Mila 18 - Leon Uris

When four hundred people had gathered, the line from the warehouse was halted and the group ordered into the “sanitation center.” In approximately ten minutes I heard a burst of hideous screaming which lasted only ten or fifteen seconds. The building was then besieged by Jewish prisoners (Sonnderkommandos) who, I am told, clean out the chamber and remove the personal belongings to the second warehouse for sorting.

Ten minutes after the first gassing, the Jewish prisoners brought the corpses out. I saw them clearly. They were the same four hundred who had gone in twenty minutes before. Six to eight corpses were piled on a welded sledlike affair, and each “sled” was pulled by Jewish prisoners. The Sonnderkommandos passed out of the inner-camp gate to a side road which ran one kilometer up a hill to a large building with a tall smokestack. I was able to see this clearly also through my field glasses.

The entire gassing process took thirty minutes for four hundred people. On the first day of my observation there were twelve separate gassings, or approximately forty-eight hundred persons. On the second day there were twenty gassings, or eight thousand, and on the third day seventeen gassings, or sixty-eight hundred. I have been told that upward of forty gassings have been accomplished in a twenty-four-hour period and never less than ten.

Leopold and other laborers have worked both in the repair of the gas chamber and crematorium. He tells me the chamber is a low-ceilinged room of four meters by twelve. It resembles a shower room in every detail except that the shower heads are false. An SS man is able to control the volume of gas through a barred observation window. Leopold and a crew of workers must enter the chamber every few weeks in order to resurface the concrete, which is torn up by victims clawing to get out.

Leopold was also instrumental in building the crematorium after open-pit burning of corpses was abandoned because of the stench. After the sleds are run to the crematorium the corpses are placed on a table and examined for gold teeth and slit open (and bled through a drainage pipe) to see if any gold or valuables had been swallowed. Then the corpses are taken into the adjoining room and placed in one of five ovens that hold five to seven corpses apiece. Extending arms and legs are hacked off. Cremation lasts minutes. The bones are removed from grates from the opposite side. Through my field glasses I was able to make out hills of bones some two stories high. Leopold tells me that recently when he went to repair the ovens a bone crushing machine had been installed and the bone meal sacked and shipped to Germany for fertilizer.

Christopher de Monti held his head between his legs and began to vomit. He vomited until his guts screamed with pain. Page after page it went. The full report of Andrei Androfski, the reports of a handful of survivors of Treblinka and Chelmno and the labor camps.

“God! What have I done?” he cried in anguish. “I am a Judas! I am a Judas!”

The puke and the tears and the pain and the liquor crushed on him and he fell to the floor in a dead faint.

Chapter Nine

FELLOW JEWS! WARNING!

DO NOT REPORT TO THE UMSCHLAGPLATZ FOR DEPORTATION! THE DESTINATION IS A DEATH CAMP LOCATED NEAR THE TREBLINKA VILLAGE! HIDE YOUR CHILDREN! RESIST! THIS IS A SIGNAL FOR AN UPRISING! JOIN US!

JOINT FORCES

Journal Entry

Oh, my God, why have you forsaken us! How has man reached such depravity? We are at the bottom of a swill pit, and it is midnight! In all of the long tortured history of our people we have reached the moment of greatest degradation.

ALEXANDER BRANDEL

The immediate result of the revelations brought the long-sought unity among the diversified elements in the ghetto. Simon Eden and the Labor Zionists already had a working agreement with Andrei and the Bathyrans. Now the Communists and many religious fringe groups and individuals went under the single banner of Joint Forces. The Revisionists agreed to a non-binding working agreement. Simon Eden was declared commander and Andrei Androfski his deputy, with the Communists taking charge of activity beyond the wall. Although they were weak inside the ghetto, the Communists on the outside gave them the closest set of allies of any other group on the Aryan side. Wolf Brandel was sent into the Brushmaker’s district to organize a fighting unit inside the factory complex.

The Joint Forces counted sixty pistols, thirty-four rifles, and a single automatic weapon.

The guns were of so many different calibers and varieties that some had only a half dozen rounds of ammunition. The tiny arsenal was reinforced somewhat by several thousand homemade bottle bombs and grenades manufactured from water pipes perfected by the chemist, Jules Schlosberg, in the cellar of Mila 19.

The total combat force stood at five hundred sixty young men and women, mostly in their early twenties, almost entirely without military training.

Journal Entry

The call for a rebellion has fallen on deaf ears. How can the people rebel? What do they have to rebel with? What help will they receive from the outside? In a final banality of the German language, the Nazis refer to the exterminations as “dispensation of special treatment.” The desire to survive has become so intense that the people will not allow themselves to believe there is a death camp at Treblinka. The Jewish Militia and members of the Civil Authority rip down underground posters as quickly as they are put up. Kennkarten stamped for slave labor are still believed by the people to be some sort of magic key to life.

It is amazing how the people will submit themselves to a living death worse than death itself. Even the most decadent societies in past history have understood that a basic minimum must be accorded for a slave or even an animal to be able to produce a reasonable day’s work. The Germans have even made an innovation on this by turning all of Poland into one big slave-labor pool. With millions of extra laborers who cannot exist otherwise, the competition for the right to become a slave is fierce.

The slaves in Dr. Koenig’s brush and uniform factories are separated from their families, numbered, stamped, beaten at their work. They labor in abysmal conditions for sixteen to eighteen hours a day. There is almost no heat in winter or ventilation or light. They exist with no personal property or human rights. They are terrorized and starved so that the fight for food among them is a further struggle to live. Their sleeping quarters are unfit to be pigsties. Every slave of every time has dreamt of freedom, and every tyrant of every time has recognized that dream. Here the only alternative is death. The slightest defect by protest or sickness brings immediate liquidation and replacement by another who scrambles for the right to be a slave.

The Big Action enters its second week. Yesterday no volunteers showed up at the Umschlagplatz. The Militia and Nightingales surrounded Koenig’s Brushmaker’s factory and selected half the workers for deportation. Today the Civil Authority called for volunteers to fill the factory openings. It was oversubscribed! Of course this newest German ruse will not last long, but it is fantastic that the people continue to allow themselves to be tricked.

Crazy Nathan stands near the Umschlagplatz and laments and prophesies that he will be the sole survivor in Warsaw. His latest psalm:

The Germans are so good to us.

They even make a raid

To give us free vacations,

With all expenses paid.

ALEXANDER BRANDEL

On the ninth day of the Big Action, Alexander Brandel walked into the barracks of the Jewish Militia, eater-corner to the Civil Authority building at Zamenhof and Gensia streets. The police who had bullied the ghetto around for nearly two years became uneasy at the presence of Brandel. He was more disheveled than ever. His slight stature certainly posed no threat of physical harm, yet they feared him. He was one of the few untouchables. Harm to him would bring savage retribution to them. But more, they feared his calm. He asked to see Piotr Warsinski.