Death Camp Treblinka: Survivor Stories

This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find upsetting

In August 1944, a Red Army offensive swept into Nazi-occupied Poland.

Following the railway toward Warsaw, Russian scouts

came across an eerie forest clearing.

An attempt had been made to erase

every trace of what had happened here.

There were no buildings,

no bodies,

no mass graves.

But the earth did not conspire in the cover-up.

This was Treblinka, the dark heart of the Nazi Holocaust.

Its gas chambers once stood here.

Nowhere in human history had 800,000 human beings

been murdered in such a short time.

Only two last survivors can now tell of the hell of Treblinka.

We found small children, newborn children.

No-one had liberated these men.

They had staged a prisoners' revolt and fought their way out.

There were flames, smoke, explosions, gunfire.

The swastika was burning and fell down.

Everything was burning.

After the escape, they would pursue vengeance,

waging war on the SS in Warsaw's bloody uprising...

..and justice,

confronting a key architect of Nazi genocide

in the trial of Adolf Eichmann.

-So you were in Treblinka 1?

-Yes.

The selection started right here.

Women were sent to the left, men to the right.

Final witnesses to monstrous crimes -

this is the story of two extraordinary men

who journeyed into the abyss

and achieved the miracle of surviving Treblinka.

Kalman Taigman lives by the sea in Israel,

far from his birthplace in Poland.

His Zionist father had emigrated here in 1935,

but efforts to bring young Kalman and his mother had failed.

In the fateful summer of 1942,

they were factory workers in Warsaw's Jewish ghetto...

..a time of bitter memory.

Since the German invasion of 1939,

Poland's Jews had been subjected to persecution and forced labour.

The majority had been rounded up,

and corralled inside hundreds of ghettos.

Warsaw was the biggest.

Over 400,000 were crammed into a tiny, unliveable area,

sealed off behind high walls.

The death toll through disease

and deliberate starvation was appalling.

Terrible days.

You'd go out in the morning, you have to go to work.

You can see dead people on the sidewalk.

The family, after the person died,

took from him the clothing,

to sell.

And to buy something to eat.

Yet such cruelty was just a prelude to the unimaginable.

Many Jews in Poland

believed that the worst was over,

that if they were able to work,

if they could work for the Germans, then they would be left alone.

They were not to know that a decision was being taken

that would lead ultimately to the liquidation

of all the ghettos in Poland

as part of a plan to annihilate the entire Jewish population of Europe.

Racial hatred, military conquest and new empire in the east

impelled Hitler in late 1941

toward a "final solution" of the Jewish question.

Fire!

SS Einsatzgruppen had already slaughtered

hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews

in mass shootings behind the lines.

Now, Heinrich Himmler's SS was authorised to cleanse,

or annihilate, all Europe's Jews, by industrial means.

Adolf Eichmann would organise the transportation of Jews,

by rail, from across the continent to the death camps.

In May 1942, the Nazis began filming Warsaw's doomed Jews for posterity.

Not even the children were to be spared.

The death factory being built to kill them all was virtually ready.

Mass deportations began on July 23rd.

They came in the morning.

They brought together 6,000 people,

and then they sent away.

They told us we are going to work in the east.

I didn't know I'm going to Treblinka.

I didn't know.

Samuel Willenberg is an artist living in Tel Aviv, Israel.

He has turned searing wartime memories into bronze.

And his drawings give a rare illustration

of life inside Treblinka.

That tense summer of 1942, he was on the run, outside the ghettos,

140 miles south of Warsaw.

He was in Czestochowa, a sacred Catholic place of pilgrimage,

with his mother and two sisters.

Samuel grew up here, a headstrong tearaway with Aryan looks

who blended easily into Polish society.

Now fugitives with forged papers, they had taken rooms here,

in the very shadow of the Jasna Gora monastery.

But for Jews, the risk of betrayal was ever-present.

But, stunned and despondent, Samuel hesitated.

In October, he too was rounded up and deported to the east.

Hidden just 60 miles northeast of Warsaw, Treblinka was the last

and most lethal of three new extermination camps.

With Sobibor and Belzec,

Treblinka served Aktion or Operation Reinhard -

the SS plan to liquidate over two million Polish Jews.

The three camps that were the core of Aktion Reinhard

were constructed with one purpose, and only one purpose -

that was mass murder.

