Death Camp Treblinka: Survivor Stories
- Year:
- 2012
- 64 Views
This programme contains scenes which
some viewers may find upsetting.
In August 1944, a Red Army offensive
swept into Nazi-occupied Poland.
Following the railway toward
Warsaw, Russian scouts
came across
An attempt had been made to erase
every trace
of what had happened here.
There were no buildings,
no bodies,
no mass graves.
But the earth did not conspire
in the cover-up.
This was Treblinka, the dark heart
of the Nazi Holocaust.
Its gas chambers once stood here.
Nowhere in human history
had 800,000 human beings
been murdered in such a short time.
Only two last survivors can now
tell of the hell of Treblinka.
We found small children,
newborn children.
No-one had liberated these men.
They had staged a prisoners' revolt
and fought their way out.
There were flames, smoke,
explosions, gunfire.
The swastika was burning
and fell down.
Everything was burning.
After the escape,
waging war on the SS
in Warsaw's bloody uprising.
And justice,
confronting a key architect
of Nazi genocide
in the trial of Adolf Eichmann.
So you were in Treblinka 1? Yes.
The selection started right here.
Women were sent to the left,
men to the right.
Final witnesses to monstrous crimes.
This is the story
of two extraordinary men
who journeyed into the abyss
and achieved the miracle
of surviving Treblinka.
Kalman Taigman lives by the sea
in Israel,
far from his birthplace in Poland.
His Zionist father
had emigrated here in 1935,
but efforts to bring young Kalman
and his mother had failed.
In the fateful summer of 1942,
they were factory workers
in Warsaw's Jewish ghetto.
A time of bitter memory.
Since the German invasion of 1939,
Poland's Jews had been subjected
to persecution and forced labour.
The majority had been rounded up,
of ghettos.
Warsaw was the biggest.
Over 400,000 were crammed
into a tiny, unliveable area,
sealed off behind high walls.
The death toll through disease
and deliberate starvation
was appalling.
Terrible days.
You'd go out in the morning,
you have to go to work.
You can see dead people
on the sidewalk.
The family, after the person died,
took from him the clothing,
to sell.
And to buy something to eat.
Yet such cruelty was just a prelude
to the unimaginable.
Many Jews in Poland
believed that the worst was over,
that if they were able to work,
if they could work for the Germans,
then they would be left alone.
They were not to know that
that would lead ultimately
to the liquidation
of all the ghettos in Poland
as part of a plan to annihilate the
entire Jewish population of Europe.
Racial hatred, military conquest
and new empire in the east
impelled Hitler in late 1941
toward a "final solution"
of the Jewish question.
Fire!
SS Einsatzgruppen
had already slaughtered
hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews
in mass shootings behind the lines.
Now, Heinrich Himmler's SS
was authorised to cleanse,
or annihilate, all Europe's Jews,
by industrial means.
Adolf Eichmann would organise
the transportation of Jews,
by rail, from across the continent
to the death camps.
In May 1942, the Nazis began filming
Warsaw's doomed Jews for posterity.
Not even the children
were to be spared.
The death factory being built to
kill them all was virtually ready.
Mass deportations
began on July 23rd.
They came in the morning.
They brought together 6,000 people,
and then they sent away.
They told us
we are going to work in the east.
I didn't know I'm going to Treblinka.
I didn't know.
Samuel Willenberg is an artist
living in Tel Aviv, Israel.
He has turned searing
wartime memories into bronze.
And his drawings
give a rare illustration
of life inside Treblinka.
That tense summer of 1942, he was
on the run, outside the ghettos,
He was in Czestochowa, a sacred
Catholic place of pilgrimage,
with his mother and two sisters.
Samuel grew up here, a headstrong
tearaway with Aryan looks
who blended easily
into Polish society.
Now fugitives with forged papers,
they had taken rooms here,
in the very shadow
of the Jasna Gora monastery.
But for Jews, the risk of betrayal
was ever-present.
But, stunned and despondent,
Samuel hesitated.
In October, he too was rounded up
and deported to the east.
Hidden just 60 miles northeast
of Warsaw, Treblinka was the last
and most lethal of three
new extermination camps.
With Sobibor and Belzec,
Treblinka served Aktion or
Operation Reinhard -
two million Polish Jews.
The three camps that were
the core of Aktion Reinhard
were constructed with one purpose,
and only one purpose.
That was mass murder.
They weren't like Auschwitz which
had a huge camp population
which was used for work purposes.
They were quite small,
about 400 metres by 600 metres.
They were near to railroads
so that Jewish populations could be
delivered to them quickly
and easily.
They were in remote locations
because they were not meant to
service any kind of industry.
They were not meant to have any
function other than mass murder.
At Treblinka's two sister camps,
SS technicians had already refined
the process of deception
and mass killing.
The German overseers numbered
just 30,
supported by over 100 troniki -
Soviet Ukrainian SS auxiliaries.
A few prisoners were made to tidy up
the aftermath of a gassing,
then they, too, were killed
at the end of each day.
Kalman's transport drew up to
the ramp at Treblinka on
September the fourth.
Immense suffering had begun
on the slow train journey itself.
Like beasts.
First of all they put in a wagon
approximately 100 person.
The journey was terrible. There was
no place to sit. You must stand.
You couldn't breathe.
There is only a small window.
Now water. No food. No nothing.
a part of the people were dead.
In the melee with 2,000
other victims,
19-year-old Kalman held tight
to his mother, Tima.
Once a train arrived in the camp
Treblinka, then the SS men and
the Ukrainian guards
went at them with a fury,
herded them out of the trucks,
beat them, shot people, created
a mood of absolute panic and terror.
You could hear shouting.
"Raus." "Out."
And we all went out from the wagons,
and they sent us to a place
where was a door.
An iron door.
I came to the door with my mother,
together.
But they say us,
"Woman, left. Man, right."
I didn't want to let her go.
So I don't know what, I get something
in my head.
From a German. And I fall down.
And when I stand up, I saw her.
She's going in the barrack.
With other women and children.
In under two hours, victims had
crossed unseen into the camp
of the dead.
Driven naked up this corridor
to a building containing
three gas chambers,
fed by a Russian tank engine.
Kalman soon learned the German name
for this path.
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"Death Camp Treblinka: Survivor Stories" Scripts.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 24 Dec. 2024. <https://www.scripts.com/script/death_camp_treblinka:_survivor_stories_6566>.
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