TREBLINKA: - Holocaust Handbooks

Chapter VIII: Indirect Transports of Jews to the Eastern Territories 237
and Che�mno) a pure extermination camp, where there was no separation of
those fit and those unfit for labor. Yet according to the cited document:
A subdivision of the Jews into those able to work and those not able to
work was planned.
The Jews able to work should be used for labor assignments.
Be��ec was supposed to become a camp, in which the Jews fit to work
were “registered in a file system according to their occupation.” This does not
conform in the least to a ‘pure extermination camp.’
The Jews unable to work were all supposed to go to Be��ec. The camp was
supposed “to accept 4-5 transports daily, of 1,000 Jews with the destination
station of Be[l]zec,” clearly Jews unable to work, who are deported “across
the border” and are allowed never to return to the General Gouvernement. For
that reason, Be��ec was designated as “the outermost border station in the
Zamosz district.” This sentence makes sense only in connection with a resettlement
beyond the border.
Piaski was supposed to become the “collection point for the Jews coming
out of the Reich.” If one uses the road, it is another 24 km to Lublin, located to
the northwest of Piaski, and 91 km to Be��ec. With the train, the distance to
Be��ec is even greater (about 130 km). This contradicts the thesis, according
to which Be��ec was a pure extermination camp, since in this case the collection
point would have been the camp itself.
It was intended to unload 60,000 Jews at a point on the D�blin-Trawniki
route. The former locale is 76 km northwest of Lublin (in the direction of
Warsaw); Trawniki is 13 km east of Piaski (which it serves as rail station) on
the Lublin-Rejowiec-Che�m/Lublin-Be��ec railroad line (before the Rejowiec
station, a junction of the rail line turns off south toward Be��ec). This project,
too, fails to jibe with the claim that Be��ec is supposed to have been a pure extermination
camp.
This fact is completely confirmed by a report of April 7, 1942. Its author is
SS-Hauptsturmführer Richard Türk, director of the Department for Population
and Welfare in the Office of the Governor of the Lublin district. The report refers
to the month of March and contains a paragraph with the heading “Jewish
Resettlement Operation of the SS and Police Chief,” in which Türk reports:
“The possibilities of accommodation were and are currently being discussed
with the delegate of the SS and Police Chief, that is, restricted to
those stretching along the D�blin-Rejowiec-Belzec railway line. Alternative
possibilities were determined.
Due to my proposal, there is a basic understanding that, to the same
degree as Jews from the west are being settled here, local Jews are to be
evacuated, if possible. The current situation of the settling movement is
that approximately 6,000 were settled here from the Reich, approximately
7,500 have been evacuated from the district and 18,000 from the city of
Lublin.