Death Camp Treblinka: Survivor Stories Page #2

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Himmelstrasse. The way to heaven.

Samuel is making his own pilgrimage

back to Treblinka.

The odds of survival beyond

this point were virtually nil.

But a new commandant, Franz Stangl,

saw the daily killing of prisoner

helpers as inefficient.

Operation Reinhard camps began

to form pools of Arbeitsjuden,

or Work Jews.

Forced on pain of death to be

slave labourers.

Selection still required

a miracle of good fortune.

Samuel retraces these fateful last

steps with his daughter, Orit.

Camp 1 was where the living

were processed on arrival.

Kalman and Samuel were forced

to sort victims' belongings

in the lower camp.

Here they would witness

daily horrors.

We went to the barracks to take out

the clothes from the women.

And we found small children.

Newborn children.

We must take two, four children

to put in a blanket

and four persons took the blanket,

and we are going to the laundrette.

Anyone who risked slowing progress

toward the Himmelstrasse

was taken out of line

and led to the so-called

"field hospital", or Lazaret.

Handicaps.

Children.

Sick persons.

Dead persons.

"Lazaret!"

I was in a big hall.

Deep. And there's fire.

Children who are living still...

..and they shoot them.

And put on the fire.

And there were children

who were still living.

The SS held the lives

of Work Jews cheaply too.

Samuel and Kalman

determined to stay alive

in the desperate and

unlikely hope of escape.

But many could not endure.

The workforce was culled regularly.

The life expectancy of

the Work Jews, the Arbeitsjuden,

was a few weeks,

a few months at the most.

A lot of them committed suicide.

It was very common for

those who had been taken

from one of the groups of Jews

doomed to the gas chambers

and put into the workforce.

Kurt Franz,

Treblinka's deputy commander,

was the most feared

of a vicious SS contingent.

Photography inside Treblinka

was strictly forbidden,

but Franz took these rare images

of the SS living area

for his private album.

He labelled it "Schoene Zeiten" -

"Good Times".

Franz made Work Jews

memorise and sing

Treblinka's camp song at roll call.

He wrote the lyrics

to Fester Schritt.

They beat us all over the day.

You can't go, you must run.

And if you didn't do something

like he wants...

..he could shoot you.

Nazi death camps

were tasked with more

than the physical

extermination of Jews.

They were designed to plunder

every economic asset

for the enrichment of the SS state

and the German war machine.

Precise instructions were given

to death camp Kommandants

on how to handle the loot.

'Guidelines for the distribution

of the belongings of the Jews...'

As many as 800

Work Jews were needed

to sort the vast

pyramids of belongings

stripped from incoming deportees.

They packed into their bundles,

into their suitcases,

their most valuable and

treasured possessions.

Orthodox Jews took with them

the candlesticks for holding

the Sabbath candles.

Wealthier Jews, of course,

took with them

any foreign currency they had,

or gold, or diamonds,

in the hope that they could use

that money to make their lives,

wherever they were going to be

resettled, a little bit better.

Women victims of Treblinka were

sent to the gas chambers

after the men so that their hair

could be harvested too.

One day, Samuel was ordered

to work as a barber.

He encountered a naked Warsaw girl

fully aware of her fate.

Samuel and Kalman felt fortunate

only to have been selected

for work in the lower camp,

and not in the Camp of the Dead.

Just metres away, the Totenlager

was sealed off

behind high, camouflaged fences.

There were no crematoria.

The dead were simply

thrown into five giant pits.

Kalman and Samuel could hear and

imagine what they could not see.

'Where are they? Where did they go?'

Kommandant Franz Stangl

was unmoved by what he saw.

"I remember pits

full of blue-black corpses,

"a mass of rotting flesh.

"It had nothing to do with humanity.

"It could not have.

They were cargo."

He was elegant, clean,

in a white jacket.

He changed shoes three times a day,

because he runs in blood.

He came home.

He kissed his wife.

He kissed the children.

How is this possible,

to go out from a hell,

to come home after his work?

You'd like...

..to kill him with all the family.

Like he did.

HE INHALES:

It was the particular agony

of the prisoners to witness

or to discover the murder

of their own flesh and blood.

One morning, a transport

arrived from Czestochowa.

The pace of Treblinka's

killing was frenzied.

Between September

and mid November of 1942,

over 438,000 Polish Jews perished.

Ten bigger gas chambers

had been erected,

raising its killing capacity

to 15,000 per day.

Franz Stangl remembered

that he would start the day with

breakfast round about seven o'clock,

and then, after he processed

a trainload of people,

would go back

to his quarters for lunch.

That would mean that up

to 6,000 people had been

murdered between his

breakfast and has lunch.

With its mission to wipe out

Polish Jewry virtually complete,

Treblinka would

open its gates to gypsies

and over 135,000 Jews

from across Europe.

These stones represent

not murdered individuals,

but whole Jewish towns,

villages and communities.

More humans had been killed

here in 1942 than at any other

place in the history of mankind.

The slaughter and defeat

at Stalingrad finally turned

the tide of the war

against the Nazis in February 1943.

The threat of defeat,

and exposure of their crimes

began to weigh on the SS leadership.

Himmler now ordered

the SS to liquidate

and to destroy

Warsaw's Jewish ghetto.

Thoughts there had turned

to diehard resistance.

And escape.

Among some 70,000 remaining captives

was a 13-year-old girl,

Ada Lubelczyk.

She had seen her mother Rachel

deported to the east

the previous summer.

The destination was Treblinka.

Ada did not know that she

was an orphan.

I remember that I was happy that she

was dressed when they took them.

I remember exactly that I wanted

to believe that it would be OK.

Ada's relatives had planned

a daring escape over the wall

to get her into hiding

on the Aryan side.

I have before, to arrange

to have documents, you know,

Aryan documents,

and I have to know all the praise,

how to make this and this...

all the praises. When I was ready,

they arranged the escape.

Just weeks later, lightly armed

young Jewish resistance fighters

began a desperate and heroic

last stand against the SS.

They fought and died in bunkers

and burning streets.

Trainloads of prisoners were

sent daily to Treblinka.

There, embers of hatred and

resistance were burning too.

Jewish prisoner Rudy Masaryk

was a Czech army officer who helped

camp elders shape

an ambitious plan...

..to break into the SS armoury

using a copied key.

Burn the camps wooden buildings

and destroy the gas chambers.

To kill Kurt Franz

and other hated SS guards.

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