Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (27 page)

“
In front of the prisoners?
”

“Yes, what else? Once a complaint is made it has to be investigated. Of course we didn’t find the watch – whoever it was had got rid of it.”

“
What happened to the complainant?
”

“Who?”

“
The man who lodged the complaint?
”

“I don’t know,” he said vaguely. “Of course, as I said, usually I’d be working in my office – there was a great deal of paper work – till about 11. Then I made my next round, starting up at the
Totenlager.
By that time they were well ahead with the work up there.” He meant that by this time the 5,000 to 6,000 people who had arrived that morning were dead: the “work” was the disposal of the bodies which took most of the rest of the day and during some months continued during the night. I knew this, but I wanted to get him to speak more directly about the
people
, and asked where the people were who had come on the transport. His answer continued to be evasive; he still avoided referring to them as “people”.

“Oh, by that time of the morning everything was pretty much finished in the lower camp. A transport was normally dealt with in two or three hours. At 12 I had lunch – yes, we usually had meat, potatoes, some fresh vegetables such as cauliflowers – we grew them ourselves quite soon – and after lunch I had about half an hour’s rest. Then another round and more work in the office.”

“
What did you do in the evenings?
”

“After supper people sat around and talked. When I came first they used to drink for hours in the mess. But I put a stop to that. Afterwards they drank in their rooms.”

“
What did
you
do? Did you have any friends there? Anyone you felt you had something in common with?
”

“Nobody. Nobody with whom I could really talk. I knew none of them.”

“
Even after a while? A month?
”

He shrugged his shoulders. “What’s a month? I never found anybody there – like Michel – with whom I felt I could speak freely of what I felt about this
Schweinerei.
I usually went to my room and went to bed.”

“
Did you read?
”

“Oh no. I couldn’t have read there. I was too unquiet.… The electricity went off at 10 – after that everything was quiet. Except of course when the transports were so big that the work had to continue in the night.…”

“I can’t think what he was talking about when he said the lights went out at ten,” said Suchomel. “That’s nonsense. They stayed on all night; after all, we had to guard the place – how could we have done that without light? People went to bed anyway – they were so
tired.
It’s quite true,” he said, “there was a great deal of drinking in the rooms. The decent ones among the men liked Stangl – because he wasn’t such a swine as most of the others. But he boozed too, but not so much in the camp – outside. Most of us never went out; I remember, about three of the men had women somewhere, but on the whole going out was not encouraged. It was too dangerous anyway, with all the partisans there were around. But Stangl had this friend, Greuer he was called – he was political officer in Kossov; that’s where he drank. I remember, once they brought him back to the camp totally, speechlessly drunk. There
were
books,” he said. “In fact it was Stangl himself who told me once that several books for the staff had arrived from Berlin, sent by Reichsleiter Bouhler. And those could be borrowed any time.”

One of the most extraordinary things about delving into this period now is the different interpretation given to individual events by different people. This is less the result of failing memories or deliberate manipulation, than because most people now represent these events and their part in them with a view to seeming – to themselves even more than to others – what they would have
liked
to have been, rather than what they were. And this applies to Germans as well as Poles, Christians as well as Jews, West as well as East Europeans. A few – a
very
few – of those I met showed no wish to hide, embellish or change the past in any way: Franz Suchomel, for example. Even fewer – and for very different reasons – had no need to do so.

4

A
MAN
of Richard Glazar’s integrity is rare anywhere. That he should have survived Treblinka and be in a position to chronicle it for us is hardly less than a miracle.

He lives with his wife and their children in a sixteenth-century farmhouse in the tiny village near Berne, in Switzerland, where Emmenthaler cheese is made. Their house stands on a path in a meadow, and has gables, dormer windows with geraniums in window-boxes, small warm rooms and a wide view over fields and mountains. “This is how we chose – how we want to live,” said Richard when I went to stay with him and his family in the late autumn of 1972.

He was then fifty-three years old, a slender man of medium height with long, tapering hands, brown hair and perceptive brown eyes. He has the kind of face that doesn’t alter much over the years; give and take a bit of hair, he probably looked very much as he does now when he was a boy. His Czech wife who, incidentally, is not Jewish, is an attractive woman with a quick smile and a firm mind who works in an office in Berne. Their pretty twenty-year-old daughter, who recently married a nice young Austrian who also works in Berne, is a computer programmer; the young couple live with the Glazars. Their twenty-one-year-old son is studying in Germany.

