by Alan Levy
On a hot day the Ukrainian helpers feel good. They work with their whips from right to left, in all directions. Nikolai and Ivan . . . they feel very good and happy on such a hot day.
Ivan is about twenty-five years old, looks like a strong, big boss. He is pleased when he has an opportunity to expend on the workers his energies. From time to time he gets an urge to take a sharp knife, stop a worker who is running by, and cut off his ear. The blood spurts out, the worker screams, but he has to keep running with the carrier [a stretcher for corpses]. Ivan waits patiently until the worker runs back. He tells him to put the carrier down, tells him to get undressed, to go over to the pit where he shoots him.
Once, Rajchman and another ‘dentist’ named Finkelstein were working at a well – washing blood and tissue from the gold crowns they had extracted from corpses – when Ivan wandered over with an auger for drilling holes in wood. ‘He told Finkelstein to lie down on the ground,’ Rajchman recalled, ‘and he drilled the metal into his rear end. This was just a joke. The poor man didn’t even scream out loud. He only groaned.’
Ivan just laughed and told Finkelstein: ‘Lie still or I’ll shoot you.’
In 1981, Chiel Rajchman of Montevideo, Uruguay was a key witness in a Cleveland, Ohio trial that led to the revocation of the US citizenship of John Demjanjuk, sixty, a Ford Motor Company mechanic, and Demjanjuk’s extradition and deportation to Israel five years later to stand trial for the crimes of Treblinka’s ‘Ivan the Terrible’. The second man to occupy the glass booth in Jerusalem where Adolf Eichmann had defended himself a quarter of a century earlier, Demjanjuk, too, was sentenced to death (in 1988). Unlike Eichmann, however, he denied everything, including that he, Ivan Nicolaievich Demjanjuk, born 3 April 1920, in Duboimachariwzi in the Ukraine, was the same person as ‘the other Ivan’, whose name he (and, later, others) said was Marchenko. But Demjanjuk performed the ultimate abstraction when he told the US marshals escorting him to Israel: ‘If I was in Treblinka, then I was just a small cog. There was a war on, and there was no choice but to follow orders. But I was never in Treblinka.’59
Aloof and distant, Franz Stangl stood above it all, above the ‘dentists’ and the ‘work-Jews’, the victims and their corpses, the driven and their destroyers, the SS and the Ukrainians. He was the master magician tinkering with new illusions to beguile killers and innocents alike: admonitions to ‘take soap and towel into the bath-house with you’ . . . receipts for clothing to be claimed after ‘showering’ . . . and, on occasions when traffic needed to be slowed down, a booth along ‘The Road to Heaven’ would be opened by a Ukrainian to collect a piddling ‘one zloty to pay for the bath’. . . or, when traffic needed to be speeded up, a German sat there encouraging them to ‘hurry up before the water gets cold’.
Two of Sigmund Freud’s sisters, both in their eighties, were transported to Treblinka from Vienna and, on the platform at arrival, one of them went up to the newly commissioned Lieutenant Kurt Franz (whose zeal had won him a rare ‘battlefield’ promotion from the top enlisted rank of sergeant) and asked to be given lighter work because of her age and health. Franz humoured her with the assurance that she must have been sent there by mistake and would be put on the first train back to Vienna ‘as soon as you take a bath.’60
As in Auschwitz and Janowskà, there was a camp band. This one was conducted by a noted Jewish chamber musician, Arthur Gold, to hasten the pace up ‘The Road to Heaven’ and muffle the cries and moans of hundreds of humans being driven to their deaths like cattle to a pen. To enable inmates to whistle while they worked with the remains of their co-religionists, Kurt Franz wrote a ‘Treblinka Song’ which Gold set to music and ‘work-Jews’ had to sing at roll-calls:
Looking straight ahead – brave and joyous – at the world,
We march off to our work.
All that matters is Treblinka;
It is our destiny.
We heed our commandant’s voice,
Obeying his every nod and sign.
We march along together
To do what duty demands.
Work, obedience, and duty
Must be our whole existence.
We want to serve, to go on serving
Until destiny winks its eye. Hooray!
