Children…

“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 the 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.”
YANKEL WIERNIK, TREBLINKA SURVIVOR
Operation Reinhardt
Between March 1942 and October 1943, at least 1.5 million
people were murdered at the Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka
death camps.These camps were part of “Operation
Reinhardt”, which sought to empty Poland of its Jews and
seize their possessions. Nothing was to be wasted. Aside
from clothes, money and personal effects, even hair and
gold dental fillings were plundered. This work, and the
clearing of the corpses, was carried out by Jewish prisoners.
The three camps were small, about 600 metres
long and some 400 metres wide, and were constructed
according to similar principles. Few Germans were at
each camp: the staff usually comprised about 30 SS
soldiers, aided by some 100 Ukrainian and Baltic auxiliaries.
Treblinka, a former SS man stationed there said,
was “a primitive but efficient production line of death”.
In those camps, unlike in Auschwitz and Majdanek, no
doctors “selected” victims when they arrived, usually
in packed freight cars. The Jews were told that they
had come to work, but that they must first undress for
“disinfection” and leave all their possessions. Men went
to one side and women and children to the other. Then
they were separately herded into the gas chambers.
The engines started and pipes introduced exhaust
fumes into the tightly packed chambers.The entire process
was over in an hour or two.At Treblinka,up to 15,000
people could be murdered in one day, but, the same SS
man explained, they “had to spend half the night at it”.
Initially, bodies were buried in enormous mass graves,
but from autumn 1942, the Germans burned them. At
most, a hundred Jews survived Treblinka, fewer than
fifty survived Sobibor, and Belzec, only two.
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