Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (19 page)

The reason why Stangl remembered Stanislaw Szmajzner so well is that, fourteen years old at the time and looking even younger, Start had worked in Sobibor as a goldsmith. “I went almost every day to watch him work,” Stangl said. “He was a wonderful goldsmith and a nice boy.”

Szmajzner was born in Pulawy on the Vistula in Poland, the middle child of a prosperous orthodox Jewish family. His father was a fruit exporter, dealing principally in the export of strawberries to, surprisingly enough, Germany. Stanislaw went to a Hebrew school.

For a child from an orthodox Polish Jewish family, he appears to have been exceptionally independent from a very early age. “I didn’t really like school very much,” he told me. “It worried my parents a lot because in our family boys were traditionally good scholars. But school work bored me. What fascinated me, from very early on, was the craft of working with gold. There was a remarkable master-goldsmith in Pulawy – his name was Herzl – and I used to watch him whenever I could. When I was ten, I made a bargain with my father: I said that if he would allow me to take lessons from Pan Herzl, I would promise in return to work hard at school. Well, he said, all right, it was a deal, and that’s how I became a qualified goldsmith by the time I was twelve – the year the Germans invaded Poland. It saved my life.”

For two and a half years after the German invasion of Poland, the Szmajzner family moved from one town to another in an effort to ameliorate their lot. Six months after the invasion, Stan, his brother-in-law, Josef, and the goldsmith Herzl slipped across the Russian frontier in the hope of greater safety in Soviet territory; but the Hitler-Stalin pact was still in force and the Russians promptly shipped all Polish Jews back to the Germans in Poland. A second attempt was more successful. Josef decided to stay in Russia; Herzl and Stan worked for a while at their craft until homesickness and anxiety about his family drove Stan back to Pulawy.

Although still only thirteen years old, Stan often took the initiative, not only in trying to save himself but also in advising his parents how to cope; unlike most of the Jews in this part of the world, he appears to have felt instinctively that safety lay in individual and unconventional action, not in remaining with the “group”. None the less, circumstances always forced them back into the ghettos. “For a whole family, it was impossible to do otherwise,” said Stan. “By the autumn of 1941 we were living in the ghetto of Wolwonice. Conditions had deteriorated to the point where people were literally dying of hunger and my father decided to try to ‘pass’ as a Catholic and beg for food in the streets ‘in the name of Jesus’. But it brought him more shame than food; he cried every night because he had been driven to commit such sacrilege. And the greatest risk was being found out by a Pole; they were always ready to denounce Jews to the Germans. Even in these terrible times – terrible for the Christian Poles too – anti-Semitism was so virulent, the Jews were as afraid of the Poles as they were of the Germans. My young brother, Moize, volunteered to work for the Germans as a servant, in our old home town, Pulawy, because my father wanted to know what had happened to our belongings; he had left everything in the care of Polish neighbours. [Polish Jews always refer to non-Jewish Poles as “Poles” and to themselves as “we” or “Jews”.] Moize went to see them and they told him that every single thing we owned had been taken by the Germans and that there was nothing left. But it wasn’t true; it was they who had taken everything and there was nothing we could do about it, nothing at all.”

While the family, especially Stan, Moize and their little nephew Jankus went from ghetto to ghetto, always trying to make themselves as useful to the Germans as possible, the deportation (or “resettlement” as it was called) of the Jewish population proceeded. Their turn came half-way through 1942. I have listened in many places around the world to men and women speaking of these awful memories. But in no place, perhaps, was it quite so extraordinary as this hot October day in a pioneering town ten thousand miles away from Poland’s pine forests in the middle of Brazil.

“After a night in a barbed-wire enclosure near the station at Malenzow,” Stan said, “early next morning they put us on a freight train, a hundred or a hundred and fifty in each car; so many that we had to stand up one against another. There were no windows, no sanitary facilities, there was no light, no air. People urinated, defecated and vomited. A few, the weakest, died standing up and had to stay standing up – there was no room to do anything else with them.”

Stanislaw, his parents, his twelve-year-old brother, Moize, his older sister and her eleven-year-old son, Jankus, a cousin aged twenty and several more distant relatives arrived in Sobibor on May 24, 1942.