They weren't like Auschwitz which had a huge camp population

which was used for work purposes.

They were quite small, about 400 metres by 600 metres.

They were near to railroads

so that Jewish populations could be delivered to them quickly and easily.

They were in remote locations because they were not meant to service any kind of industry.

They were not meant to have any function other than mass murder.

At Treblinka's two sister camps, SS technicians had already refined

the process of deception and mass killing.

The German overseers numbered just 30,

supported by over 100 troniki - Soviet Ukrainian SS auxiliaries.

A few prisoners were made to tidy up the aftermath of a gassing,

then they, too, were killed at the end of each day.

Kalman's transport drew up to the ramp at Treblinka on September 4th.

Immense suffering had begun on the slow train journey itself.

Like beasts.

First of all they put in a wagon approximately 100 person.

The journey was terrible. There was no place to sit. You must stand.

You couldn't breathe. There is only a small window.

No water. No food. No nothing.

So therefore I am telling you a part of the people were dead.

In the melee with 2,000 other victims,

19-year-old Kalman held tight to his mother, Tima.

Once a train arrived in the camp Treblinka, then the SS men and the Ukrainian guards

went at them with a fury, herded them out of the trucks,

beat them, shot people, created a mood of absolute panic and terror.

You could hear shouting,

"Raus!"

"Out!"

And we all went out from the wagons,

and they sent us to a place where was a door.

An iron door.

I came to the door with my mother, together.

But they say us, "Woman, left. Man, right."

I didn't want to let her go.

So I don't know what, I get something in my head,

from a German, and I fall down.

And when I stand up, I saw her. She's going in the barrack,

with other women and children.

In under two hours, victims had crossed unseen into the camp of the dead,

driven naked up this corridor to a building containing three gas chambers,

fed by a Russian tank engine.

Kalman soon learned the German name for this path.

Himmelstrasse - the way to heaven.

Samuel is making his own pilgrimage back to Treblinka.

The odds of survival beyond this point were virtually nil.

But a new commandant, Franz Stangl,

saw the daily killing of prisoner helpers as inefficient.

Operation Reinhard camps began to form pools of Arbeitsjuden, or Work Jews,

forced on pain of death to be slave labourers.

Selection still required a miracle of good fortune.

Samuel retraces these fateful last steps with his daughter, Orit.

Camp 1 was where the living were processed on arrival.

Kalman and Samuel were forced to sort victims' belongings

in the lower camp.

Here they would witness daily horrors.

We went to the barracks to take out the clothes from the women.

And we found small children. Newborn children.

We must take two, four children to put in a blanket

and four persons took the blanket, and we are going to the Lazarett.

Anyone who risked slowing progress toward the Himmelstrasse

was taken out of line

and led to the so-called "field hospital" or Lazarett.

Handicaps.

Children.

Sick persons.

Dead persons.

"Lazarett!"

I was in a big hall.

Deep. And there's fire.

Children who are living still...

..and they shoot them.

And put on the fire.

And there were children who were still living.

The SS held the lives of Work Jews cheaply too.

Samuel and Kalman determined to stay alive

in the desperate and unlikely hope of escape.

But many could not endure.

The workforce was culled regularly.

The life expectancy of the Work Jews, the Arbeitsjuden,

was a few weeks, a few months at the most.

A lot of them committed suicide.

It was very common for those who had been taken

from one of the groups of Jews doomed to the gas chambers

and put into the workforce.

Kurt Franz, Treblinka's deputy commander,

was the most feared of a vicious SS contingent.

Photography inside Treblinka was strictly forbidden,

but Franz took these rare images of the SS living area

for his private album.

He labelled it "Schoene Zeiten" - "Good Times".

Franz made Work Jews memorise and sing

Treblinka's camp song at roll call.

He wrote the lyrics to Fester Schritt.

They beat us all over the day.

You can't go, you must run.

And if you didn't do something like he wants...

..he could shoot you.

Nazi death camps were tasked with more

than the physical extermination of Jews.

They were designed to plunder every economic asset

for the enrichment of the SS state and the German war machine.

Precise instructions were given to death camp Kommandants

on how to handle the loot.

'Guidelines for the distribution of the belongings of the Jews...'

As many as 800 Work Jews were needed

to sort the vast pyramids of belongings

stripped from incoming deportees.

