Treblinka Eyewitness Accounts

[Werd]

I will not be wasting my time with Cal Rajchman since Kues has already annihilated him here. His claims of black faces and blue bellies from CO poisoning as well as blood in the pits that is flammable enough to help bodies on the pyres burn for hours into the night discredit him as an eyewitness to gassed corpses but not necessarily as someone who was interred in Treblinka and maybe saw a few nazi excessive abuses of power in terms of beatings or bullet executions without cause.


Summarized and shortened from here.
http://holocaustcontroversies.yuku.com/ ... GQG9Ge6XXQ

Abraham Krzepicki: Eighteen Days in Treblinka
Source: The Death Camp Treblinka. A Documentary, edited by Alexander Donat, New York 1979

ABRAHAM JACOB KRZEPICKI was in his early twenties when war broke out in Poland in 1939. He was drafted into the Polish army and was taken prisoner by the Germans. After his release, he settled in Warsaw. On August 25, 1942, he was deported to Treblinka. However, he managed to escape 18 days later and returned to the Warsaw ghetto. He joined the ZOB (Jewish Fighting Organization) in the ghetto and was killed in the Warsaw ghetto uprising in April, 1943. He was a member of a Hanoar-Hatzioni group headed by Jacob Praszker. During the shelling of the Brush Workshops he was wounded in the leg. His comrades had to evacuate the burning building and were forced to abandon him and other wounded fighters.

The leaders of the ghetto underground archives (under the historian Emanuel Ringelblum) entrusted Rachel Auerbach with the task of recording the testimony given by Krzepicki (December, 1942–January, 1943). Krzepicki’s report–he was then 25 years old–was the first eyewitness account of the crimes perpetrated at Treblinka. The manuscript (in Yiddish) had been buried in the rubble of the ghetto along with other documents from the second part of the Ringelblum archives. It was recovered on December 1, 1950 by Polish construction workers beneath the ruins of 68 Nowolipki Street. The original manuscript is now at the Jewish Historical Insti­tute in Warsaw (File #290). It was first published in the Jan. –June, 1956 issue of the Institute’s Yiddish-language publication, Bleter far Geshikhte (Vol. XI, No.1-2, 1956, Warsaw).

This is the first English translation of Krzepichi’s account.
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“So Many Clothes! But Where Are the People?” We left the cars tired and exhausted. After traveling for so many hours in semi­darkness, we were momentarily blinded by the sun. It was 5 p.m., but the day’s heat was at full strength. As we looked around, we saw countless piles of rags. The sight stabbed at our hearts. So many clothes! But where were the people? We began to recall stories we had heard of Lublin, Kolo, Turek and we said to each other, “Jews, this is no good! They’ve got us!” They drove us faster, faster. Through another exit, guarded by a Ukrainian, we left the plat­form area and entered a fenced-off area where two barracks were located.

One of the Germans rapped out a command: “Women and chil­dren to the left! Men to the right!” A little later, two Jews were stationed there as interpreters to show the crowd where to go. We men were told to sit down outside along the length of the barrack on the right. The women all went into the barrack on the left and, as we later learned, they were told at once to strip naked and were driven out of the barrack through another door. From there, they entered a narrow path lined on either side with barbed wire. This path led through a small grove to the building that housed the gas chamber. Only a few minutes later we could hear their terrible screams, but we could not see anything, because the trees of the grove blocked our view.

Beneath Machine Gun Barrels. As we sat there, tired and resigned-some of us lying stretched out on the sand–we could see a heavy machine gun being set up on the roof of the barrack on the left side, with three Ukrainian servicemen stretched out around it. We figured that any minute they would turn the machine gun on us and kill us all. This fear put some new life into me, but then I again felt the terrible thirst which had been torturing me for so many hours. The Ukrainians on the barrack roof had opened an umbrella over their heads to shield them from the sun. My sole thought at that moment was, “A cup of water! just one more cup of water before I die!”
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The Corpse Processing Plant at Work. Five hundred meters farther away, a machine was at work digging ditches. This machine, together with its motor, was as big as a railroad car. Its mechanical shovels were digging up piles of dirt. The machine loaded the dirt into little wagons, which turned away and dumped it onto the side. Things were humming out there on that big field. Many Jews had already been working there earlier. They were dragging corpses into the ditches which had been dug for them by the machine. We could also see Jews pushing carts piled with bodies toward the big ditches at the edge of the field.

There it was again, that stench. They were all running, pursued by Germans, Ukrainians, and even Jewish group leaders called kapos (Kameraden-Polizei), who kept driving them on: “Faster! Fast­er!” All the while, we could hear the crack of pistols and rifles and the whine of bullets. But there were no cries or groans from those who were shot because the Germans shot them from the back in the neck. In that way, the person drops dead quick as lightning and never even has a chance to make his voice heard one last time.

There were various kinds of ditches in that place. At a distance, running parallel with the outermost camp fence, there were three giant mass graves, in which the dead were arranged in layers. Closer to the barracks, a somewhat smaller ditch had been dug. This was where our 60 men were put to work. A group of workers walked around the area, dusting the corpses with chlorine powder, which they dipped from big barrels with their buckets. [... ]

I should point out here that none of the gassing victims were buried in this area; only those who had died in the transports or who had been shot on arrival at the camp, before entering the “showers.”

Our team of 60 men was divided into three groups. Since I knew German, I became the leader of my group, and in fact soon had to shout at my people and chase them. If I had not done so, I could have been whipped or shot at any time.
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The Personal Effects of the Victims. When we were through with the bodies in the well, we were taken to clear away the things in the left-hand barracks, where the people undressed before enter­ing the gas chamber. Here, piled up in huge mounds, were the garments, underwear, shoes and all sorts of other items left by the men, women and children who had undressed there the day be­fore. Various amounts of cash, large and small, were also lying around on the floor. There was Polish money as well as foreign currency, securities and jewelry. It was our job to pick up the rags as they were, and to add them to the piles of clothing near the railroad tracks
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A Ukrainian Tries to Cheer Us Up.
The strangest thing of all was that a Ukrainian was among those who tried to cheer us up. He was on guard duty over the barrack and when he heard the com­motion and weeping inside he walked in and spoke to us in Rus­sian, telling us not to take things so hard. Nothing would happen, nothing would be done to us; we would go on working the same as before.

And, wonder of wonders, his prediction came true. A rare mira­cle occurred. To this day, I don’t know why. Some said that there had been a breakdown in the gas chamber. By morning, no one had come for us, and then we had roll call just as usual. It is true that 80 men had been taken out to be shot, but the remainder, a good few hundred people, were assigned new work..
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After I had been working a few days at sorting personal effects – no new transports had yet arrived – I was assigned along with 14 other men to clean up the road to the gas chamber, or, as they called it, the “bathhouse.” That area aroused the greatest fear among all of us. But I had never been there before.

The “Trash” on the Last Road. The road leading from the left hand barracks or the roll call area to the building in the middle of the woods was concealed by trees. This was the path upon which hundreds of thousands of Jewish men, women and children ran their last race, a narrow sandy winding path bordered on both sides with a barbed wire fence ...