Richard Glazar was born in Prague. His father, a financial consultant who worked first for a bank and later on his own, had served in the Austrian army during the First World War, and had been wounded. In 1932, when Richard was twelve, his parents were divorced. Four years later, his mother remarried. Her second husband was a wealthy leather-merchant, Adolf Bergmann. Richard loved his stepfather and his two stepbrothers, Karl (who was to be killed in the concentration camp Mauthausen) and a younger boy (who was to be saved by the Danish Red Cross evacuation scheme for Czech-Jewish children under fourteen). “It was a marvellous time,” he said. “I spent my holidays with my maternal grandparents in the country; that’s where I learnt how to make things, how a wheel is made, how a calf is delivered, how one works the land.” He matriculated in March 1939 and was accepted at the University of Prague in June. “I wanted to study philosophy,” he said, “but by that time there was already an unofficial quota
*
and I couldn’t get into that course; but they did offer me a place to read economics. My stepfather was very aware of the dangers around the corner. At Christmas 1938, after the annexation of the Sudetenland, he had managed to get a permit to travel to England to see friends. And he had arranged that we would all emigrate to England. When I think that we might have done that – but we didn’t. In the end he didn’t have the courage to leave everything he had built up at home and start again, abroad.

“But in Czechoslovakia the measures against Jews started very gradually; first it was just signs on shops – ‘Jews Unwelcome’, or sometimes a bit sharper ‘Forbidden to Jews’, but otherwise not much happened for a while.”

There was no real anti-Semitism in Czechoslovakia, compared to other Central and Eastern European countries, partly because of a young but very strong democratic tradition, and more perhaps because most Czech Jews were assimilated middle-class people in business or the professions, with a distinct German-Austrian orientation. The men had often served as officers in the Austrian army; the children went to German or Czech schools; and segregation or taunting of Jewish children, common in Poland and Rumania for instance, was unknown. To envisage in this atmosphere the full or even partial extent of the future horrors was all but impossible, even when the first signs of it were apparent.

“On November 17, 1939,” Richard went on, “after several students had been executed,
*
the students demonstrated and all universities were closed. After this I worked for my stepfather until, in 1940, my family sent me to the country near Prague to work for a farmer – safer, they thought. In 1941, Jews were ordered to wear the Star of David on their clothes, but I didn’t register as a Jew and nobody bothered me.”

Some time during 1940 Richard’s father, who had fled the Nazis to Russia, died there – of pneumonia, so they were told. In the autumn of 1941 his mother telephoned him from Prague to say they were being “moved” to Lodz in Poland. “She cried,” Richard said, “and she said to hold on as long as I could and however I could. My stepfather – we were not religious, but he blessed me in Hebrew. I learned later that in Lodz Mother went to work in a laundry and my stepfather fell very ill and was taken away. Later my mother was sent to Auschwitz and later still to Bergen Belsen where she worked in a munition factory – and, thank God, survived.

“The farmer where I stayed was nice enough in the beginning – later a bit less, but his wife was always nice. They had two very nice daughters; I became great friends with the older one. The younger one was small. Later, after I escaped from Treblinka, I wrote to the peasant’s wife, you know, from Germany, under my assumed name. I had to let somebody know that I was alive. I addressed them in my letter as ‘Dear aunt and uncle’ – it was a risk for her, a real risk. But she answered at once and sent me clothes and other things I had left there.”

On September 2, 1942, Richard, in spite of not having registered as a Jew, received a notification to report to the
Mustermesse
– a huge exhibition hall in Prague. “When I left the farm they were both upset – she cried,” he said. “I had no idea at all what to expect or what was expected of me.” None of them knew, but Richard in particular had been isolated from rumours and for that matter from other Jews for more than a year. “Not far away from the farm there was a pub where the farm labourers went and I too had gone there sometimes,” he said. “Not long after my parents were deported they were talking at the bar and a man who worked at ‘our’ farm said that he’d heard it was pretty bad in Lodz. I remember saying sort of flippantly, ‘Well, they can’t cut their heads off,’ and he answered, ‘I heard they shoot people there.’ I said, ‘Nonsense.’ That’s how little I knew.”

