A Writer at War

by Vasily Grossman

  People who took part in burning the corpses say that the furnaces were reminiscent of gigantic volcanoes. A terrible heat burned the faces of the workers, flames flew eight to ten metres into the air, pillars of thick and greasy smoke reached the sky and hung in the air in a heavy immobile cloud. At night, local people from surrounding villages saw these flames from anything up to forty kilometres away. They rose taller than the pine forest around the camp. The smell of burned human meat filled the whole surrounding area. When the wind blew towards the Polish camp three kilometres away, the people there were suffocated with a terrible stench. Some eight hundred prisoners were kept busy burning corpses. This monstrous workshop operated day and night for eight months and couldn’t cope with the millions of buried human corpses, as new transports kept coming all the time.

  Trains arrived from Bulgaria, and the SS and Wachmänner were happy about them, as the tricked people, who had no idea of their fate, had brought many valuables, and lots of tasty things, including white bread. After them, trains began to arrive from Grodno and Bialystok, then, from the rebellious Warsaw ghetto. A group of Gypsies came from Bessarabia, about two hundred men and eight hundred women and children. The Gypsies came on foot, with strings of horse-driven carts following them. They too had been tricked. They arrived escorted by only two guards, who themselves had absolutely no idea that they had brought people to die. Witnesses say that Gypsy women clasped their hands when they saw the beautiful building of the gas chamber, and never suspected what their fate would be. The Germans found this particularly amusing.

  Terrible torments awaited those who arrived from the Warsaw ghetto. Women and children were separated from the crowd and taken to the places where corpses were burned instead of to the gas chambers. Mothers who went mad with terror were forced to lead their children between the glowing furnace bars on which thousands of dead bodies were writhing in flames and smoke, where corpses were squirming and jerking in the heat as if they had became alive again, where stomachs of dead pregnant women cracked from the heat, and unborn babies burned on the open wombs of the mothers. This sight could render even the strongest person insane.

  It is infinitely hard even to read this. The reader must believe me, it is as hard to write it. Someone might ask: ‘Why write about this, why remember all that?’ It is the writer’s duty to tell this terrible truth, and it is the civilian duty of the reader to learn it. Everyone who would turn away, who would shut his eyes and walk past would insult the memory of the dead. Everyone who does not know the truth about this would never be able to understand with what sort of enemy, with what sort of monster, our Red Army started on its own mortal combat.

  The SS men began to feel bored in Treblinka. The procession of the doomed people to gas chambers had ceased to excite them. It became routine. When the burning of corpses started, the SS men spent hours by the furnaces, the new sight amused them. The expert who had come from Germany was walking among the furnaces from morning till night, always excited and talkative. People say that no one ever saw him frowning or even serious, the smile never left his face. When corpses fell onto the furnace bars, he used to say of them: ‘Innocent, innocent.’ This was his favourite catchphrase.

  Sometimes the SS men organised a kind of picnic by the furnaces: they would sit down on the lee side, drink wine, eat and watch the flames. The sick quarters were also re-equipped. A round trench was dug with furnace bars installed on its bottom, on which the corpses were burning. Low little benches were made that stood around the trench, as if it were a stadium. They stood so close to the edge that those who sat on them were sitting right above the trench. Sick people and frail old people were brought here, and then ‘medical assistants’ would make them sit on benches facing the bonfire of human bodies. When they had had enough of this sight, the cannibals shot at the grey heads and the bent backs of people sitting down. Those killed and wounded would fall into the bonfire.

  We have never had a high regard for unsubtle German humour, but hardly anyone on this planet could have imagined what the SS humour in Treblinka was like, what the SS amused themselves with, and what jokes were made. They organised football matches for the doomed men, organised a chorus of the doomed, dances of the doomed . . . There was even a special hymn, ‘Treblinka’, written for them, which included the following words:

  ‘Für uns gibt heute nur Treblinka

  Die unser Schiksal ist . . .’9

  People with blood pouring from their wounds were forced to learn idiotic German sentimental songs just a few minutes before they died:

  ‘Ich bruch das Blumelein

  und schenkte es dem schönste

  geliebste Madelein . . .’10

  The chief commandant of the camp selected several children from one of the transports, killed their parents, dressed the children in the best clothes, gave them lots of sweets, played with them, and then gave orders to kill them a few days later when he became bored with this game. One of the main amusements were the night rapes and torture of beautiful young women and girls, who were selected from each transport of prisoners. In the morning, the rapists themselves would take them to the gas chamber.

  All the witnesses remember one feature which SS men in Treblinka had in common: they loved theoretical constructions, philosophising. They all indulged in making speeches in front of the prisoners. They boasted and explained the great significance for the future of what was taking place in Treblinka. They were all deeply and sincerely convinced of the importance and rightness of their work.

  They did gymnastics – they passionately cared for their own health and the convenience of their everyday life. They made gardens and flower beds around their barracks. They went for holidays in Germany several times a year, because their chiefs thought that their work was very bad for their health and wanted to protect them. Back at home, they would walk around with their heads up, proudly.

