“Not even some barracks left?” Yvette called from the middle. “Barracks are fascinating to see. I’ll never forget the barracks at Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald.”
“Living quarters for the Germans, you mean?” Johnny asked.
“No, I mean barracks for the Jews. Like in Majdanek.”
“There were no barracks here,” said Johnny.
“So what are we walking four miles for?” Hannah said from the rear. “A field?”
“Four kilometers, not miles.”
“Same difference.”
“Hannah, shh, listen to him,” Blake said. Chloe was glad somebody had. Though to think: Blake told Hannah to listen to Johnny. Cats and dogs living together.
“Johnny, I don’t get it. How can there not be barracks?” Denise said. “There are always barracks.”
“Here’s the thing about Treblinka II,” Johnny told them, walking backwards so he could face them. “Treblinka I, a few kilometers away, had barracks, because it was a concentration camp. People slept and worked there at the quarry before they died. But that’s not the part we’re going to. The part we’re going to had no barracks. They got off the train, and three hours later their bodies were burning in the pits.”
A hush fell over the group, even Hannah. Half a kilometer went by in silence.
“Is the burning pit still there?” Yvette asked.
“No. It’s gone.”
“But how did they hide the pits from the Jews who’d just arrived?”
“They camouflaged them with exotic landscaping. And they covered the absence of barracks by telling the Jews that Treblinka was nothing more than a transit camp. That they were on their way to better camps elsewhere. A nicer train was waiting to pull in as soon as the dirty one left, and the people had washed and deloused.”
“But couldn’t everyone smell the human flesh burning?” That was Blake. He had asked Johnny a question. Treblinka, the great equalizer.
Johnny continued to walk backwards while answering Blake. Chloe was worried for him. Careful, she wanted to call out. Careful. You’ll trip, you’ll fall.
“Oh yes, Blake,” he said. “The smell and the smoke from the fires permeated the region for miles. Everyone could smell it, everyone knew what it was. But you saw how sparsely populated the few villages around here are. That was the case sixty years ago too. And most of the villages had Gestapo living in them. No one said a thing. What could they say? Excuse me, that smells mighty suspicious. Let’s just take a gander at what you have there?”
Blake nodded in grim understanding.
“Maybe they could’ve complained,” said Hannah.
“To who?”
“Well, I don’t know.” Chloe thought Hannah wanted to add that she herself always found someone to complain to.
“No one admitted anything, or wrote anything down,” Johnny said. “The smoke the Nazis didn’t acknowledge, and everything else they hid. They wouldn’t even allow the driver to pull the locomotive into the camp. He was ordered to put the train into reverse and back up four kilometers. The locomotive remained in the woods while the cattle cars with the Jews were slowly emptied. When they were done unloading, the conductor took the train back to the main spur. He never saw what was on the load manifest. For all he knew, he was delivering lumber.”
Johnny stared at Chloe. She got uncomfortable and looked away. “Your grandmother knew this,” he said. “Once you come here, you never forget. She didn’t tell you about her past? Many survivors don’t. It’s too heavy and useless a burden for others.”
“She didn’t come here,” Chloe replied. “Her friends did. Then they vanished. She searched for them for a long time after the war, she said. She was sure she’d see them again. She didn’t believe the stories about Treblinka.”
Johnny nodded, his eyes still on her. “Many people didn’t. The Germans demolished nearly all the evidence. For years Treblinka was called the Forgotten Camp.”
“Is there a crematoria here at least?” asked Denise. “Like in Majdanek?”
Johnny shook his head. “There wasn’t one. They were burned on a pyre. Well, not at first. At first, after they were gassed, they were buried. But when Himmler visited the camp and saw the black oozing liquid of the decomposing bodies rising up from the shallow mass graves, he became physically ill. He had to be hospitalized. Afterward he ordered that every single body in the pits be dug up and burned. It took a thousand men three months to fulfill his orders. And they didn’t get them all. They hoped he wouldn’t come back and inspect the camp again.”
“How do you know they didn’t get them all?” asked Brett.