“When the door of our car was pushed open,” he said, “all we could think of was to get out into the air. What I saw first was two guards with whips – later we found out they were Ukrainian
SS
. They immediately began to shout, ‘
Raus raus
,’ and hit out blindly at those who stood in front. Of course, this made everyone move quickly; those in the back pushed towards the front, and those in front, the immediate target of the Ukrainians’ whips, jumped off as quickly as they could. It was all perfectly planned to get us out of the cars with no delay. They only opened three cars at a time – that, too, was part of the system. When I jumped down with my family, I immediately caught hold of my brother’s and little nephew’s hands. I even shouted ‘We must stick together’. My older cousin also managed to stay with us but we immediately lost sight of my father. We looked around desperately, but the hurry, the noise, the fear and confusion were indescribable; it was impossible to find anyone once one lost them from sight. About twenty metres away, across the ‘square’, I saw a line of
SS
officers and they were shooting. I especially noticed Stangl,” Stanislaw said, “because he wore a white jacket – it stuck out. He was shooting too. I can’t say whether he killed anyone, or in fact whether anyone
was
killed by these shots or not, but they were certainly shooting. No, I can’t say whether Stangl shot into the crowd or above it – they were all shooting. The purpose was to get us all to run in one direction; through a gate and a kind of corridor into yet another square.”

Stanislaw Szmajzner is as impressive a man now as he was without doubt a remarkable boy at fourteen. His testimony – very nearly the only one that linked Stangl directly to a personal act of violence – weighed heavily at Stangl’s trial. There is no doubt that
SS
officers in the camps carried guns. (“German officers and enlisted men carried the same arms,” said Franz Suchomel. “German ‘Walther’ pistols, for which there was never enough ammunition; and ‘Nagans’ from Russian stocks, with lots of ammunition, and aside from that each enlisted man had an infantry rifle for emergencies. Non-commissioned officers also had submachine-guns for emergencies, but neither of these last were carried ordinarily. The Ukrainians were first issued looted guns but later they were also given German rifles. To be honest, all guns were of Czech origin, Mausers – Model 24 – with the stamp of the Slovak army. The submachine-guns were Finnish, because they too were better than the German ones. The German staff
had
to carry whips – I myself was often taken to task by Franz and Küttner for not having one. For Stangl the Jews made a small riding-crop, but he rarely carried it. When transports arrived the Ukrainian guards had whips too. Amongst the Jews, the Kapos and the ‘camp elders’ had whips, and also the men from the ‘Blue Command’ [who assisted at the arrival of transports]. The whips were made of leather, but they didn’t have anything ‘in’ them as has now been claimed.…”)

And Richard Glazar, a highly intelligent Czech survivor of Treblinka, who has even less reason than Suchomel to defend Stangl, says, “They all carried guns and whips [at Treblinka] except for Stangl. He only carried a small riding-crop.”

In the final analysis it is, of course, irrelevant whether or not Stangl carried a gun, and indeed – considering everything else he stood for in these camps – whether or not he actually used it. Even so, as a matter of principle, in this evaluation of what he said to me – and he maintained throughout, and throughout his trial, that he never shot into any crowds – one must at least pose the question: is it possible that time and memory can have played a not uncommon trick and blurred an impression of many years ago?
Could
a small boy, in the horror of this arrival, intent on keeping hold of his even younger relatives, trying to see what was happening to his mother and sister and desperately searching the crowds for his father – could this youngster really see over or through a tight-packed crowd of jostling, gesticulating people, which
SS
officer, twenty metres away and whether wearing a white jacket or not, was actually holding and using a gun? Stan Szmajzner, I know, will be the first to understand the motives of this question and to know that it is not in the slightest degree meant to reflect on his integrity.

Stangl, insisting that he had never shot into a crowd of people, appeared to be more indignant about this accusation than about anything else, and to find irrelevant the fact that, whether he shot into the group or not, these very same people died anyway, less than two hours later, through actions ultimately under his control.