  The summer of 1943 was unusually hot in this place. There was no rain, no cloud, no wind for many weeks. The work on burning the corpses went on at full speed. The furnaces had been glowing for six months day and night, but only a little more than a half of the corpses had been burned. Prisoners who had to burn the corpses couldn’t stand the terrible moral torment, and fifteen to twenty of them committed suicide every day. Many of them sought death, deliberately violating the regulations.

  ‘It was a luxury to get a bullet,’ said Kosezky, a doctor who escaped from the camp. People said to me that it was many times more terrible to live in Treblinka than to die there. The cinder and ash from the burned corpses were loaded on to railway cars and taken outside the camp’s fencing. Peasants from the village of Wulka, whom the Germans had conscripted, put the cinder and ash on carts and dispersed them along the road going past the death camp to the Polish punishment camp. Child prisoners with spades distributed the ashes evenly on the road. Sometimes they found in it golden coins and melted gold teeth. The children were called ‘children from the black road’. The road became black from the ash, like a crêpe bandage. The wheels of vehicles made a special rustling sound on it, and when I was driven on this road, I could hear this mournful rustle, soft like a shy complaint . . .

  In the song ‘Treblinka’, which the Germans forced the eight hundred men who worked burning the corpses to sing, there were words appealing to the prisoners to be obedient, and promising them in return a ‘little, little happiness, of which they would catch a glimpse for just one minute’.

  There was one happy day in the hell of Treblinka . . . The prisoners planned an uprising. They had nothing to lose. They all had been sentenced to death. Every day of their present existence was a day of suffering and torture. Germans would have had no mercy for them, witnesses of terrible crimes, they would all end up in one of the gas chambers and be replaced by new men. Only a few dozen men survived in Treblinka for weeks or months, instead of days. These were qualified specialists – carpenters, stonemasons, tailors, hairdressers. They were the ones who formed a committee for the uprising. They
didn’t want to escape until they had destroyed Treblinka.

  A suffocating heatwave settled at the end of July. When graves were opened, steam began to rise from them as if they were gigantic boilers. A monstrous stench and heat were killing people – the emaciated men carrying the corpses sometimes fell dead on the furnace bars. Billions of heavy flies who had had too much to eat were crawling on the ground and humming in the air.

  A decision was made to start the uprising on 2 August. The signal was to be a revolver shot.11 New flames soared into the sky, this time not the heavy greasy flames of the burning corpses, but the bright, hot and violent flames of a fire. The camp buildings were burning . . . A thunder of shots was heard, machine guns started to fire from captured, rebel towers. The air was shaken with rattling and cracking, the whistling of bullets became louder than the humming of carrion flies. Axes stained with red blood began to flicker in the air. On 2 August, the evil blood of SS men poured on to the soil of the hellish Treblinka . . . They were all confused, they forgot about the system of Treblinka’s defence that had been prepared so devilishly well, forgot about the deadly fire that had been organised in advance, forgot about their weapons.

  While Treblinka was ablaze and the rebels broke through the fences, saying a silent goodbye to the ashes of their people, SS and police units were rushed in from all directions to hunt them down. Hundreds of police dogs were sent after them. German aircraft were sent up. Battles went on in the forest and in the marshes. Very few of the rebels survived, but what difference does it make? They died fighting, with weapons in their hands.12

  Treblinka ceased to exist after 2 August. The Germans finished burning the remaining corpses, destroyed stone buildings, removed wire, burned the wooden barracks that had not been burned by the rebels. The installations of the death factory were blown up or loaded onto railway wagons and taken away. Excavators were either blown up or taken away, the numberless pits were filled with earth, the railway station was destroyed to the last brick, the railway line was disassembled and the sleepers removed. Lupins were sown on the territory of the camp, and Streben, a settler, built his little house there. Now, even this house does not exist, it has been burned.13

  What did the Germans intend to achieve by all this? To conceal the murder? But how on earth would that be possible? Himmler has no power any longer over his accomplices: they lower their heads, their trembling fingers play with the edge of their jackets, and they recount in muffled, monotonous voices the story of their crimes, which sounds insane and delirious, incredible. A Soviet officer, with the green ribbon of the Stalingrad medal is writing the murderers’ evidence down, page after page. A guard is standing at the door, his lips pressed together. He, too, has the Stalingrad medal on his chest, and his dark thin face is stern.

  We enter the camp and walk on the ground of Treblinka. Little pods of lupins burst open from the slightest touch, or burst open themselves with a light tinkle; millions of little seeds fall on the ground. The sound of the falling seeds, the tinkling of the opening pods, blend together into a single melody, sad and quiet. It seems as if it is a funeral ringing of little bells coming to us right from the depth of the earth, barely heard, mournful, broad, calm.

