The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays by Vasily Grossman
Landing a punch on the temple of the soldier walking beside him, he knocked him down and snatched his submachine gun out of his hands. There was no time to work out what to do with an alien, unfamiliar weapon, and so, just as he had used to swing his hammer, he took a swing with this heavy gun and smashed it into the face of an Unteroffizier who had come running up from one side.
In the commotion that followed, little Katya Weissman lost her mother and her grandmother. She was clutching at the hem of old Rosenthal’s jacket; with some difficulty he picked her up, turned his head to bring his mouth close to her ear, and said, “Don’t cry, Katya, don’t cry!”
Holding on to his neck with one hand, the girl answered, “I’m not crying, teacher.”
It was difficult for him to keep holding her: his head was spinning, his ears were ringing, his legs were shaking from not being used to walking so far, from the agonizing tension of these last hours.
People were backing away from the ravine. Some were refusing to move forward; some were falling to the ground, trying to crawl back. Soon Rosenthal was close to the front of the crowd.
Fifteen men were led to the edge of the ravine. Rosenthal knew some of them: Mendel, the taciturn stove maker; Meyerovich, the dental technician; Apelfeld, that good-natured old rogue of an electrician. Apelfeld’s son was now a teacher in the Kiev Conservatory; when he was a boy, Rosenthal had taught him math. His breathing became labored, but the old man went on holding the little girl in his arms. Thinking about her was a distraction.
“How can I comfort her? How can I deceive her?” the old man wondered, gripped by a feeling of infinite sorrow. At this last minute too, there would be no one to support him, no one to say what he had longed all his life to hear—the words he had desired more than all the wisdom of books about the great thoughts and labors of man.
The little girl turned toward him. Her face was calm; it was the pale face of an adult, a face full of tolerant compassion. And in a sudden silence he heard her voice.
“Teacher,” she said, “don’t look that way, it will frighten you.” And, like a mother, she covered his eyes with the palms of her hands.
***
The Gestapo boss was wrong. The execution of the Jews did not enable him to breathe freely. In the evening he received a report that a large armed group had appeared near the town. It was led by Shevchenko, the chief engineer from the sugar refinery. He and 140 workers, whom there had not been time to evacuate, had joined the partisans. That night they blew up the steam mill, which had been commandeered by the German commissariat. They also set fire to a huge store of hay that the foragers of a Hungarian cavalry division had collected in a building just behind the station. No one in the town slept that night—the wind was blowing toward the town and the fire might have spread to people’s houses and sheds. Swaying this way and that way, the heavy, brick-red flames crept farther and farther. Black smoke eclipsed the stars and the moon; the clear summer sky was full of menace and flame.
Standing in their yards, people watched the huge fire slowly spread. The wind carried with it the staccato sound of machine guns and the blasts of hand grenades.
That evening Yashka Mikhailyuk came back home in a hurry, without his cap and without any vodka or fatback. As he went past the women standing silently in the yard, he said to Dasha, “Well, I was right, wasn’t I? You’ve got more living space now—a whole room to yourself!”
“More than enough living space,” said Dasha. “More than enough. My Vitya and a six-year-old little girl and the old teacher have all been laid in a single grave. I’m mourning all of them—all of them.” Then she shouted, “Go away, don’t look at me with your filthy eyes. I’ll stab you with a blunt knife, I’ll hack you to pieces with my meat ax.”
Yashka ran off to his room and sat there in silence. When his mother wanted to put up the shutters, he said to her, “No, don’t go out. Don’t even open the door. They’re all there, damn them, and they’ve gone crazy—they’ll throw boiling water in your face.”
“Yashenka,” she said, “you’d better go to your attic. The bed’s made up. I’ll lock you in there.”
In the light of the flames, soldiers were slipping past like shadows. The alarm had been sounded, and they had been called to the commandant’s office. Old Varvara Andreyevna was standing in the middle of the yard. Lit by the blaze, her disheveled gray hair looked rose pink.
“Well?” she shouted, “do you think we’re scared of you? Just look at those flames! I’m not afraid of any Fritzes. They fight old men and children. Dasha, the day will come when we’ll be burning the whole lot of them.”
