Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (34 page)

That same vagueness – “I don’t know.”

This story and the way 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 to these disclosures.

I think the reason I finally did return to the little room in the prison was because I came to realize – perhaps as a result of the intensity of my own reaction – that for a man whose view was so distorted that he
could
tell that story in that way, the relatively simple terms “guilt” or “innocence”, “good” or “bad” no longer applied; what was important was that he had found in himself the need – or strength – to speak. Even as I acknowledged my own apprehension at continuing with these talks, I also knew for certain, at that moment, that if I did he would end by telling me the truth.

All the Treblinka survivors I talked to affirmed – with the fatalistic lack of vehemence of those who have come to terms with the inevitability of human failings in everyone, themselves included – that “Blau” was an informer. But it was Suchomel, in his chosen role of an objective observer, who put this into cogent words.

“Oh, Blau,” he said. “He was
Oberkapo
at first. You see, he had known Stangl in Austria; he told me himself. No, I don’t think he was lying. Stangl made no secret of having known him previously. He was Austrian, but by origin I think Polish and I think he had been sent from Vienna to a Polish ghetto. He told me about his arrival in Treblinka; apparently he got off the train and saw Stangl standing there. He said, ‘I threw my arms around him.’ In Austria he had been a cattle- or horse-trader. He said Stangl had said to him, ‘Listen, I am going to appoint you Chief Kapo; you help me now and I’ll see that you survive this. And after the war I’ll get you a farm in Poland.’ That’s how Blau became
Oberkapo.
When he arrived he had a big stomach – he was a big fat man; in two weeks he had shrunk by half. Yes, he was hated, of course he was; he certainly ‘collaborated’, so naturally they feared and hated him. He didn’t just carry an ordinary whip – he had one of the long ones and he’d stand there swinging it and shouting in his broad Viennese, ‘You pigs, you shit sows, get on with it, let’s see how quick you can learn to be.’ He behaved as if he wanted to outdo the worst of the Ukrainians. I suppose he did it to survive; who am
I
to accuse or blame him? He stayed Kapo till early spring, I think. Then he asked Stangl to relieve him on medical grounds. He complained of heart flutters or something and Stangl made him and his wife cooks for the Jews. Old Frau Blau, she was a good cook; she cooked many a meal for me. I hated the food in our mess, so quite often she’d cook me something special. After the revolt, they were amongst the hundred or so who were left over, and who were evacuated to Sobibor – I went there too.

“One day I heard they were going to shoot these hundred the next day. So I went to see old Blau and warned him. I just asked him whether he had some poison and he understood. He and his wife took poison and so did a doctor and his wife who had been in this group; they had helped to put out the fire in the Ukrainian barracks after the revolt. Well, they too died that day. It was better that way than being shot.”

“
In the midst of all the horror that surrounded you
,” I said to Stangl the afternoon of the day he told me the story about Blau, “
and of which you were so aware that you drank yourself to sleep each night, what kept you going? What was there for you to hold on to?
”

“I don’t know. Perhaps my wife. My love for my wife?”

“
How often did you see her?
”

“After that first time in Poland they let me go on leave quite regularly – every three or four months.”

“
Did you feel close to your wife – when so much had to remain hidden, remain unsaid between you?
”

“The little time we had together, we usually talked about the children and ordinary everyday things. But it is true, things changed between us after that time when Ludwig told her about Sobibor. There was tension. And I knew she was terribly worried about me.…”

“The first time I saw Paul again after Sobibor,” said Frau Stangl, “was five months later when he came home for Christmas. It was so wonderful to see him, and at Christmas too. In Austria, at home, what with Christmas and everything, what I knew was happening in Poland seemed utterly unreal. I asked about Treblinka of course, but he said he was only responsible for the valuables, construction and discipline. No, he didn’t pretend then that it wasn’t the same sort of place as Sobibor, but he said that he was doing everything he could to get out. He stayed home for eight or ten days, but he’d only been there a couple of days when he said he’d run over and see Fraulein Hintersteiner [in Linz] who had been a secretary at Hartheim and who afterwards worked for a man called Kaufmann who went out to the Crimea as police chief. Paul wanted her to help him get a transfer to the Crimea. When he came back from seeing her, he was very happy and said it was all right – all he had to do now was wait to be notified of the transfer. So we had a good Christmas after all: I can still see his happy, relieved face.…”

9

“T
HINGS CHANGED
very much towards the middle of January,” said Richard Glazar. “That was the beginning of phase three: fewer and fewer transports; less food and of course no new clothes. This was when the plans for the uprising were being worked on very intensely. And then, in the very beginning of March 1943, real catastrophe struck us.