As we came closer to the path, we saw the “trash” which they wanted us to clean up before new transports arrived. This “trash” consisted of a veritable windfall of banknotes which people had torn up and thrown away before they died. We were given special birch brooms and rakes for the job. With the rakes, we raked up gold coins, jewels and diamonds from the sand. One of us picked up a gold twenty-dollar coin and took it over to the Ukrainian who was standing guard over us, as an inducement to have him get off our backs as we worked.
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I Already Know the Whole Camp. The next morning, 15 men, including myself, were taken out of our group and escorted once again to the gas chamber area. This time we were given a different job; we were ordered to help put up the walls of a new building. Some said that this would be a crematorium for the bodies of those who had been asphyxiated in the gas chamber because burying them took up too much space. I came to a new area with a separate barrack for the workers– a kingdom unto itself. In this way, I got an opportunity to acquaint myself with the most secret and impor­tant part of the camp–the part where the mechanical murder factory itself was located, and also the separate field for the dead where those who were murdered there were buried. One after another, I was able to learn about all the parts of the annihilation camp, Treblinka 2.
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The Gas Chambers. By that time I had already become ac­quainted with four district parts of the camp, including the big, five-sided field of corpses, which was fenced off next to the railroad tracks, and the roll call square between the two barracks. But I had not yet become acquainted with the most terrible of all the parts of the camp-the gas chambers. That day, I was to come quite close to this, the fifth and last part of the camp. I have forgotten to mention that there were towers at all four corners of the camp, each of them three stories high, in which Ukrainian guards constantly paced back and forth. These were the watchtowers which served as obser­vation posts to make sure that no one could run away from the camp. At the top levels of the watchtowers, there were machine guns, searchlights which sent out broad beacons every few minutes to every part of the camp, making the night as bright as midday. Only on nights when Warsaw was bombed did the searchlights remain dark.

Most of the buildings in the camp were made of wood. The gas chamber and the new building–which was in the process of being built at the time and to which we were assigned as construction helpers-were made of brick.

We were put to work slaking lime in the ditches which had been dug. Barrels of water, drawn from a special well, were standing nearby. It was from these barrels that, for the only time while I was in Treblinka, I was able to satisfy my thirst a little more. But it did not do me any good. just like others who finally got a chance to grab a little more water, I was seized by diarrhea that same day. It was very debilitating.

Aside from that little bit of water, the workers were no better off in this area than elsewhere in the camp. On the contrary, here in the “Death Camp,” as that place was known, the treatment the workers received was even harsher, if that was possible.

Toward noon, when the sun was burning at its strongest, I wit­nessed a scene which had a most horrible impact on me.

On my way back from the kitchen, I happened to pass by the barrack which housed those who were regularly employed in that area. In general, these people had no contact with the workers in the rest of the camp. There, I came upon three Jews lying on the ground. I didn’t know how they got there. Perhaps they hadn’t been able to make themselves go on working, or perhaps they had collapsed from exhaustion, and wanted to rest a little, and had been caught by an SS man. Now that sadist was standing over them with a thick whip in his hand, belaboring one of them. The man was lying naked and totally unconscious. But the German still refused to leave him alone and kept whipping him with all his might on his naked belly ... The others, it seems, had already received their share, since they were lying there bloody and unconscious. As I looked at this scene, I thought to myself that compared to this, the place where I had worked before had been like gold, and I resolved to get out of here no matter what the consequences and go back to the old place.

But the longish, not too large brick building standing in the middle of the “Death Camp” had a strange fascination for me: this was the gas chamber. Before I left the area, I felt I had to obtain a glimpse of this, the most terrible part of the camp where the sinis­ter crime was perpetrated on the Jews.

I had already come quite close to it several times, when I and others had been carrying water for the lime and clay from the well which stood right next to the building. But it had not occurred to me to leave my group and move a little closer to see. Only as we were returning from our midday meal and our column halted for a while, did I sneak away from them and move toward the open door of the gas chamber.

I think I have already noted that this building was surrounded by a wooded area. Now I noticed that, spread over the flat roof of the building, there was a green wire net whose edges extended slightly beyond the building’s walls. This may have been for protection against air attacks. Beneath the net, on top of the roof, I could see a tangle of pipes.

The walls of the building were covered with concrete. The gas chamber had not been operating for a week. I was able to look inside through one of the two strong whitewashed iron exits which happened to be open.

I saw before me a room which was not too large. It looked like a regular shower room with all the accoutrements of a public bathhouse. The walls of the room were covered with small, white tiles. It was very fine, clean work. The floor was covered with orange terra cotta tiles. Nickel plated metal faucets were set into the ceiling.

That was all. A comfortable, neat little bathhouse set in the mid­dle of a wooded area. There was nothing more to see. But as one stood in front of the entrance to this “bathhouse” one could see hills of lime, and beneath them the giant, still-open mass graves where tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of “bathers” lay in eternal rest. Later on, I was told that here, too, they had begun to cremate the bodies in the ditches.
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After he had left, other Gentiles appeared, including the peasant Klimek, from whom we used to buy food. He had never visited us before and hadn’t known where we were holding out. We could see now that our hideout had been discovered and was no good to us anymore. We discussed what to do next; we decided not to remain together as a group, but to split up and let each man look out for himself. I decided to part from my Hasid (he had fled naked through the barbed wire on the path to the gas chamber; there were wounds all over his skin and he didn’t have a penny to his name). I had been glad to help him out but his fanaticism had repelled me and I decided to pick another friend. I asked him how much money he needed and he answered four zlotys. I gave him ten zlotys and we parted. His name was Wiener. The name of my new friend was Anshel Mędrzycki, a bigshot and a loudmouth. He turned out to be a nicer guy than the Hasid and we decided to stay together. He, too, had run away naked from Treblinka, and I undertook to finance his trip. In order to get some cash, I proposed that I should sell a gold watch to the peasant Klimek. Mędrzycki agreed to come along, and we struck a bargain for 500 zlotys and 5 kilos of corn which I wanted to take along so I could create the impression that I was a smuggler. I went with Klimek to get the corn, so we would be ready when the boy came back.

So it was the last week of August and the first couple of weeks of September 1942 this is supposed to have been seen.

[Werd]

Jankiel Wiernik: One Year in Treblinka
Source: The Death Camp Treblinka. A Documentary, edited by Alexander Donat, New York 1979,
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Camp No. 2 was entirely different. It contained a barrack for the workers, 30 x 10 meters, a laundry, a small laboratory, quarters for 17 women, a guard station and a well. In addition there were 13 chambers in which inmates were gassed. All of these buildings were surrounded by a barbed wire fence. Beyond this enclosure, there was a ditch of 3 x 3 meters and, along the outer rim of the ditch, another barbed wire fence. Both of these enclosures were about 3 meters high, and there were steel wire entanglements between them. Ukrainians stood on guard along the wire enclosure. The entire camp (Camps 1 and 2) was surrounded by a barbed wire fence 4 meters high, camouflaged by saplings. Four watchtowers stood in the camp yard, each of them four stories high; there were also six one-storied observation towers.
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When I arrived at the camp, three gas chambers were already in operation; another ten were added while I was there. A gas chamber measured 5 x 5 meters and was about 1.90 meters high. The outlet on the roof had a hermetic cap. The chamber was equipped with a gas pipe inlet and a baked tile floor slanting towards the platform. The brick building which housed the gas chambers was separated from Camp No. 1 by a wooden wall. This wooden wall and the brick wall of the building together formed a corridor which was 80 centimeters taller than the building. The chambers were connected with the corridor by a hermetically fitted iron door leading into each of the chambers. On the side of Camp No. 2 the chambers were connected by a platform four meters wide, which- ran alongside all three chambers. The platform was about 80 centimeters above ground level. There was also a hermetically fitted wooden door on this side.