  The earth is throwing out crushed bones, teeth, clothes, papers. It does not want to keep secrets. And the objects are climbing out from the earth, from its unhealing wounds. Here they are, half ruined by decay, shirts of the murdered people, their trousers, shoes, cigarette cases which have grown green, little wheels from watches, penknives, shaving brushes, candleholders, a child’s shoes with red pompons, towels with Ukrainian embroidery, lace underwear, scissors, thimbles, corsets, bandages. And a little further on, heaps of plates and dishes have made their way to the surface. And further on – it is as if someone’s hand is pushing them up into the light, from the bottomless bulging earth – emerge the things that the Germans had tried to bury, Soviet passports, notebooks with Bulgarian writing in them, photographs of children from Warsaw and Vienna, letters scribbled by children, a book of poetry, a prayer copied on a yellowed piece of paper, food ration cards from Germany . . . And everywhere there are hundreds of little scent bottles, green, pink, blue . . . A terrible smell of putrefaction hangs over everything, the smell that neither fire, nor sun, rains, snow and winds could dispel. And hundreds of little forest flies are crawling on the half-rotted things, papers and photographs.

  We walk on and on across the bottomless unsteady land of Treblinka, and then suddenly we stop. Some yellow hair, wavy, fine and light, glowing like brass, is trampled into the earth, and blonde curls next to it, and then heavy black plaits on the light-coloured sand, and then more and more. Apparently, these are the contents of one – just one sack of hair – which hadn’t been taken away. Everything is true. The last, lunatic hope that everything was only a dream is ruined. And lupin 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.

  Not surprisingly, Grossman himself found it very hard to stand. He collapsed from nervous exhaustion, stress and nausea on his return to Moscow in August. Ehrenburg invited round the French journalist Jean Cathala to give him details of what had emerged from the liberation of Majdanek and Treblinka. Grossman was apparently too ill to leave his bed and join them.

  1 Treblinka is a little over twenty kilometres south-east of Ostrów Mazowiecka, a town northwest of Warsaw on the road to Bialystok. The camp lies half a dozen kilometres from the River Bug. The other two Aktion-Reinhard camps were Sobibor and Belzec.

  2 Grossman here is referring still to Treblinka I. The first camp commandant of Treblinka II was Obersturmführer Imfried Eberl and he was replaced in August 1942 by Obersturmführer Franz Stangl. Kurt Franz was the deputy commandant.

  3 Grossman, basing his estimate on the numbers of trains he had heard about and their size, produced the calculation that around three million people must have been killed here. Subsequent research has shown the figure to be between 750,000 and 880,000. The reason why Grossman’s estimate was excessive is probably quite simple. He was right about the sixty carriages per train, but he does not seem to have discovered that because the station platform by the extermination camp was so short, the trains used to halt some way off, and only a section at a time was shunted to the platform. Thus it was not five trains of sixty carriages per day, but generally a single train split up into five sections.

  4 It is estimated by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre that some 876,000 people were murdered at Treblinka II. This figure includes 738,000 Jews from the Generalgouvernement, beginning with the Warsaw ghetto; 107,000 from Bialystok; 29,000 Jews from elsewhere in Europe; and 2,000 Gypsies.

  5 Most reports seem to suggest that Treblinka functioned on the basis of around twenty-five SS personnel and a hundred Ukrainian Wachmänner auxiliary guards, but some of the ones mentioned here by Grossman could have been train guards not based at Treblinka. Grossman could not reveal the fact that the Wachmänner were Ukrainian. That is why he speaks of ‘SS men’ and ‘policemen’. The workers were selected Jewish prisoners who would last a few weeks before being killed themselves.

  6 SS rank roughly equivalent to that of staff sergeant.

  7 Untersturmführer in the SS was equivalent to lieutenant in the army. Kurt Franz was in fact Stangl’s deputy.

  8 These were nicknamed the ‘roasts’.

  9 ‘For us there is now only Treblinkav which is our fate . . .’

  10 ‘I pluck the little flower / and give it to the loveliest / most adored young girl . . .’

  11 The revolt was mainly organised by Zelo Bloch, a Jewish lieutenant from the Czech Army. The uprising began early, because an SS guard became suspicious. He was shot but this triggered the general action before most of the weapons had been removed from the armoury, to which the rebels had managed to obtain a duplicate key.

/>   12 It is estimated that about 750 prisoners managed to escape through the wire, but only seventy of them lived to see liberation a year later.

  13 The family brought in to make the place look like a farm was Ukrainian.

  PART FIVE

  Amid the Ruins of the

  Nazi World

  1945

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Warsaw and ód

  The Red Army, after the massive operations during the summer of 1944, which had forced the Wehrmacht back from the Beresina to the Vistula, needed time to recover and re-equip. Yet at the end of July, as Rokossovsky’s 1st Belorussian Front reached the eastern suburbs of Warsaw, Soviet radio stations had called on the Poles to rise in revolt behind German lines. But Stalin had no intention of coming to their aid or even letting the Western Allies help them with air drops. This was because the revolt was planned and led by the Armia Krajowa – the Home Army – which owed allegiance to the émigré government in London, and not to the Committee of National Liberation, the puppet Communist organisation set up in Lublin. The tragic, doomed heroism of the Warsaw uprising lasted from 1 August until 2 October. There is no mention of it in Grossman’s notebooks, which might well reflect the complete news blackout imposed by the Soviet authorities. After the Germans had crushed the rising, they systematically destroyed a large part of the city, as Grossman would see.