“Be patient. I’ll get there,” Johnny said with a small smile. “Chloe, your grandmother wasn’t the only one who was skeptical. Lots of people maintained that Treblinka was a myth perpetuated by the Jews, nothing more than a vicious lie. Except for a tiny problem: intact bones kept being unearthed near the field we’re about to see, for the next—well, until now, actually. They’re still being unearthed.”
“We’re not going to see bones, are we, Johnny?” Hannah said. “Because I won’t be able to stomach that.”
“No, don’t worry.” They continued onward.
“I want to underline,” Johnny said, “that the extermination of human beings on this scale is unprecedented in human history. There’s been genocide, there’s been slaughter, and indiscriminate killing. But there has never been such a pitiless conveyor belt of mass death. For a long while no one raised a voice against it, partly because no one believed it, just like Moody.” Johnny blinked at Chloe. She blinked back without breaking stride. He remembered her grandmother’s name. He was the boy who seemed to remember everything. Would he remember her?
“The one or two people who had managed to escape,” he went on, “and recounted some of what they’d seen here, were dismissed as kooks and liars. Imagine having several trains a day deliver thousands of human beings and have them all be dead by sundown. Yvette is right. No one believed this was possible. Or that Hitler would be insane enough to divert the vast resources from his war machine, a diversion that many people point to as having cost him the war, which he had started and for all intents and purposes won in 1942.
“But it was precisely in 1942,” Johnny continued, “at the moment that Hitler felt most invincible that he began his long-planned construction of the six death camps. Operation Reinhard required trains, coal, electricity, transport, and building materials. It needed sand and concrete, bricks and mortar, and weapons—and gas! Let’s not forget that someone had to manufacture an enormous amount of Zyklon B, and it all had to be shipped to Majdanek or Birkenau, along with benzene, kerosene, wood, metal, weapons, ammunition, and barbed wire. But the diversion of transport trains was probably most instrumental in Hitler’s defeat. Instead of bringing his wounded soldiers from the front to the hospitals, instead of bringing food and arms to the front, instead of carrying materials desperately needed to fight the Soviets in the dead of winter, with Poland directly in the path between Group Army Nord and the unstoppable Red Army, Hitler instead used the trains to deliver millions of Jews to their execution. Instead of using the Jews for slave labor, he killed them. All of it boggles the rational mind. It’s one of the reasons why no one believed the sporadic reports that arose from the camps and the ghettos. Not Churchill, not Roosevelt. Stalin may have believed it,” Johnny said, “but he didn’t care. He had his own agenda against Hitler. He was willing to kill twenty million of his men to destroy Germany—and did—because Hitler had betrayed him, not because Hitler was a monster. It was all personal with Stalin.
“The bottom line is that the place we are heading to is unique even among the death centers. The Germans built thirty or forty concentration camps in the occupied territories—and they were all death camps, make no mistake about it. The Jews, and many others, died everywhere. And of course when we see Auschwitz in a few days, the thing that I hope will affect you the most is the sheer size and scope of the slaughter operatio
n there: it had six crematoria and four gas chambers. The Birkenau section was three miles square. An entire twenty-wagon train pulled in comfortably inside it. But even Auschwitz-Birkenau had barracks. What we’ll be looking at here is distinct from the others, because what you’re about to see had only one purpose. It was an abattoir. It was to kill Jews. The killing wasn’t a byproduct of this camp, but its reason for being. There was no other business in Treblinka. They were brought here not to work but to die. That’s why there were no barracks. They weren’t needed.”
“Why didn’t they build a crematorium here?” Yvette asked in a much quieter voice. “How did they dispose of the …” She broke off.
“Because they learned from Birkenau,” Johnny replied, “that the ovens were not as economical or efficient as the burning pits. After Stalingrad was lost, and the Nazis realized they were on the clock, they quadrupled their efforts. It’s not a coincidence that most of the six million Jews died after the Soviets held Stalingrad in January 1943. No time to futz about with ovens.”
“Hannah is right, though,” Denise said. “What are we going to see here if there’s nothing to see?”