Even with this musical homage to Stangl to inspire them, fifteen to twenty ‘work-Jews’ committed suicide daily – and, occasionally, so did a Ukrainian or a German SS man.
Like Simon Wiesenthal, a Czech ‘work-Jew’, Richard Glazar, marvelled at how well the death machinery worked, even when technically imperfect, because the people who ran it rarely failed. Glazar, who survived Treblinka and then twenty years of Stalinism in his native Czechoslovakia before escaping to Switzerland during Alexander Dubček’s brief Prague Spring of freedom in 1968, contends that ‘only lack of transport, because the Germans needed it for war, prevented them from dealing with far vaster numbers; Treblinka alone could have dealt with the six million Jews and more besides.’ Given adequate rail transport, he says, just the German extermination camps in Poland could have liquidated all the Poles, Russians, and other East European ‘sub-humans’ they planned to kill once the war was won.
The weak link, transport, had become the burden and mission of Adolf Eichmann, who visited Treblinka twice in 1942 – once in the camp’s preparatory stages and again, with an SS group from Berhn, when Stangl had it running smoothly.
The first time, he tried not to use his imagination when a police captain in shirt-sleeves whose ‘vulgar, uncultivated voice’ (Eichmann recalled almost two decades later to his Israeli interrogators) told him in ‘some dialect from the south-western corner of Germany . . . how he had made everything nicely air-tight, for they were going to hook up a Russian submarine engine and pipe the exhaust into the house and the Jews inside would be poisoned.’ For Eichmann, this was ‘monstrous. I can’t listen to such things . . . without their affecting me. Even today, if I see someone with a deep cut, I have to look away. I could never have been a doctor. I still remember how I pictured the thing to myself and began to tremble, as if I’d been through something, some terrible experience.’ Quite likely, the vulgar captain he described – adding, ‘maybe he drank’ – was the savage Christian Wirth.
The second time around, ‘I expected to see a wooden house on the right side of the road and a few more wooden houses on the left; that’s what I remembered.’ Instead, Eichmann was pleasantly surprised to see ‘a railroad station with a sign saying TREBLINKA, looking exactly like a German railroad station – a replica, with sign-boards, etc.’ As a desk murderer who professed to be squeamish about violent death, Eichmann said he ‘hung back as far as I could. I didn’t push closer to see it all. I saw a footbridge enclosed in barbed wire and over that footbridge a file of naked Jews was being driven into a house, a big . . . no, not a house, a big, one-room structure, to be gassed.’
Anticipation of Eichmann’s second visit threw Commandant Stangl into a tizzy of tidying Treblinka. He ordered Staff Sergeant Suchomel (who, in 1965, was sentenced to seven years for his service under Stangl) to ‘put everything in order, first in the tailor shop and then . . . make sure about the “gold Jews” shop, too. Mark all trunks and cases very precisely with regard to content and description. He is going to want to see it looking exactly right. And when they are here, you come up to us and make a report in a proper military style.’
Witnesses were scarce. Once upon a time, an ‘Aryan’ woman – the wife of a high-ranking German Army officer – and her two sons boarded the wrong train in Germany. They wound up in a perfectly respectable passenger coach bound for Treblinka with Jewish veterans who had fought for the Kaiser in the First World War – and their families. It was only on the platform at arrival that the young mother managed to make herself heard while being ordered to undress. She presented identity papers showing she was of pure German stock and, besides, the SS could see that neither of her sons had been circumcised. Yankel Wiernik was there and wrote in One Year in Treblinka (1944):
>
She was a good-looking woman, but there was terror in her eyes. She clung to her children and tried to soothe them, saying their troubles would soon be cleared up and they would return home . . . She petted and kissed them, but she was crying because she was haunted by a dreadful foreboding.
The Germans ordered her to step forward. Thinking that this meant freedom for herself and her children, she relaxed. But alas, it had been decided that she was to perish together with the Jews, because she had seen too much and would be liable to tell all about what she had seen, which was supposed to be shrouded in secrecy. Whoever crossed the threshold of Treblinka was doomed to die. Therefore, this German woman, together with her children, went to her death with all the others. Her children cried just as the Jewish children did, and their eyes mirrored the same despair, for in death there is no racial distinction; all are equal.
