Post by ๐๐จ๐๐๐ซ๐๐ญ๐จ๐ซ on Jan 28, 2022 8:59:27 GMT
Here is the link to the Grossman discussion thread
I will get the ball rolling. This eye witness account is from Vassili Grossman. This Jew was a war correspondent for the Soviets. Wiki states At the outbreak of the Second World War, he was engaged as a war correspondent by the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda; he wrote first-hand accounts of the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin. Grossman's eyewitness reports of a Nazi extermination camp, following the discovery of Treblinka, were among the earliest accounts of a Nazi death camp by a reporter. The following extract is from TREBLINKA: EXTERMINATION CAMP OR TRANSIT CAMP? by Mattogno & Graf link. Grossman interviewed former Sonderkommando inmates who escaped from Treblinka and wrote his manuscript without revealing their identities.
In Treblinka there were two camps: the labor camp No. 1, in which
prisoners of various nationalities, above all Poles, worked, and camp No.
2, the Jewish camp.
Camp No. 1 โ the work or concentration camp โ was located directly
next to the sand pit, at the edge of the forest. It was a camp like those,
which were established by the hundreds and thousands in the occupied
eastern territories by the Gestapo. It began in 1941. As if reduced to one
common denominator, the traits of the German character, grotesquely disfigured
by the frightful fun house mirror of the Hitler regime, are combined
in it. [p. 27fโฆ]
The No. 1 Camp existed from autumn of 1941 [until] July 23, 1944. It
was completely liquidated while the prisoners were already in earshot of
the dull boom of the Soviet artillery. Early in the morning of July 23, the
guard unit and the SS people proceeded to exterminate the camp after they
had fortified themselves with schnapps. By the evening all of the prisoners
had been murdered โ murdered and buried. The Warsaw cabinetmaker
Max Lewit was able to save himself, because lying wounded underneath
the corpses of his comrades, he had waited for the darkness and crept into
the forest. He told how he heard the singing of thirty boys in the pit who
struck up the tune โSong of the Fatherlandโ before being shot to death; he
heard one of the youngsters yell: โStalin will avenge us!โ He heard the
camp favorite Leib, who had led the boys, get up again after falling down
into the pit after the volley hit him, and ask: โPan[28] Guard, they missed;
please, once more Pan Guard, once more!โ [p. 29โฆ]
We know the names of the camp SS men, their characters, idiosyncrasies,
we know the camp commander van Eipen, a half-Dutch German, who
is an insane murderer, an insatiable libertine, a lover of good horses and
fast riding jaunts. [โฆ]
We know the one-eyed German Swiderski from Odessa, the โMaster
Hammerer,โ who was regarded as the unsurpassable specialist of โdry
murder,โ because within a few minutes he killed with a hammer fifteen
children between the ages of eight and thirteen years, who had been designated as unfit for labor. We know the skinny, gypsy-like SS man Preifi,
nicknamed โthe Old Man,โ a taciturn grouch. He sought to dispel his melancholy
by sitting behind the place where the camp slops were dumped; he
stalked the prisoners who sneaked back there to secretly eat potato peels
and forced them to open their mouths and then shot into those widely
opened mouths. We know the names of the professional murderers Schwarz
and Ledecke. They took delight in shooting at the prisoners returning home
in the twilight and murdered twenty of them a day. Thirty, forty men. [p.
29f.]
Such was life in this camp, similar to a miniature Majdanek, and it
might seem that there could be nothing worse in the world. But the inmates
of Camp No. 1 knew quite well that there was something worse, something
a hundred times more horrible than their own camp. Three kilometers from
the labor camp, the Germans began in May 1942 the construction of the
Jewish camp โ the human slaughterhouse. [p. 31โฆ]
For thirteen months the trains came to Treblinka, each train consisting
of sixty cars, and on each car a number was written with chalk: one hundred
fifty โ one hundred eighty โ two hundred. These figures indicated the
number of people who were in the car. Train workers and peasants secretly
counted the trains. One peasant from the village of Wulka (the community
situated closest to the camp), the sixty-two-year-old Kazimierz Skarzinski,
told me that there were days when six trains ran past Wulka alone, over the
Siedlce railway, and that there wasnโt one day during the course of these
thirteen months that at least one of these trains didnโt come through. But
the Siedlce line is just one of the four train lines which supplied Treblinka.