Each chamber had a door facing Camp No. 2 (1.80 by 2.50 meters), which could be opened only from the outside by lifting it with iron supports and was closed by iron hooks set into the sash frames, and by wooden bolts. The victims were led into the chambers through the doors leading from the corridor, while the remains of the gassed victims were dragged out through the doors facing Camp No. 2. The power plant operated alongside these chambers, supplying Camps 1 and 2 with electric current. A motor taken from a dismantled Soviet tank stood in the power plant. This motor was used to pump the gas, which was let into the chambers by connecting the motor with the inflow pipes. The speed with which death overcame the helpless victims depended on the quantity of combustion gas admitted into the chamber at one time.

The machinery of the gas chambers was operated by two Ukrainians. One of them, Ivan, was tall, and though his eyes seemed kind and gentle, he was a sadist. He enjoyed torturing his victims. He would often pounce upon us while we were working; he would nail our ears to the walls or make us lie down on the floor and whip us brutally. While he did this, his face showed sadistic satisfaction and he laughed and joked. He finished off the victims according to his mood at the moment. The other Ukrainian was called Nicholas. He had a pale face and the same mentality as Ivan.

The day I first saw men, women and children being led into the house of death I almost went insane. I tore at my hair and shed bitter tears of despair. I suffered most when I looked at the children, accompanied by their mothers or walking alone, entirely ignorant of the fact that within a few minutes their lives would be snuffed out amidst horrible tortures. Their eyes glittered with fear and still more, perhaps, with amazement. It seemed as if the question, "What is this? What's it all about?" was frozen on their lips. But seeing the stony expressions on the faces of their elders, they matched their behavior to the occasion. They either stood motionless or pressed tightly against each other or against their parents, and tensely awaited their horrible end.

Suddenly, the entrance door flew open and out came Ivan, holding a heavy gas pipe, and Nicholas, brandishing a saber. At a given signal, they would begin admitting the victims, beating them savagely as they moved into the chamber. The screams of the women, the weeping of the children, cries of despair and misery, the pleas for mercy, for God's vengeance ring in my ears to this day, making it impossible for me to forget the misery I saw.

Between 450 and 500 persons were crowded into a chamber measuring 25 square meters. Parents carried their children in their arms in the vain hope that this would save their children from death. On the way to their doom, they were pushed and beaten with rifle butts and with Ivan's gas pipe. Dogs were set upon them, barking, biting and tearing at them. To escape the blows and the dogs, the crowd rushed to its death, pushing into the chamber, the stronger ones shoving the weaker ones ahead of them. The bedlam lasted only a short while, for soon the doors were slammed shut. The chamber was filled, the motor turned on and connected with the inflow pipes and, within 25 minutes at the most, all lay stretched out dead or, to be more accurate, were standing up dead. Since there was not an inch of free space, they just leaned against each other.

They no longer shouted, because the thread of their lives had been cut off. They had no more needs or desires. Even in death, mothers held their children tightly in their arms. There were no more friends or foes. There was no more jealousy. All were equal. There was no longer any beauty or ugliness, for they all were yellow from the gas. There were no longer any rich or poor, for they all were equal before God's throne. And why all this? I keep asking myself that question. My life is hard, very hard. But I must live on to tell the world about all this barbarism.

As soon as the gassing was over, Ivan and Nicholas inspected the results, moved over to the other side, opened the door leading to the platform, and proceeded to heave out the corpses. It was our task to carry the corpses to the ditches. We were dead tired from working all day at the construction site, but we had no recourse and had no choice but to obey. We could have refused, but that would have meant a whipping or death in the same manner or even worse; so we obeyed without grumbling.

We worked under the supervision of a Hauptmann [captain], a medium-sized, bespectacled man whose name I do not know. He whipped us and shouted at us. He beat me, too, without a stop. When I gave him a questioning look, he stopped beating me for a moment and said, "If you weren't the carpenter around here, you would be killed." I looked around and saw that almost all the other workers were sharing my fate. A pack of dogs, along with Germans and Ukrainians, had been let loose on us. Almost one-fourth of the workers was killed. The rest of us tossed their bodies into the ditches without further ado. Fortunately for me, when the Hauptmann left, the Unterscharführer relieved me from this work.

Between ten and twelve thousand people were gassed each day. We built a narrow-gauge track and drove the corpses to the ditches on the rolling platform.

One evening, after a hard day's work, we were marched to Camp No. 2 instead of Camp No. 1. The picture here was entirely different; I shall never forget it. My blood froze in my veins. The yard was littered with thousands of corpses, the bodies of the most recent victims. Germans and Ukrainians were barking orders and brutally beating the workers with rifle butts and canes. The faces of the workers were bloody, their eyes blackened and their clothes had been shredded by dogs. Their overseers stood near them.

A one-storied watchtower stood at the entrance of Camp No. 2. It was ascended by means of ladders, and these ladders were used to torture some of the victims. Legs were placed between the rungs and the overseer held the victim's head down in such a way that the poor devil couldn't move while he was beaten savagely, the minimum punishment being 25 lashes. I saw that scene for the first time in the evening. The moon and the reflector lights shed an eerie light upon that appalling massacre of the living, as well as upon the corpses that were strewn all over the place. The moans of the tortured mingling with the swishing of the whips made an infernal noise.

When I arrived at Camp No. 2 there was only one barrack there. The bunks had not yet been finished, and there was a canteen in the yard. I saw there a number of people I had known in Warsaw, but they had changed so much that it was difficult to recognize them. They had been beaten, starved and mistreated. I did not see them for very long, because new faces and new friends kept arriving on the scene. It was a continuous coming and going, and death without end. I learned to look at every living person as a prospective corpse. I appraised him with my eyes and figured out his weight, who was going to carry him to his grave and how badly his bearer would be beaten while dragging his body to the ditch. It was terrible, but true nonetheless. Would you believe that a human being, living under such conditions, could actually smile and make jokes at times? One can get used to anything.
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The new construction job between Camp No. 1 and Camp No. 2, on which I had been working, was completed in a very short time. It turned out that we were building ten additional gas chambers, more spacious than the old ones, 7 by 7 meters or about 50 square meters. As many as 1,000 to 1,200 persons could be crowded into one gas chamber. The building was laid out according to the corridor system, with five chambers on each side of the corridor. Each chamber had two doors, one door leading into the corridor through which the victims were admitted; the other door, facing the camp, was used for the removal of the corpses. The construction of both doors was the same as that of the doors in the old chambers. The building, when viewed from Camp No. 1, showed five wide concrete steps with bowls of flowers on either side. Next came a long corridor. There was a Star of David on top of the roof facing the camp, so that the building looked like an old-fashioned synagogue. When the construction was finished, the Hauptsturmführer said to his subordinates, "The Jew-town has been completed at last."

The work on these gas chambers lasted five weeks, which to us seemed like centuries. We had to work from dawn to dusk under the ceaseless threat of beatings from whips and rifle butts. One of the guards, Woronkov, tortured us savagely, killing some of the workers each day. Although our physical suffering surpassed the imagination of normal human beings, our spiritual agonies were far worse. New transports of victims arrived each day. They were immediately ordered to disrobe and were led to the three old gas chambers, passing us on the way. Many of us saw our children, wives and other loved ones among the victims. And when, on the impulse of grief, someone rushed to his loved ones, he would be killed on the spot. It was under these conditions that we constructed death chambers for our brethren and ourselves.