The sky grew deeper and deeper crimson, more and more incandescent, and it seemed to the people standing outside in their yards that the dark smoky flames were burning away everything bad, everything impure and evil with which the Germans had tried to poison the human soul.
The Hell of Treblinka*
1.
To the east of Warsaw, along the Western Bug, lie sands and swamps, and thick evergreen and deciduous forests. These places are gloomy and deserted; there are few villages. Travelers try to avoid the narrow roads, where walking is difficult and cartwheels sink up to the axle in the deep sand.
Here, on the branch line to Siedlce, stands the remote station of Treblinka. It is a little over sixty kilometers from Warsaw and not far from the junction station of Małkinia, where the lines from Warsaw, Białystok, Siedlce, and Łomza all meet.
Many of those who were brought to Treblinka in 1942 may have had reason to pass this way in peaceful times. Gazing abstractedly at the dull landscape—pines, sand, sand and more pines, heather and dry shrubs, dismal station buildings and the intersections of tracks—bored passengers may have let their gaze settle for a moment on a single-track line running from the station into the middle of the dense pine forest around it. This spur led to a quarry where gravel was extracted for industrial and municipal construction projects.
This quarry is about four kilometers from the station, in a stretch of wilderness surrounded on all sides by pine forest. The soil here is poor and barren, and the peasants do not cultivate it. And so the wilderness has remained wilderness. The ground is partly covered by moss, with thin pines here and there. Now and then a jackdaw flies by, or a brightly colored crested hoopoe. This miserable wilderness was the place chosen by some official, and approved by SS Reichsführer Himmler, for the construction of a vast executioner’s block—an executioner’s block such as the human race has never seen, from the time of primitive barbarism to our own cruel days. An executioner’s block, probably, such as the entire universe has never seen. This was the site of the SS’s main killing ground, which surpassed those of Sobibor, Majdanek, Bełzec, and Auschwitz.[1]
There were two camps at Treblinka: Treblinka I, a penal camp for prisoners of various nationalities, chiefly Poles; and Treblinka II, the Jewish camp.
Treblinka I, a labor or penal camp, was located next to the quarry, not far from the edge of the forest. It was an ordinary camp, one of the hundreds and thousands of such camps that the Gestapo established in the occupied territories of Eastern Europe. It appeared in 1941. Many different traits of the German character, distorted by the terrible mirror of Hitler’s regime, find expression in this camp. Thus the delirious ravings occasioned by fever are an ugly, distorted reflection of what the patient thought and felt before he was ill. Thus the acts and thoughts of a madman are a distorted reflection of the acts and thoughts of a normal person. Thus a criminal commits an act of violence; his hammer blow to the bridge of his victim’s nose requires not only a subhuman cold-bloodedness but also the keen eye and firm grip of an experienced foundry worker.
Thrift, precision, calculation, and pedantic cleanliness are qualities common to many Germans, and they are not bad qualities in themselves. They yield valuable results when applied to agriculture or industry. Hitler’s regime, however, harnessed these qualities for a crime against humanity. In this Polish labor camp the SS acted as if they
The camp was laid out in neat uniform rectangles; the barracks were built in straight rows; birch trees lined the sand-covered paths. Asters and dahlias grew in the fertilized soil. There were concrete ponds for the ducks and geese; there were small pools, with convenient steps, where the staff could do their laundry. There were services for the German personnel: an excellent bakery, a barber, a garage, a gasoline pump with a glass ball on top, stores. The Majdanek camp outside Lublin was organized along the same principles—as were dozens of other labor camps in eastern Poland where the SS and the Gestapo intended to settle in for a long time; there were the same little gardens, the same drinking fountains, the same concrete roads. Efficiency, precise calculation, a pedantic concern for order, a love of detailed charts and schedules—all these German qualities were reflected in the layout and organization of these camps.