Stretched far beyond the parameters of Kant and Nietzsche, the twisted German logic that let lesser thinkers like Stangl and Eichmann live with themselves in World War II has never been articulated more revealingly than in Stangl’s dialogues with Gitta Sereny in Düsseldorf in 1971 during the last months of his life.
‘It was a matter of survival, always of survival,’ Stangl told Sereny. ‘What I had to do . . . was to limit my own actions to what I – in my own conscience – could answer for. At police training school, they taught us . . . that the definition of a crime must meet four requirements: there has to be a subject, an object, an action, and free will. If any of these four elements are missing, then we are not dealing with a punishable offence.’
‘I can’t see how you could possibly apply this concept to this situation,’ Sereny protested.
‘That’s what I’m trying to explain to you,’ said Stangl. ‘The only way I could live was by compartmentalizing my thinking. By doing this, I could apply it to my own situation. If the subject was the government, the object the Jews, and the action the gassings, then I could tell myself that for me the fourth element, free will, was missing.’
On another occasion, Sereny asked Stangl: ‘What did you think at the time was the reason for the exterminations?’
‘They wanted the Jews’ money,’ he replied.
‘You can’t be serious!’ she exclaimed.
‘But of course. Have you any idea of the fantastic sums that were involved? That’s how the steel from Sweden was bought.’
‘But,’ Sereny argued, ‘they weren’t all rich . . . There were hundreds of thousands of them from ghettoes in the East who had nothing . . .’
‘Nobody had nothing,’ said Stangl. ‘Everybody had something.’
As if to confirm Stangl’s reasoning, Simon Wiesenthal cites a document signed by Stangl: a roster of items delivered by his Treblinka administration to SS headquarters in Berlin between 1 October 1942 and 2 August 1943:
25 freight cars of women’s hair
248 freight cars of clothing
100 freight cars of shoes
22 freight cars of dry goods
46 freight cars of drugs
254 freight cars of rugs and bedding
400 freight cars of various used articles
2,800,000 American dollars
400,000 British pounds
12 million Soviet rubles
140 million Polish zlotys
400,000 gold watches
145,000 kilograms golden wedding rings
4,000 karats of diamonds over 2 karats
120 million zlotys in various gold coins
Several thousand strings of pearls
When Stangl insisted that ‘the racial business was just secondary’ to the looting, Sereny asked him why, if the Nazis were going to kill the Jews anyway, they humiliated them so cruelly and used so much hate propaganda.
‘To condition those who actually had to carry out the policies,’ he answered. ‘To make it possible for them to do what they did.’
‘Well, you were part of that,’ Sereny pointed out. ‘Did you hate?’
‘Never! I would never let anybody dictate to me who to hate.’
‘What is the difference to you between hate and a contempt which results in considering people as “cargo”?’
‘It has nothing to do with hate. They were so weak. They allowed everything to happen – to be done to them. They were people with whom there was no common ground, no possibility of communication – that is how contempt is born. I could never understand how they could just give in as they did. Quite recently I read a book about lemmings, who every five or six years just wander into the sea and die; that made me think of Treblinka.’
Simon Wiesenthal says that the first time he came upon the name of Franz Stangl was in 1948, when ‘I was shown a secret list of decorations awarded to high SS officers. Most of the recipients were given the Cross of Merit for “bravery beyond the call of duty”, “giving aid to comrades under fire”, or “escape under especially hazardous circumstances”. But after certain names on the list there is just the pencilled notation “Secret Reich’s Matters” followed by “for psychological discomfort”. The coded Nazi terminology meant “for special merit in the technique of mass extermination”. Franz Stangl’s name was followed by both the notation and the special remark.’
On 4 October 1943, Heinrich Himmler told a meeting of SS generals in Posen (now Poznan, Poland):
‘I also want to speak very frankly about an extremely important subject. Among ourselves we will discuss it openly; in public, however, we must never mention it. . .