This went on for five weeks. After the work on the gas chambers had been completed, I was transferred back to Camp No. 1, where I had to set up a barbershop. Before killing the women, the Germans cut off their hair and gathered it all up carefully. I never learned for what purpose the hair was used.

My quarters were still in Camp No. 2 but, because of a shortage of craftsmen, I was taken each day to Camp No. 1, with Unterscharführer Hermann as my escort. He was about 50 years old, tall and kind. He understood us and was sorry for us. The first time he came to Camp No. 2 and saw the piles of gassed corpses, he turned pale and looked at them with horror and pity. He left with me at once in order to get away from the gruesome scene. He treated us workers very well. Often, he surreptitiously brought us some food from the German kitchen. There was so much kindness in his eyes that one might have been tempted to pour one's heart out to him, but he never talked to the inmates. He was afraid of his colleagues. But his every move and action showed his forthright character.

While I was working in Camp No. 1 many transports arrived. Each time a new transport came, the women and children were herded into the barracks at once, while the men were kept in the yard. The men were ordered to undress, while the women, naively anticipating a chance to take a shower, unpacked towels and soap. The brutal guards, however, shouted orders for quiet, and kicked and dealt out blows. The children cried, while the grownups moaned and screamed. This made things even worse; the whipping only became more cruel.

The women and girls were then taken to the "barber shop" to have their hair clipped. By now they felt sure that they would be taken to have a shower. Then they were escorted, through another exit, to Camp No. 2 where, in freezing weather, they had to stand in the nude, waiting their turn to enter the gas chamber, which had not yet been cleared of the last batch of victims.

All through that winter, small children, stark naked and barefooted, had to stand out in the open for hours on end, awaiting their turn in the increasingly busy gas chambers. The soles of their feet froze and stuck to the icy ground. They stood and cried; some of them froze to death. In the meantime, Germans and Ukrainians walked up and down the ranks, beating and kicking the victims.

One of the Germans, a man named Sepp, was a vile and savage beast, who took special delight in torturing children. When he pushed women around and they begged him to stop because they had children with them, he would frequently snatch a child from the woman's arms and either tear the child in half or grab it by the legs, smash its head against a wall and throw the body away. Such incidents were by no means isolated. Tragic scenes of this kind occurred all the time.

The men endured tortures far worse than the women. They had to undress in the yard, make a neat bundle of their clothing, carry the bundle to a designated spot and deposit it on the pile. They then had to go into the barrack where the women had undressed, and carry the latter's clothes out and arrange them properly. Afterwards, they were lined up and the healthiest, strongest and best-built among them were beaten until their blood flowed freely.

Next, all the men, and women, old people and children had to fall into line and proceed from Camp No. 1 to the gas chambers in Camp No. 2. Along the path leading to the chambers there stood a shack in which some official sat and ordered the people to turn in all their valuables. The unfortunate victims, in the delusion that they would remain alive, tried to hide whatever they could. But the German fiends managed to find everything, if not on the living, then later on the dead. Everyone approaching the shack had to lift his arms high and so the entire macabre procession passed in silence, with arms raised high, into the gas chambers.

A Jew had been selected by the Germans to function as a supposed "bath attendant." He stood at the entrance of the building housing the chambers and urged everyone to hurry inside before the water got cold. What irony! Amidst shouts and blows, the people were chased into the chambers.

As I have already indicated, there was not much space in the gas chambers. People were smothered simply by overcrowding. The motor which generated the gas in the new chambers was defective, and so the helpless victims had to suffer for hours on end before they died. Satan himself could not have devised a more fiendish torture. When the chambers were opened again, many of the victims were only half dead and had to be finished off with rifle butts, bullets or powerful kicks.

Often people were kept in the gas chambers overnight with the motor not turned on at all. Overcrowding and lack of air killed many of them in a very painful way. However, many survived the ordeal of such nights; particularly the children showed a remarkable degree of resistance. They were still alive when they were dragged out of the chambers in the morning, but revolvers used by the Germans made short work of them....

The German fiends were particularly pleased when transports of victims from foreign countries arrived. Such deportations probably caused great indignation abroad. Lest suspicion arise about what was in store for the deportees, these victims from abroad were transported in passenger trains and permitted to take along whatever they needed. These people were well dressed and brought considerable amounts of food and wearing apparel with them. During the journey they had service and even a dining car in the trains. But on their arrival in Treblinka they were faced with stark reality. They were dragged from the trains and subjected to the same procedure as that described above. The next day they had vanished from the scene; all that remained of them was their clothing, their food supplies, and the macabre task of burying them.

The number of transports grew daily, and there were periods when as many as 30,000 people were gassed in one day, with all 13 gas chambers in operation. All we heard was shouts, cries and moans. Those who were left alive to do the work around the camps could neither eat nor control their tears on days when these transports arrived. The less resistant among us, especially the more intelligent, suffered nervous breakdowns and hanged themselves when they returned to the barracks at night after having handled the corpses all day, their ears still ringing with the cries and moans of the victims. Such suicides occurred at the rate of 15 to 20 a day.

These people were unable to endure the abuse and tortures inflicted upon them by the overseers and the Germans.

One day a transport arrived from Warsaw, from which some men were selected as workers for Camp No. 2. Among them I saw a few people whom I had known from before the war. They were not fit for this kind of work.

That same day one of our own man by the name of Kuszer could not stand the torture and attacked his tormentor, a German Oberscharführer named Matthes from Camp No. 2, who was a fiend and a killer, and wounded him. The Hauptsturmführer, on arriving at the scene, dismissed all the craftsmen, and other inmates of the camp were massacred on the spot with blunt tools.

I happened to be working in the woods in between the two camps, dressing lumber. The processions of nude children, men and old people passed that spot in a silent caravan of death. The only sounds we could hear were the shouts of the killers; the victims walked in silence. Now and then, a child would whimper but then some killer's fingers would grasp its thin neck in a vise-like grip, cutting off the last plaintive sobs. The victims walked to their doom with raised arms, stark naked and helpless.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
On another occasion a transport arrived from Germany. The new arrivals were put through the usual routine. When the people were ordered to undress, one of the women stepped forward with her two children, both of them boys. She presented identity papers showing that she was of pure German stock and had boarded this train by mistake. All her documents were found to be in order and her two sons had not been circumcised. She was a good-looking woman, but there was terror in her eyes. She clung to her children and tried to soothe them, saying that their troubles would soon be cleared up and they would return home to their father. She petted and kissed them, but she was crying because she was haunted by a dreadful foreboding.

The Germans ordered her to step forward. Thinking that this meant freedom for herself and her children, she relaxed. But alas, it had been decided that she was to perish together with the Jews, because she had seen too much and would be liable to tell all about what she had seen, which was supposed to be shrouded in secrecy. Whoever crossed the threshold of Treblinka was doomed to die. Therefore this German woman, together with her children, went to her death along with all the others. Her children cried just as the Jewish children did, and their eyes mirrored the same despair, for in death there is no racial distinction; all are equal. Her husband probably will be killed at the front, and she was killed in the camp.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
The first sight that met my eyes upon my return was that of the corpses of newly gassed victims on whom "dentists" had worked, extracting their false teeth with pliers. just one look ' at this ghastly procedure was enough to make me even more disgusted with life than I had been before. The "dentists" sorted the teeth they ex­tracted according to their value. Of course, whatever teeth the Ukrainians managed to lay their hands on remained in their pos­session.