“Küttner smelled something – there is no other way of putting it. He sensed that something was going on, and with perfect instinct he picked on the one person who was almost irreplaceable for us: Zhelo Bloch, the revolt committee’s military expert. What Küttner took as a pretext was that some men’s coats had disappeared, and Zhelo was in charge of them. He came to our barracks and raged; two men were shot on the spot, several were beaten. And Zhelo was sent up to Camp II.

“It was the most terrible blow to our morale, an anti-climax which is indescribable now. It wasn’t only, you see, that he was so necessary, in a planning sense; it was that he was loved. Contrary perhaps to some of us, he was very much one of the people. Don’t misunderstand me, I only mean that, of all of us, he was the one person who could talk to anybody, give anybody a sense of faith in himself and his capacities; he was a born leader, of the best kind.

“The evening he went was the end of hope for us – for a long time. I remember that night so clearly; it was the one time in all those months that we nearly lost control; that we gave way to emotion. It could have been the end for us.

“Robert Altschuh cried like a child. Of course, he had been closest to Zhelo; they needed each other. Zhelo was essential to Robert because he was a
doer
, but Robert was just as essential to Zhelo because he was an intellectual; they complemented and reassured each other. Zhelo had relied utterly on Robert intellectually. It was Robert who was the ‘psychological’ planner; who would explain the Nazis’ psychology to us; he who advised us when to lie low and when to make ourselves noticed. He had an unfailing instinct for what was the right approach, and when. On the other hand, he was physically frail, and Zhelo of course was very strong. Without Zhelo’s physical strength, Robert collapsed. Hans Freund, too, despite his closeness to Rudi Masarek, somehow couldn’t recover from the psychological blow of Zhelo’s going. It took some weeks before Rudi came into his own as a leader – by that time much of Hans’s effectiveness had gone.” (“Freund and Altschuh,” he was to write later, “were still alive at the time of the revolt. But in all probability they died in the course of it.”)
*

“The evening of the day Zhelo was sent up to Camp II, I remember we were lying on our bunks; it was not quite dark. It was very very quiet. And suddenly Hans Freund said, ‘We aren’t human beings any more.…’ It was something we had ceased to – or never did – think about. Certainly we had never talked about it; regret for the loss of one’s sensitivity and compassion was something one just couldn’t afford, just as one couldn’t afford remembering those we had loved. But that night was different.…

“ ‘I can only think of my wife and boy,’ said Hans, who had never, with a word, spoken of his young wife and small boy from the day he arrived. ‘I never felt anything that first night after we had come. There they were – on the other side of the wall – dead, but I felt nothing. Only the next morning, my brain and stomach began to burn, like acid; I remember hearing about people who could feel everything inside but couldn’t move; that was what I felt. My little boy had curly hair and soft skin – soft on his cheeks like on his bottom – that same smooth soft skin. When we got off the train, he said he was cold, and I said to his mother, “I hope he won’t catch a cold.” A cold. When they separated us he waved to me.…’ ”

During the many many hours Richard and I talked, he never faltered; this was the only time. It was late at night, his family had gone to bed; his house is so deep in the country, there wasn’t a sound except the occasional shuffle or wheezing from a cow in a nearby field. We sat in his living room which was dark except for a lamp on his desk. He hid his face in his hands for long minutes. I poured some coffee his wife had made before she went to bed. We drank it without talking. “Did you see this?” he asked then after a while, pointing to something behind me. I turned around. In a cabinet, on a shelf by itself, a beautiful small Bristol-blue glass jar. “How lovely,” I said. He shook his head, stood up, walked over, picked it up and handed it to me. “What do you think it is?” There was half an inch or so of something in the bottom of the jar. I didn’t know. “Earth,” he said. “Treblinka earth.”