This may appear to be a marginal matter, but I believe it to be peculiarly significant in representing a profoundly mistaken emphasis accepted – perhaps of necessity – by the courts, and also by the public and by the individuals involved: a concept whereby responsibility has been limited to momentary and often isolated actions, and to a few individuals. It is, I think, because of this universal acceptance of a false concept of responsibility that Stangl himself (until just before he died), his family and – in a wider but equally, if not even more, important sense – countless other people in Germany and outside it, have felt for years that what is decisive in law, and therefore in the whole conduct of human affairs, is what a man
does
on isolated occasions rather than what he
is.

To Stanislaw Szmajzner, the shooting incident was merely a tiny part of an enormous and horrendous panorama of memories. He seemed almost surprised at the importance ascribed to it. And he and many other survivors – far more than people who were only later or indirectly involved in these matters – came much closer to evaluating men like Stangl for what they
were
rather than for what they
did
on isolated occasions. The detached humanity and wisdom of some of the survivors is perhaps the most astounding thing to evolve out of these events.

“At the exit of the corridor into the second square,” Stan continued his story, “two more Ukrainians divided the arrivals into two groups: women and small children to the right, men and boys to the left. The women were immediately lined up in rows of four – my mother and sister too – and marched off through another gate at the right, we had no idea where to. Then they lined us up in fours too. That’s when I first saw Gustav Wagner, a very tall man, slightly malformed, who walked with a looped sort of movement of his body. He bellowed, ‘Carpenters, tailors, mechanics – step out.’ This was when we became certain it was a labour camp. I still don’t know today what made me step forward. But I got out of the line, stepped up to him and said – in German of course – ‘Don’t you need a goldsmith?’ Well, of course, I was just a little boy – he looked down at me and said, ‘You? Are you telling me you are a goldsmith?’ I said yes, I was, and so were my two brothers and my cousin, and I pointed at them. Of course they weren’t, but I just said they were because it seemed the thing to do. I quickly opened my rucksack and brought out some of my tools – that’s all I had in there – and showed them to him and also showed him something I had made. God knows what inspiration had made me bring it. Well, he told us to step out of the line and waved us to a corner. ‘Go and sit there,’ he said, and a bit later he sent another boy – a sign-painter he was. And we sat there, for hours I think, until everyone else from the transport had gone through that same gate on the right – we still didn’t know where. And then he came back and took us to yet a third courtyard in which there was an old wooden hut which he unlocked and pushed us into. It was empty except for an older man who rushed towards us and asked whether we were Jews. He said he was a sign-painter too, and had arrived the day before and that he had been put in that hut with ink and brushes and told to paint signs ‘Camp I, Camp II, Camp III’.

“We waited a long time – it was already dark when the door was unlocked again and Wagner told my brother and me to bring along a tin that was standing there, to fetch coffee and bread from another hut. When we got back we realized that the tin had contained petrol before and we couldn’t drink the coffee. But we had the bread. And afterwards we lay down on the ground and slept. The very next morning Wagner came with Stangl. So I was a goldsmith, they said. I sat down then and there and made something for them from a little bit of metal I had brought. They watched for a while and later I gave them what I had made. But anyway, that was the beginning. They brought me gold to work with that very afternoon.”

In his book Szmajzner described this first meeting with Stangl in greater detail: “He dressed impeccably and appeared vain although his eyes seemed kind. He had a soft voice, good manners and was extremely polite. He looked like a young university professor …” and he went on to say that Stangl had said repeatedly that he was amazed to find a boy of his age capable of making good jewellery.

“Stangl seemed so friendly when they brought the gold in the afternoon,” he told me. “I felt encouraged to ask about my father. I told him that I’d like to go and see my father. ‘Where is he, please?’ I asked. ‘You are much better off here,’ Stangl answered in a very friendly way. ‘This is a much better place to work. Don’t worry about him. He is all right.’

“They assigned my brother to work with me; my little nephew was eventually made bootboy for the officers; he also had to run their baths and that sort of thing. And my twenty-year-old cousin was appointed Platzmeister: he had to tidy up the square where transports arrived – organize the belongings into lots and so on. [The Szmajzner family obviously arrived before the camp was completed and the work organized. Later the workers were grouped into Kommandos, each performing different functions.]