![]() ![]() Several times it happened that a Jew, a Jewess or the entire transport resisted the Germans or tried to escape – the guards then killed them with particular cruelty. He saw the opening of new gas chambers, unsuccessful attempts to burn the corpses, and above all, the unimaginable chaos of mass murder, carried out with sadism, amidst shots, screams and torture. Wiernik witnessed hundreds of thousands of people being led to their deaths. Overcrowding and lack of air killed many of them in a very painful way.’ Often people were kept in the gas chambers overnight with the motor not turned on at all. When the chambers were opened again, many of the victims were only half dead and had to be finished off with rifle butts, bullets or powerful kicks. Satan himself could not have devised a more fiendish torture. The motor which generated the gas in the new chambers was defective, and so the helpless victims had to suffer for hours on end before they died. ![]() People were smothered simply by overcrowding. As I have already indicated, there was not much space in the gas chambers. What irony! Amidst shouts and blows, the people were chased into the chambers. A Jew had been selected by the Germans to function as a supposed „bath attendant.” He stood at the entrance of the building housing the chambers and urged everyone to hurry inside before the water got cold. Everyone approaching the shack had to lift his arms high and so the entire macabre procession passed in silence, with arms raised high, into the gas chambers. But the German fiends managed to find everything, if not on the living, then later on the dead. The unfortunate victims, in the delusion that they would remain alive, tried to hide whatever they could. 2. Along the path leading to the chambers there stood a shack in which some official sat and ordered the people to turn in all their valuables. Next, all the men, and women, old people and children had to fall into line and proceed from Camp No. Afterwards, they were lined up and the healthiest, strongest and best-built among them were beaten until their blood flowed freely. They then had to go into the barrack where the women had undressed, and carry the latter’s clothes out and arrange them properly. Men ‘had to undress in the yard, make a neat bundle of their clothing, carry the bundle to a designated spot and deposit it on the pile. During these works, Wiernik watched the operation of the death machine. When the overseers found out that he was an experienced carpenter, they sent him to construction works in the camp. In the first days after his arrival, Wiernik was forced to segregate looted property and bury the murdered victims in mass graves. Their faces distorted with fright and awe’. The ukrainians were standing on the roofs above the barracks with rifles and machine guns.The camp yard was littered with corpses, some still in their clothes and some naked. Only on arriving there did the horrible truth dawn on us. the train got under way again and, within a few minutes, we came into the Treblinka Camp. Even so, some people who sent to death did not fully realize where the train was going. Captured by the Germans during the great deportation from the Warsaw ghetto, he went to Treblinka – like all Polish Jews sent there – in an overcrowded cattle car. ![]() How can I breathe freely and enjoy all that which nature has created?’ – Wiernik wrote in the first words of his account. įor your sake alone I continue to hang on to my miserable life, though it has lost all attraction for me. He had a terrifying account of almost a year spent in the German Nazi extermination camp in Treblinka, where he was transported on August 23, 1942. At the beginning of August 1943, Wiernik reached Krzywoszewski’s apartment at Smolna 25 street. Before the war, he lived in Warsaw, worked as an administrator of a house belonging to the family of Stefan Krzywoszewski, who was a playwright and former director of municipal theaters in Poland’s capital. Jankiel Wiernik (also Jacob, Yankel in English sources) was born in 1889 in Biała Podlaska in eastern Poland. Jankiel Wiernik, ’A Year in Treblinka’ title card / Treblinka Museum / Wikipedia ![]()
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