They packed into their bundles, into their suitcases,

their most valuable and treasured possessions.

Orthodox Jews took with them

the candlesticks for holding the Sabbath candles.

Wealthier Jews, of course, took with them

any foreign currency they had, or gold, or diamonds,

in the hope that they could use that money to make their lives,

wherever they were going to be resettled, a little bit better.

Women victims of Treblinka were sent to the gas chambers

after the men so that their hair could be harvested too.

One day, Samuel was ordered to work as a barber.

He encountered a naked Warsaw girl fully aware of her fate.

Samuel and Kalman felt fortunate only to have been selected

for work in the lower camp,

and not in the Camp of the Dead.

Just metres away, the Totenlager was sealed off

behind high, camouflaged fences.

There were no crematoria.

The dead were simply thrown into five giant pits.

Kalman and Samuel could hear and imagine what they could not see.

"Where are they? Where did they go?"

Kommandant Franz Stangl was unmoved by what he saw.

"I remember pits full of blue-black corpses,

"a mass of rotting flesh.

"It had nothing to do with humanity.

"It could not have. They were cargo."

He was elegant, clean, in a white jacket.

He changed shoes three times a day, because he runs in blood.

He came home.

He kissed his wife.

He kissed the children.

How is this possible,

to go out from a hell, to come home after his work?

You'd like...

..to kill him with all the family...

..like he did.

HE INHALES

It was the particular agony of the prisoners to witness

or to discover the murder of their own flesh and blood.

One morning, a transport arrived from Czestochowa.

The pace of Treblinka's killing was frenzied.

Between September and mid November of 1942,

over 438,000 Polish Jews perished.

Ten bigger gas chambers had been erected,

raising its killing capacity to 15,000 per day.

Franz Stangl remembered

that he would start the day with breakfast round about seven o'clock,

and then, after he processed a trainload of people,

would go back to his quarters for lunch.

That would mean that up to 6,000 people had been

murdered between Stangl's breakfast and Stangl's lunch.

With its mission to wipe out Polish Jewry virtually complete,

Treblinka would open its gates to Gypsies

and over 135,000 Jews from across Europe.

These stones represent not murdered individuals,

but whole Jewish towns,

villages and communities.

More humans had been killed here in 1942

than at any other place in the history of mankind.

The slaughter and defeat at Stalingrad finally turned

the tide of the war against the Nazis in February 1943.

The threat of defeat,

and exposure of their crimes began to weigh on the SS leadership.

Himmler now ordered the SS to liquidate

and to destroy Warsaw's Jewish ghetto.

Thoughts there had turned to diehard resistance...

and escape.

Among some 70,000 remaining captives was a 13-year-old girl,

Ada Lubelczyk.

She had seen her mother Rachel deported to the east

the previous summer.

The destination was Treblinka.

Ada did not know that she was an orphan.

I remember that I was happy that she was dressed when they took them.

So, I remember exactly that I...

I wanted to believe that it would be OK.

Ada's relatives had planned a daring escape over the wall

to get her into hiding on the Aryan side.

I have before, to arrange to have documents, you know,

Aryan documents, and I have to know all the prayers,

how to make this and this...

all the prayers. When I was ready, they arranged the escape.

Just weeks later, lightly armed young Jewish resistance fighters

began a desperate and heroic last stand against the SS.

They fought and died in bunkers and burning streets.

Trainloads of prisoners were sent daily to Treblinka.

There, embers of hatred and resistance were burning too.

Jewish prisoner Rudy Masaryk was a Czech army officer who helped

camp elders shape an ambitious plan...

..to break into the SS armoury using a copied key,

burn the camps wooden buildings and destroy the gas chambers,

to kill Kurt Franz and other hated SS guards...

..then break out en masse into the woods by nightfall.

But the oppressive regime made planning near impossible.

The Jews who were part of the killing machine,

they were being culled regularly so there were constant searches.

The Work Jews were kept under very close supervision,

and there were,

what were called "squealers" in their ranks -

Jews who thought that they could extend their life expectancy

if they co-operated with the Nazis.

If they told them that they'd

heard rumours about an underground in the camp,

a resistance.

One day, Samuel was ordered to the Lazarett where a sick man

had just been taken for execution.

The arrival of giant cranes and excavators that spring

signalled a new stage of horror.

