf. He specialised in killing children. This beast, who possessed a massive physical strength, would suddenly seize a child out of the crowd, and either hit the child’s head against the ground waving the child like a cudgel, or tear the child in two halves.

  Zepf’s work was important. It added to the psychological shock of the doomed people, and showed how the illogical cruelty was able to crush people’s will and consciousness. He was a useful screw in the great machine of the fascist state.

  And we should all be terrified, but not by the nature that gives birth to such degenerates. There are lots of monstrosities in the organic world – Cyclops, creatures with two heads, as well as the corresponding terrible spiritual monstrosities and perversities. It is another thing that is terrible: these creatures that had to be isolated and studied like psychiatric phenomena were living in a certain country as active and useful citizens.

  The journey from the ‘cash office’ to the place of execution took sixty to seventy seconds. People, urged on by the blows and deafened by the shouts ‘Schneller! Schneller!’, reached the third square and stopped for a moment, startled. In front of them was a beautiful stone building decorated with wood, looking like an ancient temple. Five wide stone steps led to the low, but very wide, massive, beautiful ornate door. There were flowers growing by the entrance, and flowerpots stood there. But all around there was chaos, one could see piles of freshly dug earth everyhere. A vast excavator was throwing out tons of sandy yellow soil, grinding its steel jaws, and the dust it raised was hanging between the earth and the sun. The rattling of the machine digging from morning till evening, the enormous trench graves, mixed with a mad barking of dozens of Alsatian guard dogs.

  There were narrow-gauge railway lines on both sides of the death building, along which men in baggy overalls brought dumper trucks. The wide door of the death house opened slowly, and two assistants of the chief, whose name was Schmidt, appeared by the entrance. They were sadists and maniacs, one of them tall, about thirty years old, with broad shoulders, a dark-skinned excited face and black hair, the other one younger, short, with brown hair and waxy, yellow cheeks. We know the names and surnames of these traitors to mankind. The tall one was holding a massive, metre-long gas tube in his hand, the other one was armed with a sabre.

  At this moment, the SS men would unleash the trained dogs, who threw themselves on the crowd and tore the naked bodies with their teeth. SS men were beating people with sub-machine-gun butts, urging on petrified women, and shouting wildly: ‘Schneller! Schneller!’ Schmidt
’s assistants at the entrance to the building drove people through the open doors into the gas chambers.

  By this time, one of Treblinka’s commandants, Kurt Franz, would appear by the building with his dog, Barry, on a leash. He had specially trained his dog to jump at the doomed people and tear their private parts. Kurt Franz had made a good career at the camp. Having started as a junior SS Unteroffizier, he was promoted to the relatively high rank of Untersturmführer.7

  Stories of the living dead of Treblinka, who had until the last minute kept not just the image of humans but the human soul as well, shake one to the bottom of one’s heart and make it impossible to sleep. The stories of women trying to save their sons and committing magnificent doomed feats, of young mothers who hid their babies in heaps of blankets. I’ve heard the stories of ten-year-old girls, who comforted their sobbing parents with a heavenly wisdom, about a boy who shouted when entering the gas chamber: ‘Russia will take revenge! Mama, don’t cry!’

  I was told about dozens of doomed people who began to struggle. I was told about a young man who stabbed an SS officer with a knife, about a young man who had been brought here from the rebellious Warsaw ghetto. He had miraculously managed to hide a grenade from the Germans and threw it into the crowd of executioners when he was already naked. We were told about the battle between a group of rebels and guards and the SS that lasted all night. Shots and explosions of grenades were resounding until the morning, and when the sun rose, the whole square was covered with the bodies of dead rebels . . . We were told about the tall girl who snatched a carbine from the hands of a Wachmann on ‘The Road of No Return’ and fought back. The tortures and execution she was subjected to were terrible. Her name is unknown, and nobody can pay it the respect it deserves.

  Inhabitants of the village of Wulka, the one closest to Treblinka, tell that sometimes the screams of women who were being killed were so terrible that the whole village would lose their heads and rush to the forest, in order to escape from these shrill screams that carried through tree trunks, the sky and the earth. Then, the screams would suddenly stop, and there was a silence before a new series of screams, as terrible as the ones before, shrill, boring through the bones, through the skulls and the souls of those who heard them. This happened three or four times every day.

  I asked one of the captured butchers, Sh., about these screams. He explained that women started to scream at the moment when the dogs were unleashed and the whole group of prisoners were urged into the house of death. ‘They could see their death coming, and beside that it was very crowded there. They were beaten terribly, and dogs were tearing their bodies.’

  A sudden silence came when the doors of the gas chambers were closed, and the screams started again when a new batch of prisoners was brought to the building. This happened two, three, four, sometimes five times a day. This was a special conveyor belt to the executioners’ block.

  It took some time for Treblinka to be developed into the industrial complex which I have described here. It grew gradually, developing new workshops. At first, three small gas chambers were built. While their construction was still going on, several trains arrived, and the prisoners they brought had to be killed with cold steel – axes, hammers and bludgeons – as the chambers were not ready yet, and the SS men didn’t want to start shooting because the noise would reveal Treblinka’s purpose. The first three concrete chambers were five metres by five metres and 190 centimetres high. Each of them had two doors: one to let the people in by, and the other one to pull out the corpses. This second door was very wide, about 2.5 metres. These three chambers were built side by side on the same foundation.

