Death Camp Treblinka: Survivor Stories Page #4

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by barbed wire,

and near the entrance

there was a hut, painted white

with red crosses on it

and the inscription

"lazarette" on the walls.

He stayed on after his testimony

to listen to Eli Rosenberg.

He had slaved in the Totenlager

and was an eye witness to the last

and darkest secrets

of Treblinka.

TRANSLATOR:
When the people entered

into the gas chambers,

the last ones

were stabbed in their bodies

by the bayonets.

The last people already saw

what was happening.

They did not want to enter.

and the just jammed the people inside

- 400 into the small chamber.

This was the final capacity, the full

capacity of the gas chamber,

and was so jam-packed

that it was difficult

to close the door.

When they locked the door,

we were on the outside.

We heard only screams

and prayers - "Mother, father."

And after 35 minutes, they were dead.

And two Germans were standing

and they said, "Everyone is asleep.

"Open the doors."

And we opened the doors

and we took the bodies out.

It's difficult not to understand.

Take a beast, take a wolf, a lion.

They can kill people

when they are hungry.

They were not hungry.

They took people, small people,

small children.

Yeah.

Eichmann was convicted of crimes

against the Jewish people

and was hanged in 1962.

Yet few of the perpetrators of

Operation Reinhard shared that fate.

Himmler committed suicide

in Allied custody in May 1945.

Treblinka's commandant, Franz

Stangl was extradited from Brazil.

Sentenced to life imprisonment

in a West German court in 1970,

he died soon afterwards in prison.

Kurt Franz was put on trial in

Dusseldorf with nine other

Treblinka SS guards

and sentenced to life

imprisonment in 1965.

Released in 1994 for health reasons,

Lalka, "the doll",

died at home four years later.

The majority of the SS

and the Ukrainian guards at

Treblinka have evaded justice.

This house in Udim was Samuel

and Ada's first home in Israel.

It belongs now to their

architect daughter, Orit.

Samuel's mother, Manifa,

was with them in the '60s,

still haunted by the loss

of her two daughters.

Samuel has dedicated his life to

remembrance of the suffering

and resistance

of fellow Poles at Warsaw.

And of fellow Jews at Treblinka.

As many as 850,000 innocents

were cruelly murdered here

in little more than a year.

Nazi secrecy denies us

knowledge of all the victims' names.

Samuel asks that

we never forget Treblinka.

Kalman shares this mission,

visiting Yad Vahsem in Jerusalem.

In the Hall Of Names,

records of victims' identities

are collected and preserved.

Kalman has submitted

the names of 18 close relatives.

This is my mother.

They murdered her

when she was 39 in Treblinka.

Shalom, Kalman. Shalom.

Historians recognise

the unique significance

of these final witnesses

to Treblinka.

The fact that anybody survived

means that they went

completely against the odds.

The Nazi plan was to kill

every single Jew there.

The Nazis almost succeeded. I mean,

look at the survival rates.

50, 60, 70 people out of 859,000

were killed.

That's essentially zero.

These last two survivors

of Treblinka are of very different

kinds of personalities.

Samuel Willenberg is this outgoing,

gregarious person

while Kalman Taigman is reserved.

When you see these two

personalities, you also see

just how there was no formula for

survival for Jews in the Holocaust.

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