Himmler had recently toured Treblinka's camp too,

and discovered that three quarters of a million bodies

lay uncremated within the pits.

Stangl was ordered to exhume and to burn them on giant open-air pyres.

An SS technician nicknamed "The Artist"

constructed the so-called "roasts",

which burned day and night for months.

All prisoners knew that the burning of the last corpse

would trigger camp closure and their own execution.

We know that as we are going...

finished the last one...

they will put us too.

Don't wait for it, they will take you too.

And so it begins.

A day for the revolt was chosen...

The uprising was not just a gesture of resistance,

it was the effort of men who had seen hellish things,

who had seen criminality on an unbelievable scale.

It was their determination to get out, to stay alive

and to tell the truth to the world.

The Germans, they saw what was going on

and called to one another...

..they are Jewish, start shooting.

Jewish - we are broken people.

Almost dead.

And the Ukrainian soldiers, they begin to run after us...

There were scenes of absolute chaos.

Tragically, one of the leaders of the revolt,

Rudy Masaryk was one of the first to be shot, went down near the wire.

But the chaos itself served a purpose.

There were so many people running in so many directions.

There were flames, smoke, explosions, gunfire

that dozens and dozens of Jews were able to get to the fence,

get over the fence and then plunge into the minefield

and into the forests.

After 15 minutes of running, we stop,

turn back and look at how everything is burning.

The swastika was burning and falling down. Everything was burning.

The feeling was...

..unbelievable.

Me? Outside?

How?!

Stangl launched a massive manhunt.

By nightfall, fewer than 200 rebels were still alive and on the run.

And we ran all night long. No lights, nothing.

Next morning we saw a goy

and I asked him, "Where are we? What is here?"

And he told us...

"Jews burned the camp and ran away.

"Run away too, because you are Jews."

We are looking for food, for water, and we found a farmer.

I ask him if we can stay there for one night.

He said, "OK. Come."

Kalman and his friends decided to lie low in the wild.

To survive a year-long ordeal,

they would dig a makeshift bunker and live underground.

Samuel went solo.

Trusting in his charm and looks,

he set out for Warsaw to find his artist father.

This perilous journey took months,

but eventually Samuel traced Perec to an apartment block

where he was living under a false name.

Samuel learned that his mother Manifa was also alive.

He was then asked for news of his sisters.

The time for revenge would soon come.

On 1st August 1944, almost a year after Treblinka's revolt,

a great uprising by the Armia Krajowa -

the Polish Home Army - began in Warsaw.

Already with the resistance, Samuel volunteered to fight

against his old SS tormentors in bloody street fighting.

The battle raged for over 60 days.

No mercy was given.

Yet when Warsaw's uprising was finally crushed,

Samuel managed to slip out of the devastated city.

He fought on as a partisan, based in the Kampinos woods.

For Kalman, the sound of Russian tank engines

had augured the gassing of innocents.

But the roar of Soviet tanks now heralded...

liberation.

One day in the morning, a tank...

..came in...

..and stopped, the tank,

near our place.

Everything was...

trembling there.

We didn't know what kind of tank it is.

Finally, one of us...

..understood...

Russian.

Samuel was freed from Nazi rule in January 1945.

Both he and Kalman joined the Soviet-led Polish army,

and fought on, through to the final defeat of Hitler.

At war's end, Treblinka was desolate,

and forgotten.

It had been completely demolished

soon after the prisoners' revolt, back in 1943.

Only war crimes investigators now visited

the wasteland.

A stunned world focused more

on the Nazi concentration camps which had been liberated intact,

and with many survivors.

Yet fewer than 70 had survived Treblinka.

And they were now scattered,

seeking to rebuild shattered lives.

Samuel had met a young girl in the city of Lodz.

Ada Lubelchik,

sheltered through the war by a Polish family,

was looking for accommodation when she met a dashing army officer.

I went to the office where my friends worked. I came there,

and in this place was sitting

a very nice-looking Polish officer.

You know, with all this uniform

and with the cap - a soldier, how it looks.

And he was very nice.

He was blond, with blue eyes.

But my matter was to

ask about an apartment.

And they ask.

And he told me, "Yeah - I have an apartment.

"I have a very nice one - two rooms,

"but one condition.

"You have to marry me."

It was the first time that I met him.

It's supposed to be a joke.