I worked for a while in Camp No. 2, doing repair work in the kitchen. The commandant of the kitchen had introduced a' new system. During that period fewer transports arrived and no new workers became available. At that time, workers in Camp No. I were given numbers and triangular leather identification badges. There was a different color patch for each group. The badges were worn on the left side of the chest. Rumors circulated that we work­ers in Camp No. 2 would also receive numbers but at the time nothing came of it. At any rate, some system had been introduced so that no stranger from an incoming transport could smuggle himself in, as I had done, to prolong his life.

We began to suffer greatly from the cold and they started issuing blankets to us. While I had been away from Camp No. 2, a carpen­try shop had been installed there. A baker from Warsaw served as its foreman. His job was to make up stretchers for carrying the corpses from the gas chambers to the mass graves. The stretchers were constructed very primitively; just two poles with pieces of board nailed at intervals.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________

At any rate, the cremations were promptly begun. The corpses of men, women, children and old people were exhumed from the mass graves. Whenever such a grave was opened, a terrible stench rose from them, because the bodies were already in an advanced stage of decomposition. This work brought continued physical and moral suffering to those who were forced to do it. We, the living, felt renewed grief, even more intensively than before. We were ill-fed, because transports had ceased to arrive, so that the hapless purveyors of food had become a thing of the past. We did not like to draw on our reserves. All we ate was moldy bread, which we washed down with water. The malnutrition caused an epidemic of typhus. Those who became ill needed neither medication nor a bed. A bullet in the neck and all was over.

Work was begun to cremate the dead. It turned out that bodies of women burned more easily than those of men. Accordingly, the bodies of women were used for kindling the fires. Since cremation was hard work, rivalry set in between the labor details as to which of them would be able to cremate the largest number of bodies. Bulle­tin boards were rigged up and daily scores were recorded. Never­theless, the results were very poor. The corpses were soaked in gasoline. This entailed considerable expense and the results were inadequate; the male corpses simply would not burn. Whenever an airplane was sighted overhead, all work was stopped, the corpses were covered with foliage as camouflage against aerial observation.

It was a terrifying sight, the most gruesome ever beheld by human eyes. When corpses of pregnant women were cremated, their bellies would burst open. The fetus would be exposed and could be seen burning inside the mother's womb.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________

The new transports were handled in a simplified manner; the cremation followed directly after the gassing. Transports were now arriving from Bulgaria, comprising well-to-do people who brought with them large supplies of food: white bread, smoked mutton, cheese, etc. They were killed off just like all the others, but we benefited from the supplies they had brought. As a result, our diet improved considerably. The Bulgarian Jews were strong and husky specimens. Looking at them, it was hard to believe that in 20 minutes they would all be dead in the gas chambers.

These handsome Jews were not permitted an easy death. Only small quantities of gas were let into the chambers, so that their agony lasted through the night. They also had to endure severe tortures before entering the gas chambers. Envy of their well-fed appearance prompted the hangmen to torment them all the more.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________

One day a transport arrived in Treblinka when we were already locked in our barracks for the night. Accordingly, the Germans and the Ukrainians processed the victims without help. Suddenly we heard yells and heavy rifle fire. We stayed put and waited impa­tiently for morning to come so that we could learn what had hap­pened. The next morning we saw that the yard was littered with corpses. While we were working, the Ukrainian guards told us that the people who had come on that transport had refused to be led into the gas chambers and had put up a fierce fight. They smashed ever thing they could lay their hands on and broke open the chests with gold that stood in the corridor leading to the chambers. They grabbed sticks and every weapon they could get hold of to defend themselves. The bullets fell thick and fast, and by morning the yard was strewn with dead bodies and with the improvised weapons the Jews had used in their last fight for life. Those killed while fighting, as well as those who died from gas, were all horribly mutilated. Some of them had had limbs torn from their bodies. By dawn it was all over. The rebels were cremated. To us it was just one more warning that we could not hope to escape our fate.
________________________________________________________________________________________________

Several new transports arrived, I did not know from where. Two transports of Poles arrived also, but since I never saw them alive I do not know how they were treated when they had to disrobe and enter the death chambers. They were gassed just as the others had been. When we handled these corpses, we noticed that the men had not been circumcised. Also, we heard the Germans remarking that those "damned Poles" would not rebel again.
________________________________________________________________________________________________

No transports had been coming to Treblinka for quite some time. Then, one day, as I was busy working near the gate, I noticed quite a different spirit among the German garrison and the Ukrain­ian guards. The Stabscharführer, a man of about 50, short, stocky and with a vicious face, left the camp several times by car. Then the gate flew open and about 1,000 Gypsies were marched in. This was the third transport of Gypsies to arrive at Treblinka. They were followed by several wagons carrying all their possessions: filthy tatters, torn bedclothes and other junk. They arrived almost unes­corted except for two Ukrainians wearing German uniforms, who were not fully aware of what it all meant. They were sticklers for formality and even demanded a receipt, but they were not even admitted into the camp and their insistence on a receipt was met with sarcastic smiles. They learned on the sly from our Ukrainians that they had just delivered a batch of new victims to a death camp. They paled visibly and again knocked on the gate demanding ad­mittance, whereupon the Stabscharführer came out and handed them a sealed envelope which they took and departed. The Gyp­sies, who had come from Bessarabia, were gassed just like all the others and then cremated.
________________________________________________________________________________________________

[Werd]

Excerpts from Richard Glazar, Trap with a Green Fence, 1995 translation from the German original by Northwestern University Press

The masses of people are led from the arrival platform to the Entkleidungsplatz, the disrobing site. That is the area enclosed by the green fence where we were ordered to undress and prepare for delousing. The naked women and children were led to the Friseurstube, the hair salon, where their hair was cut off. The women’s hair is used to insulate motors. In the meantime the men, also undressed, were ordered to stack up their hand luggage in the corner of the disrobing area nearest the sorting site. The SS men forced them into a trot. This way they drew air more deeply into their lungs, thus helping to speed up things in the gas chambers.
Together, everyone – all the shorn women and children and the panting men – is driven through the Schlauch, the "Pipeline," into the second section of the camp. The Pipeline is a narrow alley enclosed by barbed wire, resembling the passageway through which wild animals are released into an arena. But this alley is longer and curves in such a way that it is impossible to see one end from the other. For the most part the barbed wire is covered with green pine branches. On the dividing line between the two parts of the camp, built right inside the Pipeline, there is a small office, a depository for valuables known as the kleine Kasse. At the window of this small wooden shed everyone is required to hand over all papers, watches, and jewelry. Everyone is robbed of his name and another piece of his naked, anonymous life.
While the first group from the transport is circulating through the Pipeline, the cars with the next group are brought in. In the meantime, the first group had finished "showering," and before the new group enters the green passageway, the "showers" are emptied and readied for them. The transports from Darmstadt, from Theresienstadt, from anywhere in the west for that matter, whose charges are delivered in passenger cars, are handled with relative care. These passengers don’t seem to sense anything amiss. All apprehension is immediately banished. No one can imagine his own end – such a very naked end.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________

