TREBLINKA: - Holocaust Handbooks

Chapter III: Investigations, Camp Plans, Statistics 95
If this is correct, the plan would have to be the most accurate of any drawn
by the witnesses, for it is based not upon unaided memory, but instead upon
direct observation of the camp. It is in fact the only one that depicts the form
of the buildings and installations, which are numbered 1 to 53 and show diverse
sub-numerations. The plan’s legend explains these buildings and installations,
with short anecdotes from the camp history inserted now and then.
The two authors mention installations, which are missing from the other plans,
for example the sports field for the Ukrainian guard detachment (17), the recreational
space with parasols and chairs for the SS men (10), an armored vehicle
always ready for action (12), the bicycle parking place (11), the gas station
(15), the projecting roof for protection of the fuel containers (16), the vegetable
gardens (4), the extinguishing basin (39, a water reserve for fire-fighting –
ed.), the space for trucks to maneuver (44), the coal supplies (45), a false train
station, consisting of a barracks with the inscription “Obermajdanki,” a clock
and a placard with the inscription “Wo�kowysk–Bia�ystok Train Station,” ticket
room, time table, doors to the waiting rooms of the first, second, and third
class with bar, all of it phony (50/1-6), four placards with information about
the type of clothing, which the Jews had to deposit there when they had undressed
(wool, silk etc.), and last of all some statues: of a Ukrainian assault
group advancing into battle (21), of a shepherd pasturing his animals (32), of
Jews who are going to work with shovels and picks beneath the sign “To the
Ghetto” (36). In the legend to the plan, there also appears an explicit reference
to the mass killings – “Road to the Death Camp” – but it is the strangest thing
that even this ‘Death Camp’, the ‘Camp No. II’, doesn’t appear at all on this
plan, as if it were an unimportant detail. Perhaps the two artists did not yet
know how many extermination facilities they were to show or how to represent
them.
Samuel Willenberg rectified this deficiency more than forty years later by
publishing a plan of the camp in his memoirs on Treblinka, 237 in which the
camp has the shape drawn by the surveyor Trautsolt, and the buildings are
represented corresponding to the technique employed by Laks and P�atkiewicz.
Of course ‘Camp II’ possesses those installations, which are supposed
to have existed there according to the official version, i.e. the two alleged
killing facilities, three mass graves, a cremation grate and a barrack for
the Jewish prisoners. 238
As we shall see in the last chapter of this book, in all probability ‘Camp II’
contained facilities of quite a different kind.
237 See Document 15 in the Appendix.
238 S. Willenberg, Revolt…, op. cit. (note 83), p. 6.