There eyes were set on "aliyah" -

emigration to Israel.

Kalman's new life in Israel had begun in 1948,

when he was finally reunited with his father, Shimon.

A successful businessman,

he had married Rivka -

herself a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp.

They had a son, Haim.

Yet, in 1960,

the Israelis brought the world's attention back to the Nazi genocide

by sensationally kidnapping Adolf Eichmann from Argentina.

Kalman and three other Treblinka survivors were summoned

to be part of a huge trial,

held on the stage of Jerusalem's biggest auditorium.

It was a time for revelation

and justice.

-LAWYER:

-Was there any law authorising you to carry out the mass deportations?

-TRANSLATOR:

-I had received orders and instructions from my direct

superiors...

Eichmann by himself never shot people.

He was a good organiser

of trains.

Was there any law authorising the commander

of an extermination camp

to murder people?

That law, of course, did not exist.

But I know that those who did it

referred to the maxim according to which

the words of the Fuhrer

have the force of law.

This is what those people say.

I think the uniform make from him a man.

He was not a man.

He was nothing.

On June 6th, 1961,

Kalman confronted Eichmann with the crimes of Treblinka.

-TRANSLATOR:

-Lazarett was a kind of grave -

a big dugout, fenced off by barbed wire,

and near the entrance

there was a hut, painted white

with red crosses on it and the inscription

"Lazarett" on the walls.

He stayed on after his testimony to listen to Eli Rosenberg.

He had slaved in the Totenlager

and was an eye witness to the last and darkest secrets

of Treblinka.

TRANSLATOR: When the people entered into the gas chambers,

the last ones were stabbed in their bodies

by the bayonets.

The last people already saw what was happening.

They did not want to enter.

and they just jammed the people inside - 400 into the small chamber.

This was the final capacity, the full capacity of the gas chamber,

and was so jam-packed

that it was difficult to close the door.

When they locked the door, we were on the outside.

We heard only screams

and prayers - "Mother, Father."

And after 35 minutes, they were dead.

And two Germans were standing

and they said, "Everyone is asleep.

"Open the doors."

And we opened the doors and we took the bodies out.

It's difficult not to understand.

Take a beast, take a wolf, a lion.

They can kill people when they are hungry.

They were not hungry.

They took people, small people, small children.

Yeah.

Eichmann was convicted of crimes against the Jewish people

and was hanged in 1962.

Yet few of the perpetrators of Operation Reinhard shared that fate.

Himmler committed suicide in Allied custody in May 1945.

Treblinka's commandant, Franz Stangl, was extradited from Brazil.

Sentenced to life imprisonment in a West German court in 1970,

he died soon afterwards in prison.

Kurt Franz was put on trial in Dusseldorf with nine other Treblinka SS guards

and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1965.

Released in 1994 for health reasons, Lalka, "the doll",

died at home four years later.

The majority of the SS

and the Ukrainian guards at Treblinka have evaded justice.

This house in Udim was Samuel and Ada's first home in Israel.

It belongs now to their architect daughter, Orit.

Samuel's mother, Manifa, was with them in the '60s,

still haunted by the loss of her two daughters.

Samuel has dedicated his life to remembrance of the suffering

and resistance of fellow Poles at Warsaw,

and of fellow Jews at Treblinka.

As many as 850,000 innocents were cruelly murdered here

in little more than a year.

Nazi secrecy denies us knowledge of all the victims' names.

Samuel asks that we never forget Treblinka.

Kalman shares this mission, visiting Yad Vahsem in Jerusalem.

In the Hall Of Names,

records of victims' identities are collected and preserved.

Kalman has submitted the names of 18 close relatives.

This is my mother.

They murdered her when she was 39 in Treblinka.

-Shalom, Kalman.

-Shalom.

Historians recognise the unique significance

of these final witnesses to Treblinka.

The fact that anybody survived means that they went

completely against the odds.

The Nazi plan was to kill every single Jew there.

The Nazis almost succeeded. I mean, look at the survival rates -

50, 60, 70 people out of

859,000 who were killed.

That's essentially zero.

These last two survivors of Treblinka are of very different

kinds of personalities.

Samuel Willenberg is this outgoing, gregarious person

while Kalman Taigman is reserved.

When you see these two personalities, you also see

just how there was no formula for survival for Jews in the Holocaust.

THEY CHAT