Lucian Cukowa, a railway repair worker, who the Germans had mobilized
for work on the branch line that goes from Treblinka to Camp No. 2, relates
that during his work from June 15, 1942, until August 1943, one to
three trains came every day from Treblinka Station to the camp over this
secondary line. Every train consisted of sixty cars and in each car were no
fewer than one hundred fifty persons. We have collected dozens of such
statements. Even if we reduced all the numbers, as given by the witnesses,
of all those who were on the trains to Treblinka by about a factor of two,
the number of people brought to Treblinka within thirteen months nevertheless
amounts to approximately three million. [p. 31f.]
In the report on this last tragic train, all witnesses mention the atrocities
of an anthropoid creature, the SS man Zepf. He specialized in the murder
of children. This creature, who had at his disposal enormous strength,
suddenly grabbed a child from out of the crowd and, after he had swung
him through the air like a club, smashed in his skull on the ground or tore
him right in two. When I heard of this monster, obviously born of a woman,
it seemed to me unthinkable and improbable that the acts that were told of
him could be true. But after I had personally heard these reports repeated from direct eyewitnesses, I saw that they spoke of them as of details,
which were neither unusual nor inconsistent with the entire structure of the
Hell of Treblinka, and I believed in the possibility of such a creature. [p.
43โฆ]
The dimensions of the first three chambers were only five by five meters,
which means that each had twenty-five square meters. Each chamber
was one hundred ninety centimeters high. It had two doors; one admitted
the living, the other served for bringing out the gassed corpses. This second
door was very wide, approximately two and a half meters. The chambers
were mounted upon a common foundation. These three chambers did
not correspond to the productive capacity demanded by Berlin in assembly-
line murder. [โฆ]
The seven hundred prisoners worked five weeks long on the structure of
the new large-scale murder business. When the work had reached its peak,
an expert came with his staff from Germany and took care of setting things
up. The new chambers, ten in all, were symmetrically arranged on either
side of a concrete corridor. [โฆ]
The new chambers were each seven by eight meters, or fifty-six square
meters in area. The total surface area of these ten chambers amounted to
five hundred sixty square meters, and if one added to this the area of the
three old chambers, which were put into service at the arrival of small parties,
then Treblinka had at its disposal a total of usable lethal surface area
of six hundred thirty-five square meters. Four hundred sixty to five hundred
people were squeezed into one chamber at a time. When fully loaded,
therefore, the ten chambers during one operation annihilated an average
of four thousand five hundred people. At their most typical loading, the
chambers of the Hell of Treblinka were filled at least two or three times
every day (there were days when this happened five times). If we intentionally
reduce the figures, we are able to calculate that, with a usage of only
twice per day of just the new chambers, approximately ten thousand people
were murdered in Treblinka on a single day, and about three hundred
thousand in a month. Treblinka operated for thirteen months, day after
day, but if we allow even ninety days to be deducted for repairs, idleness,
untypical transports, there are ten full months of operation. If in one month
an average of three hundred thousand people arrive, then within ten
months Treblinka exterminated three million people. [p. 47fโฆ]
The duty of the writer is to report a terrible truth, and the citizenโs duty
as a reader is to learn it. Anyone who turns away, closes his eyes and
walks by, desecrates the memory of the murdered. Whoever does not know
the whole truth can never grasp against what foe, what monstrosity, the
great Red Army took up the deadly struggle. [p. 55โฆ]
We entered the camp of Treblinka at the beginning of September
[1944], which was thirteen months after the day of the revolt. For thirteen
Chapter I: The Description of Treblinka in Historiography 23
months the Germans had tried to erase the traces of their work. [โฆ]. And
the earth, giving way under oneโs feet, is fatty and swollen, as if it had
been soaked in a surfeit of linseed oil; the unsolid earth of Treblinka wells
up like an eddying sea. This wasteland, surrounded by barbed wire fencing,
has consumed more human lives than entire oceans and seas of the
globe since the existence of the human race.โ (p. 61f.)
