M2RB: Schindler's List Music Video (John Williams) Pt. 1
The last living survivors of Nazi
death camp Treblinka have spoken about the excruciating torment they
suffered during World War II.
Kalman
Tagiman and Samuel Willenberg were both 19 years old when they arrived
at the camp, where they were forced to assist in the mass murder of men,
women and children.
For Samuel, now 89, it is one particular memory which haunts him to this day, 70 years later.
Samuel
was sifting through the belongings of another trainload of doomed
innocents, this time coming from his home town, when he made a discovery
so horrific he fell to the floor.
A
young girl’s coat, and a pleated blue skirt, lying on top of a pile of
clothes, just before the entrance to the gas chambers. The coat and
skirt belonged to his two younger sisters.
The
Treblinka 'death factory' was located in occupied Poland but was
destroyed by the Nazis at the end of the war as they tried to cover
their tracks.
Less than 70
Treblinka prisoners survived the war – they were a small part of the
slave-labour prisoners who attacked guards and escaped the camp.
It
is estimated that between 800.000 and 1.2million prisoners were taken
to Treblinka. Prisoners arriving had only had one per cent chance of
surviving the first three hours.
Due to the lack of physical
evidence it is sometimes called 'the forgotten camp', and with only two
survivors still alive to tell their stories it may soon be.
Which
is why, despite his advancing age and unbearably painful memories,
Samuel has vowed to spend his remaining years bearing witness to the
terrible crimes committed there.
Speaking
about the moment he realised his two sisters were among the latest
victims, in a BBC documentary airing on Monday, Samuel, now living in
Israel, remembers: 'It was the worst day of my life. Even now it makes
me cry.'
'One morning a transport
arrived. We ran in. There was a new system to remove clothes
immediately, jackets, trousers, a production line. Suddenly I looked
down. My sisters’ clothes.
'I
recognised Tamara’s coat - it was too small for her so my mother had
lengthened the sleeves with bright green material. And my other sister’s
skirt, navy with blue stripes... as if one was hugging the other. I
immediately knew where they were, what had happened.'
Death factory: At its peak the facility, hidden
in the forests 60 miles northeast of Warsaw, was murdering a staggering
15,000 Jews a day.
Close-up below: Notice the babies in their arms.
A minority of the prisoners
were spared the chambers. Strong, young men were spared to assist their
Nazi torturers at Treblinka which, at its peak, was killing 15,000 Jews a day.
Ten gas chambers worked simultaneously and
the camp’s commander Franz Stangl would proudly recall how he could
'process' an entire train between his breakfast at 7am and lunch at
midday - an average of 6,000 Jews.
In
fact, only 67 people are known to have survived the camp, fleeing in a
brazen revolt in the summer of 1943 shortly before Treblinka was
destroyed.
Kalman Taigman arrived at the camp
with his mother after being rounded up along with thousands of other
Jews in the Warsaw ghetto and transported to the camp hidden in the forests 60 miles northeast of Warsaw.
The
only other living link to the 'forgotten' death camp, also now living
in Israel, Kalman is also tormented by unimaginably painful memories of
what went on there.
Remembering
the day he arrived in July 1942, he says: 'I held tight onto mother’s
hand as we were herded out of the wagons. The Germans were hitting
people, shooting people.
'They
sent us to a place where there was an iron door. I came to the door
with my mother together, but they said women to the left, and men to the
right. I didn’t want to let her go.
'Then
I got something in my head from a German and I fell down. When I stood
up I could see her being moved on, it was the last time I ever saw her.
She was taken straight to the gas chambers.”
Teenage memories: Kalman Taigman was 19 years old
when he arrived at Treblinka
Samuel,
too, remembers being herded off the cattle cars at Treblinka in October
1942, and how a chance encounter saved him from being killed along with
all the others.
'They
stopped the train and the whole crowd got out. Suddenly I recognised a
familar face. He asked, "Where are you from?" I answered, "Czestochowa".
He said, "Tell them you’re a bricklayer" and he disappeared.
'A
second later an SS guard arrived. "Where is the bricklayer?" I pointed
to myself. I got a kick in the bum and sent to the barracks. And then
there was silence.'
The days
of slavery at Treblinka were filled with never-ending horrors. When
forced to sort victims belongings, the men often found newborn babies
amongst the piles which the Nazis would take and burn alive in
fire-filled pits.
Whenever men sets out to create...
...'Heaven on Earth" or "A Kingdom Here on Earth," or "Utopia"...
...they invariably with 100% certainty
end up creating Hell instead."
-Sophie
Those too ill or weak to continue to the gas chambers, as well as injured and unaccompanied children, were taken into the so-called ‘Field Hospital’ - a wooden building with a Red Cross flag flying outside. Once inside, they would be shot through the neck and thrown into mass graves.
Kalman
recalls: 'It was hell, absolute hell. A normal man cannot imagine how a
living person could have lived through it - killers, natural-born
killers, who without a trace of remorse, just murdered every little
thing.'