When he left the farm, he carried a knapsack and two bags. “I wore boots, two pairs of trousers – dungarees or jeans and over them flannels – a sweater and a sports coat. In my rucksack I carried a suit, some shirts, a pair of flannel pyjamas, sport shoes and black shoes, underclothes, handkerchiefs and towels. And in the bags I had food: lard with onion, biscuits, and tins of this and that.

“By the time I got to Prague it was already ‘Jew-free’ as they called it. We stayed at the
Mustermesse
two or three days and waited; they distributed food and there were sinks to wash in. We slept on the ground. Of course there were a great many rumours of every kind and there was this fear of uncertainty, but there was no physical fear.

“One morning they counted us and we went to a nearby station and travelled to Theresienstadt, a village around a fortress north of Prague built in the time of Maria Theresa, which had been turned into a huge internment camp.”

Theresienstadt was intended to be the Nazis’ “model” internment camp for Jews, housing Czechs, Germans and Austrians who had served in the armed forces and been wounded, and elderly people of means and influence. Quite a few of them had important connections abroad, able to make large payments for them in us currency. This camp, under Eichmann’s personal supervision, was later to be exhibited on three different occasions to Red Cross delegations, one from Germany, one from Denmark and one from the International Red Cross, and convinced several of the delegates that it was indeed, as Himmler was to say: “Not a camp in the ordinary sense of the word, but a town inhabited and governed by Jews, in which every manner of work … is done. This type of camp was conceived by me and my friend Heydrich, and this is what we had intended all camps to be.” None the less, between November 1941 and 1942, 110,000 people were crammed into this “town” which formerly housed 7,000, and by the end of 1942 there were only 49,392 left. Sixteen thousand had died of illness and starvation, and 43,879 had been “shipped East” in that one year.

“I was assigned quarters in a stable,” Richard Glazar said. “Two cousins found me there; they were in an attic.”

Richard stayed in Theresienstadt for a month working in a garbage disposal unit. He found his maternal grandfather and his paternal grandmother – they had been there for several months. His grandmother lived in a room with a dozen other old women, sleeping on blankets on the floor. “She seemed very small,” said Richard. “I used to bring her chocolate, whenever I could scrounge some, but she always said ‘No, thank you, keep it for yourself. But then one day I brought her a pot of lard and she accepted that. My grandfather was in an old people’s ward: that was really terrible. He was almost blind; he had tried to cut his veins.”

After a few days in the stable, Richard had moved into a large hall, with friends. This is where he met another Czech, Karel Unger, who was to become his closest friend, and who survived and escaped from Treblinka with him and now lives in the us.

“After a month in Theresienstadt I was notified that I was to leave the next day for another camp, in the East. I ran to see Hannah, my cousin – she said grandfather had just died; it was that day too.

“We, our Czech transport, travelled on a passenger train; later I was to find out how rare that was; only transports from the ‘West’ – Germany, Austria, Holland, etc – travelled on passenger trains with their comparative comfort; everybody else went in cattle trucks. The people supervising our transport were police – in green police uniform. They appointed some of the young men as monitors and gave them armbands. It wasn’t particularly rough, or frightening. True enough, the police officer in charge expressed himself rather oddly. ‘I am to bring a thousand pieces,’ he said, ‘and a thousand pieces I am going to bring. So anybody who puts his head out of the window is going to have it blown off; we shoot.’ We thought he was being unnecessarily crude; no need, we thought, to frighten the women and children that way; but we didn’t really give it a second thought. We left Theresienstadt on October 8 and we travelled two days. First we thought we were going in the direction of Dresden, but then the train turned and we went East. During the nights it stood more than it moved. The last morning we saw in the distance the outline of a city; it must have been Warsaw. We got to Treblinka at 3.30 p.m. We all crowded to look out of the windows. I saw a green fence, barracks and I heard what sounded like a farm tractor at work. I was delighted. The place looked like a farm. I thought, ‘This is
prima
[marvellous]; it’s going to be work I know something about.’