Everything is run by SS troops. They have young Ukrainian guards to help them and us, about a thousand of us. Our number is replenished daily from the newly arrived transports. The first, larger part of the camp, the assembly area, is located between the arrival platform on one side and a sandy rampart on the other. Beyond the rampart, taking up a little more than one quarter of the entire area, is the second part of the camp, the death camp. Life with its remnants still intrudes, even into the sorting site, the largest section of the assembly area; all kinds of things are there, stacked up in bizarre piles, hills and mountains. Beyond the wall is solely the realm of death. The ones on the other side, who carry the corpses from the gas chambers to the mass graves, are closer to death than we who remain on this side. There is no return to life for anyone once the gates of Treblinka have closed behind him. There is no way back for anyone who has once stepped over the boundary into the death camp.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
One overcast November afternoon, flames leap into the sky from behind the sandy rampart and immediately spread. We catch sight of this enormous fire-spewing stage as we are marching down to evening roll call. Our bowls in hand, we hang out around the kitchen, illuminated by the dark red glow beyond and by light mounted on the barracks above us.
"They’re starting to burn the corpses." "There’s not enough room to bury them." "They want to get rid of every trace." Rumors spread with lightning speed through the camp, even before we reach our barracks. Robert is the last to crawl up into his bunk. "It’s not all that easy to burn so many bodies, and especially not on an open fire like that." He continues: "Bodies don’t really burn that well. They burn very poorly, in fact. You have to build big bonfires and put a lot of kindling in among the corpses, and then douse the whole thing in something very flammable. They’ve already had to do some trial runs."
The bread sacks lay where they’ve been thrown, unopened. Everyone’s eyes turned from the bunks to the few small barred windows in the barracks. Beyond the windows, red flames have spilled across the sky, coloring the entire night dark red, then orange, and finally wafting away in sulphury smoke.
Salwe appears across the way on a bunk up against the outside wall. Upright, his back to the small window, he looks into the depths of the barracks. The face, clean and bright, doesn’t have a single wrinkle. The skin around his straight nose and mouth is so fine, so vibrant. He had just begun his career as an operatic tenor when they stuck him in the Warsaw Ghetto. From there he was brought by transport to Treblinka. An acquaintance had pointed him out, and the SS selected him for their benefit, and ours. He is a small but unusually good-looking man.
______________________________________________________________________________________________

The gas chambers are the only brick buildings in the entire camp. Actually, they comprise two structures. Atfirst was built somewhat farther from the entrance a smaller structure with three gas chambers, each about five by five meters. Sometime in the fall of 1942 the second building, containing ten gas chambers, was completed. This building is located very close to the Pipeline, at the point where it opens into the second part of the camp. There is a hallway running all the way down the middle of the new building. One enters the gas chambers, five on either side, from this hallway. The new gas chambers measure about seven by seven meters. The motor room is built onto the back wall, where the hallway ends. The exhaust gases from the motors are pumped into the gas chambers through conduits in the ceilings of the chambers. These conduits are disguised as showers. The floor, which is covered with coarse tiles, slopes towards the outside wall. Built into these walls are well-sealed trap doors that can be cranked open. After the "gassing process" is completed, the trap doors are raised, and the corpses are carried out onto a narrow platform. During the first phase of the operation, bodies were carried to mass graves on wooden litters that had been hastily nailed together. Now the bodies are stacked up on a large incineration grid made of train rails.
They must have started up the new gas chambers at the beginning of October, at about the same time our transport arrived in Treblinka. When all of these gas chambers are in operation it is possible to kill almost three thousand people at a time. The actual gassing only takes about twenty minutes. Much depends on how quickly the chambers can be filled and then emptied, and on how well the motors are running. The biggest bottlenecks actually occur outside Treblinka, when the railroad sidings become congested.
The most rapid work tempo is required of those who empty the chambers while the next lot is being prepared for processing in the first section of the camp. What happens to all of the straps and belts that are collected here and then brought to the entrance of the second camp? Everyone on the other side has a collection of straps. One end is looped around the feet or the arms of the corpse, and "lets go, lets go, pull, pull!" There’s no other way to get the job done quickly enough when the chamber has a full load of about three hundred.

Oscar Strawczynski

Excerpts from: Escaping Hell in Treblinka. Israel Cymlich. Oskar Strawczyinski. Yad Vashem and The Holocaust Survivors’ Memoirs Project, New York and Jerusalem 2007
[pages 123 f.]

NOTES ON THE TRANSLATION

The late Oskar Strawczyinski wrote his memoir of Treblinka in Yiddish after he escaped from the camp in August 1943 and sought refuge in the forest. After several months, he was able to join a group of partisans originally from the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa (The Jewish Combat Organization) in Warsaw. His comrades in this group encouraged him to put his recollection down on paper and secured writing material for this purpose from a nearby village. The memoir was written during the spring and summer of 1944. One copy survived the war and was placed in the archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York.

Oskar’s memoir is an unusual document. It was written shortly after the revolt in Treblinka, while the memoirs were still fresh and vivid. The account was written in isolation in the forest, free of pressure and outside influences, but while survival itself was still uncertain.

DEDICATION

[Oskar Strawczynski began his memoir with the following dedication to his family.]
Dedicated to the memory of my unforgettable wife Anka, my two dear children Guta and Abus, my devoted parents Yosef and Malka, who perished in the terrible “Factory” TREBLINKA October 5, 1942

In that great tumult I do not notice that the work on the platform – such as clearing the people and leftover luggage from the trains, and herding and pushing the crowd towards the gate – is performed by a detachment of around 30 Jewish men wearing blue armbands. This is the detachment of “Blues” commanded by Kapo Mayer. On the platform there are also SS men, the Ukrainian “Wachmänner” of Treblinka and also the policemen and guard escorting the train. When the last of the transport passes through the gate, and the wagons are cleared, the escort returns to their wagon and the train leaves the camp. All this happens very quickly, and I noticed the details only later, while working in Treblinka.

Beyond the gate, we find ourselves in quite a large square with barracks on two sides. Opposite the fence and the gateway through which we had passed is a fence with a small entrance in the corner. This is the gate to the “Avenue of Death”, which leads to the “baths” in Camp 2. Down this avenue, completely naked, they took their last walk: my dear wife and children, father, mother, brothers and sisters, together with millions of Jewish men and women. They never came out of the “bath”. Their sacred bodies were heaped on stretchers and thrown into the infernal fires.

Later, when I was working on the rooftops of Treblinka, I had many opportunities to watch the last walk of our naked, unfortunate people: Mothers holding their little ones in the arms, older children at their sides, young girls with their hair already shorn, covering their breasts with their hands; or several together, arms linked, all running as quickly as possible through the row of Germans and Ukrainians, who laugh at them and mock them. Quite often, one or another of the victims was struck on the head with a whip or rifle butt and collapsed in a stream of blood. Those were horrible scenes from hell.
________________________________________________________________________________________

The route leads from the Transport Square to the large sorting square. The victims run around one of the mountains of clothing, throw their bundles onto it and, without stopping, run back to the Transport Square. This danse macabre has been going on now for over 15 minutes. From a distance, I recognize my neighbors from the danse macabre. I see my neighbor Palacz being led to the Lazarett [infirmary], from where, shortly afterward, a shot is heard. Palacz, a rather weak, delicate young man, evidently could not pass the “training”. I do not see my father, or any other men of his age, among those running.