“Things went from bad to worse that month of March,” he went on. “There were no transports – in February just a few, remnants from here and there, then a few hundred gypsies –
they
were really poor; they brought nothing. In the storehouses everything had been packed up and shipped – we had never before seen all the space because it had always been so full. And suddenly everything – clothes, watches, spectacles, shoes, walking-sticks, cooking-pots, linen, not to speak of food – everything went, and one day there was nothing left. You can’t imagine what we felt when there was nothing there. You see, the
things
were our justification for being alive. If there were no
things
to administer, why would they let us stay alive? On top of that we were, for the first time, hungry. We were eating the camp food now, and it was terrible and, of course, totally inadequate [300 grammes of coarse black bread and one plate of thin soup a day]. In the six weeks of almost no transports, all of us had lost an incredible amount of weight and energy. And many had already succumbed to all kinds of illness – especially typhus. It was the strain of anxiety which increased with every day, the lack of food, and the constant fear of the Germans who appeared to us to be getting as panic-stricken as we were.

“It was just about when we had reached the lowest ebb in our morale that, one day towards the end of March, Kurt Franz walked into our barracks, a wide grin on his face. ‘As of tomorrow,’ he said, ‘transports will be rolling in again.’ And do you know what we did? We shouted, ‘Hurrah, hurrah.’ It seems impossible now. Every time I think of it I die a small death; but it’s the truth. That is what we did; that is where we had got to. And sure enough, the next morning they arrived. We had spent all of the preceding evening in an excited, expectant mood; it meant life – you see, don’t you? – safety and life. The fact that it was their death, whoever they were, which meant our life, was no longer relevant; we had been through this over and over and over. The main question in our minds was, where were they from? Would they be rich or poor? Would there be food or not?

“That morning, all of us stood around everywhere, waiting. The
SS
did too; for once they didn’t care whether we worked or not. Everybody was discussing where they would be from; if only it were from somewhere rich like Holland.

“When the first train pulled in, we were looking out through the cracks in the wall of our barrack, and when they got out, David Bart called to one of the Blue Command, ‘Where are they from?’ and he answered, ‘The Balkans.’ I remember them getting off the train, and I remember Hans Freund saying, ‘Ah yes, you can see they are rich. But they won’t burn well, they are too fat.’ This was a very, very special transport of rich Bulgarians who had lived in Salonika – 24,000 of them. They had already spent some time in a camp together; they were organized and disciplined, and they had equipped themselves with a special supply-car for the long journey. When the Blue Command opened those doors, we nearly fainted at the sight of huge pieces of meat, thousands of tins with vegetables, fats and fish, jars of fruit and jams, and cakes – the black earth of the ramp was yellow and white with cakes. Later, after the Bulgarians had been taken away, the Ukrainians fought us for the food; we managed ‘accidentally-on-purpose’ to drop some of the big wooden chests in which the jams were packed. They burst open, the Ukrainians beat us with their horrible whips, and we bled into the jam. But that was later; oh, the
SS
were very, very careful with this transport; if the Bulgarians had had the slightest idea what awaited them, they wouldn’t have stood still for it. It would have been a bloodbath. But they hadn’t a clue; even then, in March, almost April, 1943 – with nearly a million already killed in Treblinka [so Richard thought, and Zabecki agreed], three million or so by then in all the extermination and other camps in Poland – they were as full of illusions as we Czechs had been six months before. They still didn’t know. The mind just boggles – with all the hundreds, the thousands of people who by then knew – how could they not have known? Marvellous-looking people they were; beautiful women, lovely children; stocky and strong-looking men; marvellous specimens. It took three days to kill them all. And ten days later we had processed all their belongings. Imagine, at fifty kilograms a person – that’s what each was ‘allowed’ to bring for this ‘resettlement’ – there were 720,000 kilograms of
things
; incredible, how the machine proved itself in those ten days.