I will get the ball rolling. This eye witness account is from Vassili Grossman. This Jew was a war correspondent for the Soviets. Wiki states At the outbreak of the Second World War, he was engaged as a war correspondent by the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda; he wrote first-hand accounts of the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin. Grossman's eyewitness reports of a Nazi extermination camp, following the discovery of Treblinka, were among the earliest accounts of a Nazi death camp by a reporter. The following extract is from TREBLINKA: EXTERMINATION CAMP OR TRANSIT CAMP? by Mattogno & Graf link. Grossman interviewed former Sonderkommando inmates who escaped from Treblinka and wrote his manuscript without revealing their identities.
In Treblinka there were two camps: the labor camp No. 1, in which
prisoners of various nationalities, above all Poles, worked, and camp No.
2, the Jewish camp.
Camp No. 1 โ the work or concentration camp โ was located directly
next to the sand pit, at the edge of the forest. It was a camp like those,
which were established by the hundreds and thousands in the occupied
eastern territories by the Gestapo. It began in 1941. As if reduced to one
common denominator, the traits of the German character, grotesquely disfigured
by the frightful fun house mirror of the Hitler regime, are combined
in it. [p. 27fโฆ]
The No. 1 Camp existed from autumn of 1941 [until] July 23, 1944. It
was completely liquidated while the prisoners were already in earshot of
the dull boom of the Soviet artillery. Early in the morning of July 23, the
guard unit and the SS people proceeded to exterminate the camp after they
had fortified themselves with schnapps. By the evening all of the prisoners
had been murdered โ murdered and buried. The Warsaw cabinetmaker
Max Lewit was able to save himself, because lying wounded underneath
the corpses of his comrades, he had waited for the darkness and crept into
the forest. He told how he heard the singing of thirty boys in the pit who
struck up the tune โSong of the Fatherlandโ before being shot to death; he
heard one of the youngsters yell: โStalin will avenge us!โ He heard the
camp favorite Leib, who had led the boys, get up again after falling down
into the pit after the volley hit him, and ask: โPan[28] Guard, they missed;
please, once more Pan Guard, once more!โ [p. 29โฆ]
We know the names of the camp SS men, their characters, idiosyncrasies,
we know the camp commander van Eipen, a half-Dutch German, who
is an insane murderer, an insatiable libertine, a lover of good horses and
fast riding jaunts. [โฆ]
We know the one-eyed German Swiderski from Odessa, the โMaster
Hammerer,โ who was regarded as the unsurpassable specialist of โdry
murder,โ because within a few minutes he killed with a hammer fifteen
children between the ages of eight and thirteen years, who had been designated as unfit for labor. We know the skinny, gypsy-like SS man Preifi,
nicknamed โthe Old Man,โ a taciturn grouch. He sought to dispel his melancholy
by sitting behind the place where the camp slops were dumped; he
stalked the prisoners who sneaked back there to secretly eat potato peels
and forced them to open their mouths and then shot into those widely
opened mouths. We know the names of the professional murderers Schwarz
and Ledecke. They took delight in shooting at the prisoners returning home
in the twilight and murdered twenty of them a day. Thirty, forty men. [p.
29f.]
Such was life in this camp, similar to a miniature Majdanek, and it
might seem that there could be nothing worse in the world. But the inmates
of Camp No. 1 knew quite well that there was something worse, something
a hundred times more horrible than their own camp. Three kilometers from
the labor camp, the Germans began in May 1942 the construction of the
Jewish camp โ the human slaughterhouse. [p. 31โฆ]
For thirteen months the trains came to Treblinka, each train consisting
of sixty cars, and on each car a number was written with chalk: one hundred
fifty โ one hundred eighty โ two hundred. These figures indicated the
number of people who were in the car. Train workers and peasants secretly
counted the trains. One peasant from the village of Wulka (the community
situated closest to the camp), the sixty-two-year-old Kazimierz Skarzinski,
told me that there were days when six trains ran past Wulka alone, over the
Siedlce railway, and that there wasnโt one day during the course of these
thirteen months that at least one of these trains didnโt come through. But
the Siedlce line is just one of the four train lines which supplied Treblinka.