‘I mean the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. This is something that is easy to talk about. “The Jewish people will be exterminated,” says every member of the party. “This is clear, this is in our programme: the elimination, the extermination of the Jews. We will do this.” And then they come to you – eighty million good Germans – and each one has his “decent” Jew. Naturally, all the rest are vermin, but this particular Jew is first-rate. Not one of those who talk this way has seen the bodies; not one has been on the spot. Most of you know what it is to see a pile of one hundred or five hundred or one thousand bodies. To have stuck it out and at the same time, barring exceptions caused by human weakness, to have remained decent: this is what has made us tough.
‘This is a page of glory in our history which never has and never will be written.’
Even the shadowy Stangl, who avoided most contact with Jews at Treblinka, had his own ‘decent’ Jew: a Viennese named Blau, whom he made a cook because ‘I always tried to give as many jobs as possible to Viennese Jews . . . After all, I was Austrian . . . Blau was the one I talked to the most; him and his wife . . . He knew I’d help whenever I could.’
One day, Blau asked Stangl’s help. Blau’s eighty-year-old father had arrived on that morning’s transport. Was there anything Stangl could do?
‘Really, Blau, you must understand,’ Stangl responded in a kindly voice. ‘It’s impossible. A man of eighty!’
Blau said of course he understood his father couldn’t be put to work and would therefore be a useless mouth. But could he take him to the fake ‘hospital’ for execution rather than let him be run through The Tube to the gas chamber? And could he maybe take his father first to the kitchen and give him a meal?
Stangl said magnanimously: ‘You go and do what you think best, Blau. Officially, I don’t know anything; but unofficially you can tell the Kapo [prisoner squad leader] I said it was all right.’ That afternoon, according to what Stangl told Sereny in 1971, ‘when I came back to my office, Blau was waiting for me. He had tears in his eyes. He stood to attention and said: “Herr Kommandant, I want to thank you. I gave my father a meal. And I’ve just taken him to the hospital; it’s all over. Thank you very much.” I said, “Well, Blau, there’s no need to thank me, but of course if you want to thank me, you may.”’
While the son’s wish to show his doomed father how well he was doing under the worst of circumstances may be comprehensible to some, to Gitta Sereny ‘this story and the wa
y it was told represented to me the starkest example of a corrupted personality I had ever encountered and came very near to making me stop these conversations. I broke off early that lunchtime and went to sit for nearly two hours in a pub across the street, wrestling with the most intense malaise I’d ever felt at the thought of listening further.’ Fortunately, she did return and historians probing the depths of the Final Solution are indebted to her intestinal fortitude.
To Sereny, Stangl also described how ‘a beautiful reddish-blonde Jewess’ was sent up to substitute for an ailing maid who cleaned his living quarters. Just to make chit-chat, Stangl asked her if she had chosen a room for herself in the servant barracks.
The girl stopped dusting and stood very still, looking Stangl in the eye before responding quietly: ‘Why do you ask?’
Taken aback by her breach of master-slave etiquette, Stangl blustered: ‘Why shouldn’t I ask? I can ask, can’t I?’
The girl looked right through him for a few seconds before saying: ‘Can I go?’
‘Yes, of course,’ Stangl said. Years later, he recalled how ‘I so admired her for facing up to me’, but could not remember what became of her. Apparently, the girl, Tchechia Mandel, an industrialist’s daughter from Wiesenthal’s home city of Lemberg, was still alive and working in the camp kitchen at the time of a 2 August 1943 uprising when 200 militant young Jews (including Richard Glazar and Grossinger’s maître d’ Siedlecki, ‘dentist’ Rajchman and lumberman Rajzman) – armed with rifles, revolvers, and hand grenades stolen from the SS arsenal – cut all wires, set fire to the camp, and escaped into the woods with another 400 ‘work-Jews’. (Four hundred more who couldn’t or wouldn’t flee were killed in the camp.) Most of the escapees were hunted down and murdered by the Germans, Ukrainians, Polish peasants, and even Polish partisans. Only fifty survived the war.
No women were in a position to escape on that heroic Monday and hardly a handful of them survived the German reprisals. The spirited Tchechia Mandel did, but she was not to be spared.