After depositing their bundles, the breathless men are led through the small gate into the “Avenue of Death”, with their hands raised over their heads. At the gateway is a little hut. There the “Gold Jews” take the victims’ valuables, money and documents, “for deposit only” – until they return from the “bath”. A special sign announces that there are no limitations on foreign exchange.

The crowd passes through and there is silence for a few minutes. Suddenly a smothered mass scream is heard from the distance. “Ah-ah-ah…” The scream does not last long; it becomes weaker and weaker until it dies away. I know instinctively that this is the last cry of the unfortunate, condemned victims, among them my own, my loved ones. Again I break into hysterical tears.

After every transport I heard this same last cry, which makes by blood run cold.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________

CHAPTER 8

Murder and Disposal of the Bodies

While we in Camp I were busy building and beautifying, the work of exhuming and burning the bodies of the first victims of the Warsaw ghetto continued intensively in Camp 2. There were a few tremendously huge mass graves, each one filled with tens of thousands of murdered people. The layers of corpses were covered with chlorine. At the beginning, the chlorine used to arrive in wagonloads. The bodies were now being dug out and burnt in order to erase the evidence. It was not an easy job. For many months, three bulldozers growled away from 4 o’clock in the morning until nightfall. The work went on with great intensity, in two shifts. The bulldozers would constantly dig up earth mixed with body parts. The body parts had to be carefully picked out and taken on wooden carriers to be burnt in the great ovens. When one of the mass graves was emptied, the earth was replaced and carefully smoothed over, to give the appearance that nothing had ever been there. The Germans would celebrate by bringing whiskey and drinking a toast – “Until the last Jew” – and would finish up with a three-gun salute.

The graves could never be emptied entirely, because blood mixed with water accumulated at the bottom. Motorized pumps were set up to draw it out. However, they could never manage to drain the bottom few meters, and so the graves were simply covered over.

Over in Camp 2, there was also the bath … It was a large, concrete building standing on a cement platform. On its roof, visible from a distance, was a wooden Star of David. Running through the middle of the building was a corridor. The entrance was covered with a red curtain. Off the corridor were doors leading to small cubicles into which the arrivals from the transport were introduced. Outside, over the platform were large openings covered by panels hinged at the top and fastened with steel bands. Inside the cubicles, smooth tiles covered the slightly slanted floors and halfway up the walls. On the ceiling were mounted a few shower-heads. There was also a small window in the middle of the ceiling [of each cubicle].

As mentioned before, the people leave all their belongings in Camp 1. Everyone is undressed there. The women, already naked, are seated on a long bench and their hair is cut off. This is accomplished by about 40 barbers. The hair is then cleaned with steam, using a steam kettle brought especially for this purpose. The hair is then packed in bales, and sent out along with the clothing and other wares.

The victims come into Camp 2 already naked and shorn, and are immediately squeezed into the cubicles. There is no more division. Men, women, and children are all pressed together in the small cubicles so tightly that this alone would be enough to suffocate them. The doors are hermetically sealed, and the motors start to work. The air from inside is sucked out, and fumes from burnt gasoline are forced in. The cries from inside can be heard for about 10 minutes, and then it becomes silent. The entire process, from the arrival at the camp to the oven, lasts only about half an hour. Most of the victims in the cubicles start to hemorrhage.

A German controls the progress of the “work” through the little window in the ceiling. When he is sure that everyone inside is dead, he opens the side panels, and the corpses fall out onto the cement platform. An elderly Jew from Czestochowa, known as “the dentist”, checks the bodies for gold or metal teeth, which he pulls out. The bodies are then piled onto stretchers and carried to the oven, where they are flung into the fire and burned. The blood that has collected in the cubicles streams out into specially dug ditches.

The “bath” contained 10 cubicles: four big ones and six smaller ones.

As I mentioned before, we in Camp 1 were strictly forbidden to enter Camp 2. If anyone crossed over into Camp 2 by accident, that’s where he had to remain; there was no return to Camp 1. I received the information about the arrangements and procedures in Camp 2 mainly from Herszel Jablkowski, a solid and decent man, with whom I worked for many months in the workshop; he as a [black]smith and I as a tinsmith. He arrived at Treblinka on June 18, 1942, a considerable time before the first transports. According to him, the first transport arrived on Tisha B’Av in 1942 (July 23). He participated in digging the first mass grave. At that time, there was no bulldozer. Later, as a smith, he was employed in building the “bath”. It was all one camp then. The day before the first transport arrived, Camp 1 and Camp 2 were divided. As a skilled tradesman, Jablkowski was sent to Camp 1. I also received some information about Camp 2 from Szymon Goldberg, a carpenter from Radomsko, who worked in Camp 2 for four months. He escaped during the uprising and we met in the forest 10 months later.

The work was dedicated to his deceased family memebers October 5 1942.

[Moderator]

Werd,
Please make it obvious any points you are trying to make. Thanks.
M1

[Werd]

I should point out that both Oscar Strawczynski and Yankiel Wiernik both testify to a star of david being on the roof of the gas chamber. Also, since we know Wiernik is full of crap as well as Rajchman, what are we to make of these other claimed eyewitnesses to gas chambers? What are the oddities in their stories that allow us to finger them as liars? Not to sound like someone from the other side, but merely to play devil's advocate, are these other people part of the conspiracy to make things up as well?

[Creox]

I should point out that both Oscar Strawczynski and Yankiel Wiernik both testify to a star of david being on the roof of the gas chamber. Also, since we know Wiernik is full of crap as well as Rajchman, what are we to make of these other claimed eyewitnesses to gas chambers? What are the oddities in their stories that allow us to finger them as liars? Not to sound like someone from the other side, but merely to play devil's advocate, are these other people part of the conspiracy to make things up as well?

As we know there were no homicidal gas chambers my thoughts are the witnesses suffer from distorted memories or memories that are created through decades of exposure to propaganda/stories etc. Many witnesses have admitted they actually never saw a chamber but were working off of stories that "other" inmates cited. If I'm not mistaken there was a thread or two on the subject of memories here.

[Carto's Cutlass Supreme]

I remember when I'd discover a new witness it was exciting and important to my process of discovering that the holocaust was a myth. But regarding this forum, it's good to look up these alleged eyewitnesses in the keyword search before posting. Otherwise it appears that you're mentioning a witness the forum hasn't encountered before. Talking about a testimony anew is fine, but maybe it's good to be aware of, or acknowledge the other threads.

On Krzepicki: If 700,000 allegedly died at Treblinka, and around 70 Jews escaped, what are the chances that one of those Jews (Krzepicki) was a former roommate of Rachel Auerbach who later became a career employee at Yad Vashem. And if you did escape Treblinka, would you really go back to Warsaw and collaborate with Auerbach on writing about your experiences in 'novel' form? Rather than frantically contacting Jewish organizations and trying to get the word out?

Krzepicki is an Auerbach construct. She knew Adolf Berman and was involved in the Warsaw Jewish underground and the propaganda they made. And then there's the aspect of Krzepicki's story found in 1950 in a jar by construction workers. LOL.

Related links:
Did Krzepicki exist?
Did Abraham Krzepicki exist?

Correspondence School in the Secret Annex?
Carto's Cutlass Supreme @ Correspondence School in the Secret Annex?