“Well, there is something to see,” said Johnny. “There is the leveled field in the middle of nowhere with woods all around it. There is a cemetery. And I brought with me a schematic layout of the camp. I’ll show you some of how it happened.”
“Isn’t there anything there?” Brett pressed on. “Any gas chambers, barracks, station, anything?”
“No,” said Johnny. “Nothing but the cemetery. You’ll have to imagine the rest.”
They walked. The woods were dark, even at noon, and smelled of rotting plants, sappy pine needles, undergrowth. Chloe became afraid. If ever she might have had a nightmare about a death camp, she couldn’t have conceived of anything more frightening than walking four kilometers deep into the empty woods to a forgotten farm where nearly a million people had died.
“Where is everyone?” Denise asked. “Yesterday there were dozens of people at Sobibor.”
“Not here,” Johnny said. “I came here once in the middle of winter, and there was no one here then either.”
“Well, perhaps that’s because there’s nothing to see,” Brett said, not so gently.
“I disagree with you, Brett,” said Artie. “I strongly disagree.”
“You have to decide for yourself that question,” Johnny said. “It’s probably a philosophical one. Why do you walk up Via Dolorosa to Calvary? Is there something to see? Why do you go inside the Roman Colosseum? Anything there? Gettysburg?” he asked. “Now there’s a field for you. Is that all you see when you tour Gettysburg?”
“I get your point,” Brett said, amending. “But couldn’t they rebuild some of it so we could imagine it better?”
“They left it as the Germans left it,” Johnny said, “because they thought that would be more telling.”
“Who did you come with in the winter?” Chloe asked him.
“My father,” Johnny replied. “Everything was covered with deep snow. It was deathly quiet.”
“Like now.”
“Quieter. No birds. No insects. No other people but me and him. All you could hear was the dead.”
“Johnny, stop,” Yvette said. “You’re making us shiver.”
Chloe didn’t want to continue walking. She turned to glance at Mason slightly behind her, at Hannah and even at Blake, who kept his eyes away from her, wouldn’t look at her directly. Hannah was pale and slow, and definitely looked as if she didn’t want to continue walking. Blake had his arm around her. Mason caught up and squeezed Chloe’s hand. “We have railroad ties across our pond. We go there all the time.”
“It’s not this.”
They played there as children and teenagers, running on the tracks, pretending the train was just around the corner, and they had mere seconds to jump to safety. That wasn’t this. That was child’s play. Literally. They skipped on the ties. If you misstepped onto the pebbled sand, you lost. There, they balanced themselves on the rusty rails, pretending they were Olympic gymnasts. Not here. There was no rail here. The tracks had been long demolished. Only the symbols of tracks, ominous wide black ties, ran alongside the path they doggedly trod on. How far was four kilometers? Why did it feel like a day on the trains? Blake wasn’t taking any photos. Neither was anyone else. Everyone just wanted to get through it.
Johnny pointed ahead. Finally the clearing.
They walked out into an open field shaped like a polygon, the size of a football field. It was dotted with sharp jagged rocks of varying sizes, like an ocean shore at low tide. In the middle stood a much larger stone, a giant mushroom cleaved through the center. They stopped, huddled, took a drink of water, looked around while Johnny got out his maps. After a short break, too short by the sounds of Hannah’s under-the-breath whingeing, they resumed following Johnny, while he told them about what once stood on this ground.
“What you bear witness to here,” Johnny said, “are the best qualities of the German personality corrupted in the terrifying distorting mirror of Hitler’s Reich. Accuracy, attention to detail, frugality, cleanliness, all good traits in a nation of hardworking people, were instead applied by Hitler to a crime against mankind. The barracks they built right in this corner for their own living quarters were constructed in an orderly line, as if on a well-planned street. They planted birch trees along their walking paths for aesthetic pleasure and some shade. They carefully leveled the roads with white sand from the nearby quarry. They built comfortable laundry facilities for themselves with well-constructed steps leading to the basin. They even built small fountains for the woodland birds. They had a bakery, a barber, a storage shed, a fuel station. There were gardens, flowers, a little petting zoo! They played music, sang sentimental songs, took pictures of one another. Their natural inclination toward order, toward maps and plans and schematics, was worked out to the last detail.” Johnny smirked. “Except for small problems here and there,” he said. “For example, they didn’t have delousing facilities at Treblinka. They had to send the clothes they removed from the Jews to Majdanek for delousing with Zyklon B before shipping them off to Germany.”