People were sent to the labor camp for various periods of time, sometimes as little as four to six months. There were Poles who had infringed the laws of the General Government—usually this was a matter of minor infringements, since the penalty for major infringements was immediate death. A slip of the tongue, a word overheard on the street, a failure to make some delivery, someone else’s random denunciation, a refusal to hand over a cart or a horse to a German, a young girl being so bold as to refuse the advances of a member of the SS, the merest unproven hint of suspicion of being involved in some act of sabotage at a factory, these were the offenses that brought thousands of Polish workers, peasants, and intellectuals—the old and the young, mothers, men, and young girls—to this penal camp. Altogether, about fifty thousand people passed through its gates. Jews ended up in this camp only if they were unusually skilled craftsmen: bakers, cobblers, cabinetmakers, stonemasons, tailors. There were all kinds of workshops in the camp, including a substantial furniture workshop that supplied the headquarters of German armies with tables, straight-backed chairs, and armchairs.
Treblinka I existed from the autumn of 1941 until July 23, 1944. By the time it had been fully destroyed, the prisoners could already hear the distant rumble of Soviet artillery. Early in the morning of July 23, the SS men and the Wachmänner fortified themselves with a stiff schnapps and set to work to wipe out every last trace of the camp. By nightfall all the prisoners had been killed and buried. Max Levit, a Warsaw carpenter, managed to survive; he lay wounded beneath the corpses of his comrades until it grew dark, and then he crawled off into the forest. He told us how, as he lay in the pit, he heard thirty boys from the camp singing “Broad Is My Motherland!” just before they were shot. He heard one of the boys shout, “Stalin will avenge us!” He told us how the redheaded Leib—one of the most popular of the prisoners and the leader of this group of boys—fell down on top of him after the first volley, raised his head a little, and called out, “Panie Wachman, you didn’t kill me. Shoot again, please! Shoot again!”
It is now possible to describe the regimen of this labor camp in some detail; we have testimonies from dozens of Polish men and women who escaped or were released at one time or another. We know about work in the quarry; we know how those who failed to fulfill their work quota were thrown over the edge of a cliff into an abyss below. We know about the daily food ration: 170 to 200 grams of bread and half a liter of some slop that passed for soup. We know about the deaths from starvation, about the hunger-swollen wretches who were taken outside the camp in wheelbarrows and shot. We know about the wild orgies; we know how the Germans raped young women and shot them immediately afterward. We know how people were thrown from a window six meters high. We know that a group of drunken Germans would sometimes take ten or fifteen prisoners from a barrack at night and calmly demonstrate different killing methods on them, shooting them in the heart, the back of the neck, the eyes, the mouth, and the temple. We know the names of the SS men in the camp; we know their characters and idiosyncrasies. We know that the head of the camp was a Dutch German named van Euppen, an insatiable murderer and sexual pervert with a passion for good horses and fast riding. We know about a huge young man named Stumpfe who broke out into uncontrollable laughter every time he murdered a prisoner or when one was executed in his presence. He was known as “Laughing Death.” The last person to hear him laugh was Max Levit, on July 23 of this year, when thirty boys were shot on Stumpfe’s orders and Levit was lying at the bottom of the pit. We know about Svidersky, a one-eyed German from Odessa who was known as “Master Hammer” because of his supreme expertise in “cold murder”—that is, killing without firearms. It took him only a few minutes—with no weapon but a hammer—to kill fifteen children, aged eight to thirteen, who had been declared unfit for work. We know about Preifi, a skinny SS man who looked like a Gypsy and whose nickname was “the Old One.” He was sullen and taciturn. He would relieve his melancholy by sitting on the camp rubbish dump and waiting for a prisoner to sneak up in search of potato peelings; he would then shoot the prisoner in the mouth, having forced him or her to hold their mouth open.
We know the names of the professional killers Schwarz and Ledeke. They used to amuse themselves by shooting at prisoners returning from work in the twilight. They killed twenty, thirty, or forty every evening.