  The three chambers, however, did not have sufficient capacity to satisfy Berlin. Immediately after they began operating, construction commenced on the building which I described above. Treblinka’s leaders were very satisfied and proud to have outstripped by such a margin all of the Gestapo’s death-factory capacity. Seven hundred prisoners worked for five weeks to build the new death factory. When the construction was in full swing, an expert arrived from Berlin with his crew to install the chambers. The ten new chambers were located symmetrically on both sides of a broad concrete corridor . . . Each of them had two doors . . . The doors for corpses opened on to special platforms which were constructed on both sides of the building. Lines of narrow-gauge railway led to the platforms. The corpses were heaped on to the platforms and immediately loaded on to railway cars and taken to the huge moat-graves, which colossal excavators were digging day and night. The floor in the chambers sloped from the corridor down towards the platforms. This made the work of unloading the chambers considerably quicker (corpses were unloaded from the old chambers in a primitive fashion: carried on stretchers or hauled by straps). The new chambers were each seven metres by eight metres. The total floor area of the new chambers was now 460 square metres, and the total area of all gas chambers in Treblinka reached 635 square metres.

  At this stage, Grossman worked through his calculations on the number of people killed in each batch, and extrapolated his figures to estimate that three million had been killed in ten months.

  Will we be able to find in ourselves enough courage to reflect on what our people were feeling, what they were going through during their last moments in those chambers? We know that they were silent . . . In the terribly crowded state, which was bone-crushing, their chests were unable to breathe, they were standing squashed against one another, with the last sticky death-sweat pouring down, they were standing there as one body.

  What pictures flashed in the glazed dying eyes? Those of childhood, of the happy peaceful days, or those of the last harsh journey? The grinning face of the SS soldier in the first square in front of the railway station? ‘So this is why he was laughing.’ The consciousness is waning, the minute of the terrible last suffering has come . . . No, it is impossible to imagine . . . The dead bodies were standing, gradually cooling down. Witnesses said that children were able to breathe for a longer time than the grown-ups. Schmidt’s assistants looked into the peepholes twenty to twenty-five minutes later. The time came to open the door of chambers leading to the platforms. Prisoners in overalls would start the unloading. As the floor sloped towards the platforms, the bodies fell out by themselves. People who were unloading the chambers told me that the faces of dead people were very yellow, and a little blood ran from the noses and mouths of about 70 per cent of them. Physiologists can explain this.

  The corpses were examined by SS men. If someone was discovered to be still alive, was moaning or moved, this person was shot with a pistol. Then the crews armed with dentist’s tongs would set to work wrenching platinum and gold teeth out of dead people’s mouths. The teeth were then sorted according to their value, packed into boxes and sent to Germany. Apparently, it was easier to wrench out the teeth of dead people than of those still alive.

  The corpses were loaded on to the cars and taken to the enormous moat-graves. There, they were laid down in rows, closely, side by side. The moat would be left unfilled with earth, waiting . . . And meanwhile, when workers would have just begun unloading the gas chamber, the ‘transport’ Scharführer would receive a short order by telephone. The Scharführer would then blow a whistle, a signal for the engine driver, and another twenty carriages were slowly drawn to the platform with its simulation of a railway station called ‘Ober-Maidan’ . . . The excavators were working, roaring, digging day and night new moats, hundreds of metres long. And the moats stood there unfilled, waiting. They did not have to wait long.

  Himmler’s victims.

  Himmler visited Treblinka early in 1943 at the end of the winter. He inspected the camp and one of the people who saw him there said that he went up to a huge pit and looked into it for a long time without speaking. The Reichsführer SS flew away the same day in his personal plane. Just before leaving, Himmler gave the commanders of the camp an order that confused everyone: Hauptsturmführer Baron von Perein, and his deputy, Korol, and Captain Franz were immediately to be
gin burning the buried corpses, and burn them all, to the last corpse, to take ash and cinder out of the camp and disperse them in fields and roads. There were already millions of corpses in the earth by that time, and this task seemed extremely difficult and complicated. The order was also given not to bury the dead any longer, but to burn them at once. Why did Himmler fly there for this inspection and personally give this categorical order? There could only be one possible explanation for this: the Red Army’s victory at Stalingrad.

  At first, the burning did not go very well. The corpses did not want to burn. It was noticed, however, that women’s corpses burned better than men’s, and the workers tried to use them to make men’s corpses burn better. Large amounts of petrol and oil were used to burn the corpses, but this was expensive, and did not work very well. It all seemed like a blind alley. But a solution was soon found. A thickset man of about fifty arrived, a specialist and expert.

  Construction of furnaces began under his guidance. These were furnaces of a special type. An excavator dug a trench which was 250–300 metres long, 20–25 metres wide and 5 metres deep. Ferroconcrete columns were installed on the bottom of the moat in three rows at equal distance from one another. They provided the foundation for steel beams along the rectangular pit. Rails were placed on these beams at a distance of five to seven centimetres from one another. This was the structure of the gigantic bars of the cyclopic furnaces. A new narrow-gauge railway was built which led from the moat-graves to the moat-furnace. Another furnace was built soon, and then a third one of the same size. Onto each furnace-grill, 3,500–4,000 corpses were loaded simultaneously.8