The Historiography of the Holocaust

Figure 13
The Topography of Genocide 233
Yet we must beware again of taking objects and mythologizing them. At the
sight of the Polish goods vans standing on the line by Treblinka station we
must not immediately call them ‘cattle cars’ and associate such rolling stock
only with the death trains (figure 16). If we do that, we create discontinuity
rather than continuity. Without railways the great emigration of white Europeans
of whatever religion to the New World where many of these settlers were
to displace and kill the aboriginal peoples could not have taken place. One can
find photographs of these emigrants, including Jews, being loaded into goods
vans with no more to heat them than a stove because they could not afford to
travel in any greater comfort. So the idea of people with few assets travelling
long distances in goods vans under such conditions was common in eastern
and southern Europe, even in the early twentieth century.
It is not usually mentioned that the original buildings of the main camp at
Auschwitz, Auschwitz I, were built by the Austro-Hungarian authorities to
regulate the traffic in emigration between eastern Europe and Germany. 41
Certainly goods vans would have left O0wi(cim station and the siding by the
emigrant camp crammed with the poor of Galicia, including Jews. So the
announcements of the first resettlements of Jews and Poles by the Germans
would not have been greeted with quite the foreboding we assign to them, and
those Jews who did not think the worst were not deluded individuals within
the ghettos. Moreover, in eastern Poland and the Baltic states there were other