“They didn’t have Zyklon B here?”
Johnny shook his head. “Only at Birkenau and Majdanek. Here they used carbon monoxide, the exhaust fumes from an internal combustion engine. The efficiency in Treblinka was such that the Germans were able to kill more than a thousand people at once. This tiny place whirred at maximum operation for only a few months in 1943, and yet with these limited facilities, no crematoria, and gas chambers much smaller than Auschwitz, they still managed to kill nearly a million people. Just think about the fury and single-mindedness with which they approached the task entrusted to them.”
“It’s impossible!” Artie exclaimed. “The logistics alone are impossible.”
“And yet.”
All Chloe wanted was to turn around and run back to the van. She clasped her flowers. She had promised her grandmother. Moody, crazy like a fox. She must have known what the children would see here before they grew up and became adults. As Chloe meandered through the jagged rocks to the large mushroom-shaped stone structure, she didn’t think the Poles needed to make it into a proper memorial. This graveyard almost without markers had a sure and absolute stamp of death in every knowing tree branch, in every falling needle, in every flattened ounce of its loamy soil.
Johnny caught up to Chloe and Mason. “To make the façade as real as they could,” Johnny told them, pointing to the edge of the field, “they built a fake train station, and spent extra time on it, so that the soon-to-die didn’t panic any more than they needed to. It was all about maintaining order. They painted a clock on the fake station, which permanently read six o’clock.” With his words, Johnny kept drawing for Chloe invisible things with material weight. “They painted words with destinations. Warsaw, Bialystok, Vilnius. The camp was small, as you see, and they mined the perimeter, and fenced it in, and then fenced off
separate sections within the camp. Such as the small cabin with a Red Cross flag on it, where the old and the sick and the weak were taken immediately and shot through the neck above the pit where a fire smoldered. Farther along the fence, only a few hundred feet away, concealed from everything else by fake shrubbery, were the excavation pits, where the ashes and bones of the burned were rolled in wheelbarrows to be buried. Where the Sonderkommandos lived, they fenced off that area, too.”
“Who were the Sonderkommandos?” Yvette asked. The rest of the group had caught up with Chloe and Mason.
“Good question,” said Johnny. “They were the unlucky Jews to whom fell the task of turning on the gas, of pulling the gold teeth out of their dead brothers, of removing the jewelry, of carrying the bodies one by one on stretchers to the raised platform onto which they placed them, and of throwing more wood on the fire underneath them.”
“What did the Germans do?”
“Supervised. They didn’t like to get their hands dirty. They hated uncleanliness.”
“What happened to the Sonderkommandos?”
“Burned with the rest. Replaced by new Sonderkommandos.”
They all stopped at a large stone monument with a crack in it like a schism.
Chloe looked around the flat, drab field, the distant trees. “Everything is out in the open,” Blake said. “I just don’t understand how they could have hidden what they were doing from the people they were killing. It seems so hard to hide the truth.” He seemed stuck on this particular point, the deception.
“In the long term, yes,” Johnny said. “But in the short term anyone can do it. As I said, they constructed ingenious fences. A barbed-wire fence, camouflaged with long branches of pine. The fence was six feet tall, so when you were naked and stooped in shame, your eyes to the ground, you didn’t see the fire grates and the excavation pit. The Germans placed a flowerpot in front of the entrance to the gas chamber. There was a guy, an SS standing guard, whose sole job was to make sure the pot always had fresh flowers in it, to make the entrance to the showers more hospitable. The Jews were told that after their shower, they would get a hot meal and a ticket out. Chloe, do you want to put down your flowers here, on the place where the flowerpot was?” Johnny asked. “We’re standing over that spot. We know this because a Treblinka survivor built a very good model of the camp, which is now in the Holocaust Museum in Kigali. They’re hoping to move the model here, if ever they open a museum.”