Shoah Page #11

How many quarts of beer a day

do you sell?

400, 500 quarts.

- What?

- 400, 500 quarts.

- [ Repeats Phrase]

- Hier.

That's a lot!

[ German ]

Have you worked here long?

- Around 20 years.

- [ Repeats Phrase]

: 3%:

Why are you hiding...

- I have my reasons.

- Your face?

- I have my reasons.

What reasons?

- Never mind.

- Why not?

[ Lanzmann]

Do you recognize this man?

No?

Christian Wirlh?

Mr. Oberhauser!

Do you remember Belzec?

No memories of Belzec?

Nein?

Nein?

Of the overflowing graves?

You don't remember?

MUNICH:

WUPPERTAL:
ANTON SPIESS,

German state prosecutor

at the Treblinka trial (Frankfurt, 1960)

[ In German]

When the Action itself first got under way,

it was almost totally improvised.

At Treblinka, for example,

the commandant, Dr. Eberl,

let more trains come in

than the camp could handle.

It was a disaster!

Mountains of corpses!

Word of this foul-up

reached the head of the Reinhard Action,

Odilo Globocznik, in Lublin.

He went to Treblinka

to see what was happening.

There's a very concrete

account of the trip

by his former driver, Oberhauser.

Globocznik arrived

on a hot day in August.

The camp was permeated

with the stench of rotting flesh.

Globocznik didn't even bother

to enter the camp.

He stopped here,

before the commandant's office,

sent for Dr. Eberl

and greeted him with these words,

How dare you accept

so many every day

when you can only process 3,000?

Operations were suspended,

Eberl was transferred and Wirth came,

followed immediately by Stangl,

and the camp was completely reorganized.

The Reinhard Action

covered 3 extermination camps:

Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec.

There's also talk of 3 death camps

on the Bug River,

for they were all located

on or near the Bug.

The gas chambers

were the head of the camp.

They were built first,

in the woods, or in a field,

as at Treblinka.

The gas chambers were

the only stone buildings.

All the others were wooden sheds.

These camps weren't built to last.

Himmler was in a huny

to begin the 'final solution.

The Germans had to capitalize

on their eastward advance

and use this remote back-country

to carry out their mass murder

as secretly as possible.

So at first they couldn't

manage the perfection

they achieved 3 months later.

[ Piwonski Speaking Polish]

[ Interpreter #1, In French]

Near the end of March 1942...

[ Piwonski Continues ]

sizeable groups of Jews

were herded here,

groups of 50 to 100 people.

[ Piwonski Continues ]

Several trains arrived...

[ Piwonski Continues ]

with sections of barracks,

with posts, barbed wire, bricks...

[ Piwonski Continues ]

and construction

of the camp as such began.

[Train Whistle Blows]

[ Piwonski Continues ]

The Jews unloaded these cars...

[ Piwonski Continues ]

and carted the sections

of barracks to the camp.

[ Piwonski Continues ]

The Germans made them

work extremely fast.

[ Piwonski Continues ]

When we saw the pace they worked at...

[ Piwonski Continues ]

It was extremely brutal.

[ Piwonski Continues ]

When we saw the complex being built,

and the fence,

which, after all, enclosed a vast space...

[ Piwonski Continues ]

we realized that

what the Germans were building

wasn't meant to aid mankind.

[ Wind Whistling ]

[ Birds Chirping ]

[ Piwonski Continues ]

Early in June...

[ Piwonski Continues ]

the first convoy arrived.

[ Piwonski Continues ]

I'd say there were over 40 cars.

[ Piwonski Continues ]

With the convoy

were SS men in black uniforms.

[ Piwonski Continues ]

It happened one afternoon.

He had just finished work.

JAN PIWONSKI:

But he got on his bicycle and went home.

[ In French]

Why?

[ Interpreter #1 Murmurs In French]

I merely thought

these people had come to build the camp,

as the others had before them.

That convoy...

There was no way

of knowing that it was...

the first earmarked for extermination.

- Besides...

- [ Piwonski Continues]

He couldn't have known that Sobibor...

[ Piwonski Continues]

Would be a place for the mass

extermination of the Jews.

The next morning,

when I came here to work,

the station was absolutely silent,

and we realized,

after talking with the Poles

who worked at the station here,

that something utterly

incomprehensible had happened.

First of all, when the camp

was being built,

there were orders shouted in German,

there were screams,

Jews were working at the run,

there were shots,

and here there was that silence...

[ Interpreter #1 ]

Mm-hmm.

No work crews,

a really total silence.

[ Interpreter #1 Speaking Polish]

40 cars had arrived,

and then... nothing.

It was all very strange.

[ Lanzmann ]

It was the silence that tipped them off?

That's right.

- Can he describe that silence?

- [ interpreter #1 Speaking Polish]

[ Piwonski Replies ]

- It was a silence...

- [ Piwonski Continues ]

Nothing was going on in the camp.

You heard nothing.

Nothing moved.

[ Piwonski Continues ]

So then they began to wonder...

[ Piwonski Continues ]

Where have they put those Jews?

[ MUIIer, In German]

Cell 13, Block 11 at Auschwitz 1,

is where

the Special Work Detail was held.

The cell was underground, isolated.

For we were...

bearers of secrets,

we were reprieved dead men.

We weren't allowed to talk to anyone,

or contact any prisoner,

even the SS.

Only those in charge of the Action.

There was a window.

We heard what happened in the courtyard.

The executions,

the victims' cries, the screams,

but we couldn't see anything.

This went on for several days.

One night an SS man came

from the political section.

It was around 4 A.M.

The whole camp was still asleep.

There wasn't a sound in the camp.

We were again taken out of our cell

and led to the crematorium.

There, for the first time,

I saw the procedure used

with those who came in alive.

We were lined up against a wall

and told, No one may talk

to those people.

Suddenly, the wooden door

to the crematorium courtyard opened,

and 250 to 300 people filed in:

old people, and women.

They carried bundles,

wore the Star of David.

Even from a distance, I could tell

they were Polish Jews,

probably from Upper Silesia,

from the Sosnowiec ghetto,

some 20 miles from Auschwitz.

FILIP MULLER:

I caught some of the things they said.

I heard fachowitz,

meaning skilled worker.

And Malach-ha-Mavis,

which means

the angel of death in Yiddish.

Also, harginnen:

They're going to kill us.

From what I could hear,

I clearly understood

the struggle going on inside them.

Sometimes they spoke of work

probably hoping

that they'd be put to work.

Or they spoke of Malach-ha-Mavis,

the angel of death.

The conflicting words echoed

the conflict in their feelings.

Then a sudden silence

fell over those gathered

in the crematorium courtyard.

All eyes converged

on the flat roof of the crematorium.

Who was standing there?

Aumeyer, of the SS,

Grabner,

the head of the political section,

and Hossler, the SS officer.

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