Death Camp Treblinka: Survivor Stories Page #4

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'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

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