Lucian Cukowa, a railway repair worker, who the Germans had mobilized
for work on the branch line that goes from Treblinka to Camp No. 2, relates
that during his work from June 15, 1942, until August 1943, one to
three trains came every day from Treblinka Station to the camp over this
secondary line. Every train consisted of sixty cars and in each car were no
fewer than one hundred fifty persons. We have collected dozens of such
statements. Even if we reduced all the numbers, as given by the witnesses,
of all those who were on the trains to Treblinka by about a factor of two,
the number of people brought to Treblinka within thirteen months nevertheless
amounts to approximately three million. [p. 31f.]
In the report on this last tragic train, all witnesses mention the atrocities
of an anthropoid creature, the SS man Zepf. He specialized in the murder
of children. This creature, who had at his disposal enormous strength,
suddenly grabbed a child from out of the crowd and, after he had swung
him through the air like a club, smashed in his skull on the ground or tore
him right in two. When I heard of this monster, obviously born of a woman,
it seemed to me unthinkable and improbable that the acts that were told of
him could be true. But after I had personally heard these reports repeated from direct eyewitnesses, I saw that they spoke of them as of details,
which were neither unusual nor inconsistent with the entire structure of the
Hell of Treblinka, and I believed in the possibility of such a creature. [p.
43โฆ]
The dimensions of the first three chambers were only five by five meters,
which means that each had twenty-five square meters. Each chamber
was one hundred ninety centimeters high. It had two doors; one admitted
the living, the other served for bringing out the gassed corpses. This second
door was very wide, approximately two and a half meters. The chambers
were mounted upon a common foundation. These three chambers did
not correspond to the productive capacity demanded by Berlin in assembly-
line murder. [โฆ]
The seven hundred prisoners worked five weeks long on the structure of
the new large-scale murder business. When the work had reached its peak,
an expert came with his staff from Germany and took care of setting things
up. The new chambers, ten in all, were symmetrically arranged on either
side of a concrete corridor. [โฆ]
The new chambers were each seven by eight meters, or fifty-six square
meters in area. The total surface area of these ten chambers amounted to
five hundred sixty square meters, and if one added to this the area of the
three old chambers, which were put into service at the arrival of small parties,
then Treblinka had at its disposal a total of usable lethal surface area
of six hundred thirty-five square meters. Four hundred sixty to five hundred
people were squeezed into one chamber at a time. When fully loaded,
therefore, the ten chambers during one operation annihilated an average
of four thousand five hundred people. At their most typical loading, the
chambers of the Hell of Treblinka were filled at least two or three times
every day (there were days when this happened five times). If we intentionally
reduce the figures, we are able to calculate that, with a usage of only
twice per day of just the new chambers, approximately ten thousand people
were murdered in Treblinka on a single day, and about three hundred
thousand in a month. Treblinka operated for thirteen months, day after
day, but if we allow even ninety days to be deducted for repairs, idleness,
untypical transports, there are ten full months of operation. If in one month
an average of three hundred thousand people arrive, then within ten
months Treblinka exterminated three million people. [p. 47fโฆ]
The duty of the writer is to report a terrible truth, and the citizenโs duty
as a reader is to learn it. Anyone who turns away, closes his eyes and
walks by, desecrates the memory of the murdered. Whoever does not know
the whole truth can never grasp against what foe, what monstrosity, the
great Red Army took up the deadly struggle. [p. 55โฆ]
We entered the camp of Treblinka at the beginning of September
[1944], which was thirteen months after the day of the revolt. For thirteen
Chapter I: The Description of Treblinka in Historiography 23
months the Germans had tried to erase the traces of their work. [โฆ]. And
the earth, giving way under oneโs feet, is fatty and swollen, as if it had
been soaked in a surfeit of linseed oil; the unsolid earth of Treblinka wells
up like an eddying sea. This wasteland, surrounded by barbed wire fencing,
has consumed more human lives than entire oceans and seas of the
globe since the existence of the human race.โ (p. 61f.)