TREBLINKA: - Holocaust Handbooks

Chapter I: The Description of Treblinka in Historiography 23
months the Germans had tried to erase the traces of their work. […]. And
the earth, giving way under one’s feet, is fatty and swollen, as if it had
been soaked in a surfeit of linseed oil; the unsolid earth of Treblinka wells
up like an eddying sea. This wasteland, surrounded by barbed wire fencing,
has consumed more human lives than entire oceans and seas of the
globe since the existence of the human race.” (p. 61f.)
In his edifying report Grossmann writes that there were three methods of
mass killing: gassing, scalding with hot steam, and suffocation by evacuation
of the death chamber by means of vacuum pumps. We shall return to this
theme in the following chapter. In any case, the second as well as the third
murder method very soon took their leave from history; only the gas chambers
have remained. The number of Treblinka victims, postulated several times by
Grossmann as three million, was also dropped at that time as being obviously
all too incredible, and in the publications that followed writers contented
themselves with significantly lower numbers of victims.
b. Rachel Auerbach
In 1946, the Polish Jewess Rachel Auerbach, who had not been interned in
Treblinka herself but had supposedly received her information from former
inmates, wrote a work in the Yiddish language about the camp, which was
published in 1979 in English by Alexander Donat under the title In the Fields
of Treblinka. 29 Auerbach attacked Grossmann on the basis of the number of
three million victims claimed by him. She gives the number of victims with
precision as 1,074,000 and writes:
“Such places as Treblinka, with their huge mass graves, do not need
that sort of odd local patriotism which is expressed by exaggerating the
number of victims in order to depict the monstrosity of the mass murders
committed there. Believe me, over a million people killed in the course of
one year in one little place is a million times more than a million human
brains could grasp. And even half a million would be much more than
enough.” (p. 55)
This praiseworthy refusal to indulge in any kind of exaggeration aside, the
authoress reports, among other things, the following concerning Treblinka:
“The floor of the gas chambers was sloping and slippery. The first ones
in would slip and fall, never to rise again. Those who followed would topple
over them. The chamber was packed to the brim. The people were
jammed together so closely that they pushed each other into a standing position.
Some witnesses report that the people inside the chambers had to
raise their arms and pull in their stomachs so that more could be fitted in.
And then, when they stood pressed together, little children were slipped in
above their heads like so many bundles.
29 Rachel Auerbach, “In the Fields of Treblinka,” in: A. Donat, op. cit. (note 4), pp. 19-73.