None of these beings was in any way human. Their distorted brains, hearts, and souls, their words, acts, and habits were like a caricature—a terrible caricature of the qualities, thoughts, feelings, habits, and acts of normal Germans. The orderliness of the camp; the documentation of the murders; the love of monstrous practical jokes that recall the jokes of drunken German students; the sentimental songs that the guards sang in unison amid pools of blood; the speeches they were constantly delivering to their victims; the exhortations and pious sayings printed neatly on special pieces of paper—all these monstrous dragons and reptiles were the progeny of traditional German chauvinism. They had sprung from arrogance, conceit, and egotism, from a pedantic obsession with one’s own little nest, from a steely indifference to the fate of everything living, from a ferocious, blind conviction that German science, German music, poetry, language, lawns, toilets, skies, beer, and homes were the finest in the entire universe. These people’s vices and crimes were born of the vices of the German national character, and of the German State.
Such was life in this camp, which was like a lesser Majdanek, and one might have thought that nothing in the world could be more terrible. But those who lived in Treblinka I knew very well that there was indeed something more terrible—a hundred times more terrible—than this camp. In May 1942, three kilometers away from the labor camp, the Germans had begun the construction of a Jewish camp, a camp that was, in effect, one vast executioner’s block. Construction proceeded rapidly, with more than a thousand workers involved. Nothing in this camp was adapted for life; everything was adapted for death. Himmler intended the existence of this camp to remain a profound secret; not a single person was to leave it alive. And not a single person—not even a field marshal—was allowed near it. Anyone who happened to come within a kilometer of the camp was shot without warning. German planes were forbidden to fly over the area. The victims brought by train along the spur from Treblinka village did not know what lay in wait for them until the very last moment. The guards who had accompanied the prisoners during the journey were not allowed into the camp; they were not allowed even to cross its outer perimeter. When the trains arrived, SS men took over from the previous guards. The trains, which were usually made up of sixty freight wagons, were divided into three sections while they were still in the forest, and the locomotive would push twenty wagons at a time up to the camp platform. The locomotive always pushed from behind and stopped by the perimeter fence, and so neither the driver nor the fireman ever crossed the camp boundary. When the wagons had been unloaded, the SS Unteroffizier on duty would signal for the next twenty wagons, which would be waiting two hundred meters down the line. When all sixty wagons had been fully unloaded, the camp Kommandantur would phone t
Treblinka was well located; it was possible to bring transports from all four points of the compass: north, south, east, and west. Trains came from the Polish cities of Warsaw, Międzyrzecze, Częstochowa, Siedlce, and Radom; from Łomza, Białystok, Grodno, and other Belorussian cities; from Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Austria; and from Bulgaria and Bessarabia.
Every day for thirteen months the trains brought people to the camp. In each train there were sixty wagons, and a number chalked on the side of each wagon—150, 180, 200—indicated the number of people inside. Railway workers and peasants secretly kept count of these trains. Kazimierz Skarzuński, a sixty-two-year-old peasant from the village of Wólka (the nearest inhabited point to the camp), told me that there were days when as many as six trains went by from Siedlce alone, and that there was barely a day during these thirteen months without at least one train. And the line from Siedlce was only one of the four lines that supplied the camp. Lucjan Żukowa, who was enlisted by the Germans to work on the spur from Treblinka village, said that throughout the time he worked on this line, from June 15, 1942 until August 1943, one to three trains went to the camp each day. There were sixty wagons in each train, and at least 150 people in each wagon. We have collected dozens of similar testimonies. Even if we were to halve the figures provided by these observers, we would still find that around two-and-a-half to three million people were brought to Treblinka during these thirteen months. We shall, however, return to this figure.
The fenced-off area of the camp proper, including the station platform, storerooms for the executed people’s belongings, and other auxiliary premises, is extremely small: 780 by 600 meters. If for a moment one were to entertain the least doubt as to the fate of the millions transported here, if one were to suppose for a moment that the Germans did not murder them immediately after their arrival, then one would have to ask what has happened to them all. There were, after all, enough of them to populate a small state or a large European capital. The area of the camp is so small that, had the new arrivals stayed alive for even a few days, it would have been only a week and a half before there was no more space behind the barbed wire for this tide of people flowing in from Poland, from Belorussia, from the whole of Europe. For thirteen months—396 days—the trains left either empty or loaded with gravel. Not a single person brought by train to Treblinka II ever made the return journey. The terrible question has to be asked: “Cain, where are they? Where are the people you brought here?”