'Polardude' writes

And in this newly discovered archive was the account of Abraham Krzepicki, written in Harry Potter literary style, that didn't have any of the same mistakes that wartime accounts had. Imagine that. Why? Because those liars probably wrote in in 1949, and then placed it where some construction worker was going to dig. And even then it's ridiculous. Krzepicki probably didn't even exist!

Saying something was written and lost, only to be found again, is a good way to get your facts straight in hindsight. LOL.

Carto's Cutlass Supreme @ Warsaw Ghetto: help needed.

[hermod]

Sad to see that the burden of proof is always on the revisionist side. Amazing to see that revisionists are still compelled to debunk the 'testimonies' of every self-proclaimed 'survivor' in the 21st century! Has anybody ever been asked to debunk the 'testimonies' of every 'witness' to alien abductions, no matter how numerous, for most people not to believe that aliens have travelled thousands of light years in order to probe human rectums?

[greatmystery]

I remember when I'd discover a new witness it was exciting and important to my process of discovering that the holocaust was a myth. But regarding this forum, it's good to look up these alleged eyewitnesses in the keyword search before posting. Otherwise it appears that you're mentioning a witness the forum hasn't encountered before. Talking about a testimony anew is fine, but maybe it's good to be aware of, or acknowledge the other threads.

On Krzepicki: If 700,000 allegedly died at Treblinka, and around 70 Jews escaped, what are the chances that one of those Jews (Krzepicki) was a former roommate of Rachel Auerbach who later became a career employee at Yad Vashem. And if you did escape Treblinka, would you really go back to Warsaw and collaborate with Auerbach on writing about your experiences in 'novel' form? Rather than frantically contacting Jewish organizations and trying to get the word out?

Krzepicki is an Auerbach construct. She knew Adolf Berman and was involved in the Warsaw Jewish underground and the propaganda they made. And then there's the aspect of Krzepicki's story found in 1950 in a jar by construction workers. LOL.

Related links:
Did Krzepicki exist?
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2910&hilit=krzepicki

Correspondence School in the Secret Annex?
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3111&p=21532&hilit=krzepicki#p21532

'Polardude' writes

And in this newly discovered archive was the account of Abraham Krzepicki, written in Harry Potter literary style, that didn't have any of the same mistakes that wartime accounts had. Imagine that. Why? Because those liars probably wrote in in 1949, and then placed it where some construction worker was going to dig. And even then it's ridiculous. Krzepicki probably didn't even exist!

Saying something was written and lost, only to be found again, is a good way to get your facts straight in hindsight. LOL.

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3064&p=21140&hilit=krzepicki#p21140

I am resurrecting this thread because someone is (pretending) to be impressed that Krzepicki's manuscript got the color of the tiles right. Of course this doesn't prove that the room it said was a gas chamber was a gas chamber, it was obviously just a bathroom. However, if the letter was written after the war, which I tend to believe considering the facts presented, how did it get the colors of the tiles correct? Thoughts?

[hermod]

I am resurrecting this thread because someone is (pretending) to be impressed that Krzepicki's manuscript got the color of the tiles right. Of course this doesn't prove that the room it said was a gas chamber was a gas chamber, it was obviously just a bathroom. However, if the letter was written after the war, which I tend to believe considering the facts presented, how did it get the colors of the tiles correct? Thoughts?

Several possibilities:

- He (or the author of his alleged report) actually took a shower there and thought that such details would strenghten the credibility of his lies about Treblinka.

- He (or the author of his alleged report) talked to people who had actually taken a shower there or who had actually worked there (investigation).

- He (or the author of his alleged report) heard or read the testimonies of people who had actually taken a shower there or who had actually worked there (cross pollination).

- He (or the author of his alleged report) accidently guessed it right (luck).

- Most of the shower rooms in public bathhouses had such tiles at that time (fashion). I doubt there 36 kinds of public bathhouses in the German camps during WWII.

[greatmystery]

I am resurrecting this thread because someone is (pretending) to be impressed that Krzepicki's manuscript got the color of the tiles right. Of course this doesn't prove that the room it said was a gas chamber was a gas chamber, it was obviously just a bathroom. However, if the letter was written after the war, which I tend to believe considering the facts presented, how did it get the colors of the tiles correct? Thoughts?

Several possibilities:

- He (or the author of his alleged report) actually took a shower there and thought that such details would strenghten the credibility of his lies about Treblinka.

- He (or the author of his alleged report) talked to people who had actually taken a shower there or who had actually worked there (investigation).

- He (or the author of his alleged report) heard or read the testimonies of people who had actually taken a shower there or who had actually worked there (cross pollination).

- He (or the author of his alleged report) accidently guessed it right (luck).

- Most of the shower rooms in public bathhouses had such tiles at that time (fashion). I doubt there 36 kinds of public bathhouses in the German camps during WWII.

Are you going with the premise that Krzepicki wrote the letter and is not a construct of Auerbach? I suppose it's also possible that if Auerbach invented the story she might have known someone that had been through Treblinka. Unlike what the officials would have you believe, many people 'survived' going through Treblinka. I'm thinking about writing an article about this little mystery, but I don't want to do too much speculating.

[Hektor]

....

Are you going with the premise that Krzepicki wrote the letter and is not a construct of Auerbach? I suppose it's also possible that if Auerbach invented the story she might have known someone that had been through Treblinka. Unlike what the officials would have you believe, many people 'survived' going through Treblinka. I'm thinking about writing an article about this little mystery, but I don't want to do too much speculating.

Recall several people (Jews) being interviewed that said they were in Treblinka, but where then sent somewhere else. Those are people that realized that they actually WHERE in Treblinka. There can be an infinite number of other Jews that where there, but simply didn't recall that they were there, especially decades later, when someone may have asked them.

[greatmystery]

I've written a two part series about the Treblinka tiles and the reports about tiles in the shower room that Holocaust affirmers call a gas chamber. I thank CoDoH users for providing me with valuable information.
https://www.holocaust.claims/treblinka/ ... tupid-lie/
https://www.holocaust.claims/treblinka/ ... est-claim/

[Hektor]

I've written a two part series about the Treblinka tiles and the reports about tiles in the shower room that Holocaust affirmers call a gas chamber. I thank CoDoH users for providing me with valuable information.
https://www.holocaust.claims/treblinka/ ... tupid-lie/
https://www.holocaust.claims/treblinka/ ... est-claim/

Given that the testimony is rather an embarrassment, this is all they can gasp on.

[greatmystery]

I've written a two part series about the Treblinka tiles and the reports about tiles in the shower room that Holocaust affirmers call a gas chamber. I thank CoDoH users for providing me with valuable information.
https://www.holocaust.claims/treblinka/ ... tupid-lie/
https://www.holocaust.claims/treblinka/ ... est-claim/

Given that the testimony is rather an embarrassment, this is all they can gasp on.

True. When ever they get something that could be remotely considered physical evidence they cling onto it.

It's interesting how they are not outright lying, except for the star of David part. The article says, “Star of David-stamped tiles are consistent with Holocaust survivors’ reports of appearance of the Nazi extermination camp’s gas chambers.”

Notice the weasel words, 'consistent', 'appearance'. The average reader won't think twice about it. They will never know that the live witnesses simply said there were tiles in the alleged gas chamber. And the report with the most details (color of the tiles) was from a piece of paper with dubious origins.