'There was death, just death,' says
Samuel. 'God must have been on holiday. I looked for Him, but there was
only beautiful Polish sky.'
Treblinka opened on July 23, 1942 and consisted of two camps - Treblinka I and Treblinka II.
Most of those who perished at the hands of the Nazis at Treblinka II were Jewish but there was also a minority of Romani.
Treblinka I was a forced labour camp, where more than 20,000 prisoners died from execution, exhaustion or maltreatment.
The
camp was dismantled and a farmhouse was built in its place in an
attempt to hide any evidence of genocide but the remotely located land
is now a memorial.
Women were sent to the gas chambers after the men, so that their hair could be harvested and sold.
Samuel remembers a young woman from Warsaw who knew exactly what was about to happen.
One-way journey: Jews being loaded onto cattle-truck-style trains that would roll virtually straight into the gas chambers of Treblinka in occupied Poland
He
remembers: 'She was about 19, maybe younger. I remember her name to
this day. Ruth Dorfmann. I cut her hair, then she asked me how long it
would last. I said ten minutes. She looked back and said farewell. She
was really saying farewell to the whole world.
'Then we heard the sound of the tank engine, and that’s how it ended.'
More humans were killed at Treblinka in 1942 than at any other place in the history of mankind.
By
the end of the year, after 17,000 Jewish communities had been
completely wiped out and almost all of Poland’s Jews exterminated, the
camp began taking in gypsies and over 135,000 Jews from across Europe.
לעולם לא עוד
One
day, two SS officers were overheard making a toast in brandy, saying,
'We drink to the imminent arrival of the Jews of England!” referring to
the 300,000 British Jews the Nazis believed would soon come under the
control of the Third Reich.
But in February 1943 defeat to the Russians in the Battle of Stalingrad turned the tide of the war against the Germans.
Fearing
that Nazi atrocities would one day be uncovered, Himmler ordered the
destruction of all evidence of the Final Solution, including the
cremation of over 750,000 corpses which had been buried at Treblinka.
Never again: The camp was destroyed by the Nazis in 1943 and the stone memorial is the only evidence of where it once stood
Again, Samuel and Kalman were
among the Jewish slaves made to dig up and bodies and burn them - but
this time they knew that once they had completed the grim work they too
would all be killed.
So, on
August 2, 1943, they were among 150 other Jewish prisoners who made a
daring escape bid, stealing weapons, setting fire to the camp and
fleeing into the woods during the night.
Most
were shot and killed by SS troops in the surrounding mine fields or
hunted down and killed by SS and Ukrainian military units.
Samuel
was shot in the leg but kept on running, ignoring dead friends in his
path. His blue eyes and non-Jewish features allowed him to survive in
the countryside before making his way to Warsaw.
There he joined the Polish underground and fought against the Nazis in the 1944 Warsaw uprising.
Kalman,
who ran in a different direction, remembers: 'After 15 minutes of
running, we stopped, turned back and looked at how everything was
burning, the flag with the swastika was on fire and falling down.
Everything was burning. Our feeling was unbelievable. Me, outside? How?'
Unloading: A rare photo of Jews being taken off the trains. There was only a one per cent chance that any visitor to the camp would still be alive after three hours
Kalman managed to avoid capture as he wandered for nearly a year in the Polish countryside after his escape.
After
the war, Samuel and Kalman made their ways to Israel, where they
pursued careers and raised families. Samuel became a surveyor in
Israel’s housing ministry and Kalman ran a successful import business.
In
1960 Kalman took part in the sensational trial of Adolf Eichmann, who
Israel had dramatically kidnapped from his bolt hole in Argentina. As
the world watch, he confronted the Holocaust architect from the witness
stand with his first-hand accounts of Treblinka’s untold atrocities.
Eichmann was convicted of crimes against the Jewish people and hanged in 1962.
Samuel, meanwhile, immortalised his memories in drawings and bronze sculptures, including one of Ruth Dorfmann, the young woman whose hair he shaved before her death.
Sketch of the camp: As the German war machine was being defeated, attempts were made to totally erase all evidence of Treblinka and the horrors it contained
Even so, Holocaust deniers have
used the lack of physical evidence, such as records or mass graves, to
suggest there was no genocide at Treblinka and that it was just a
transit camp for Jewish workers.
But
those claims were scuppered earlier this year when British forensic
archaeologist Caroline Sturdy Colls used ground-penetrating radar to
find evidence of massive burial pits at the Treblinka site, which she
said contains the burnt remains of thousands of bodies.
The
last two survivors of Treblinka remain good friends, united both in
their common experiences and in their desire to tell the world about the
death camp’s lost secrets before their voices, too, are forever
silenced.
'I live two lives,
one is here and now and the other is what happened there,' says Samuel.
'It never leaves me. It stays in my head. It goes with me always.'
'There are only the two of us left,' adds Kalman 'Soon there will be no-one left to tell. The world cannot forget Treblinka.'
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