Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience

In 1972, Sereny meets Berek Rojzman, another survivor of Treblinka, in the suburbs of Warsaw where he lives with his wife, a gentile. While many other Jews in Poland were immediately victimized by antisemitic laws, Rojzman and his first wife and family found ways to skirt restrictions and live a relatively normal life. Despite their ingenuity, the Nazis shipped them to Treblinka in November 1942. Berek Rojzman survived while his family perished; a friend working in the undressing barracks advocated for him. Subsequently, he survived by trading with the Ukrainian guards, who, he says, all wanted something.

Sereny meets another survivor of Treblinka, Joe Siedlecki, in upstate New York where he lives with his wife, a German who converted to Judaism when they married. Siedlecki was a soldier in the Polish army who became a POW before being shipped to Treblinka. Siedlecki’s account complicates the sharp distinction between good and bad people in the camp. There were sadists among the German guards—such as Kurt Franz, who survivors agree was the worst of the SS—but Siedlecki claims the Polish and Ukrainian guards were generally more brutal. Additionally, he asserts that some of the Jewish Kapos—prisoners picked by the SS to oversee the others—were as bad as the Germans. Siedlecki was selected to work while his family was killed because he was tall and strong. Siedlecki is adamant that he never saw Stangl hurt anyone; in his position, Stangl didn’t have to do such “dirty” work. That being said, Siedlecki is certain Stangl was present when guards beat or killed prisoners.

During the peak period of transports between October and January 1942— during which time the Nazis gassed around 20,000 Jews per day—the thousand or so Jews working in Treblinka dressed and ate well from the plundered goods. Glazar describes how differently they lived from those in concentration camps during this phase of the camp: “I usually wore jodhpurs, a velvet jacket, brown boots, a shirt, a silk cravat” (541). The prisoners obtained clothes and food by secretly stealing them off the transports or by trading money or jewels—which the Ukrainian guards didn’t have access to—for food the SS allowed Ukrainians to steal off trains. Outsiders would also come to trade through the camp’s fences, sometimes with the Ukrainian guards and sometimes with the Jewish prisoners.

While they did not want for food or clothing, the Jews working at Treblinka were always subject to the murderous whims of the guards. According to Glazar, it was important to try to look clean and like the guards–though not too much like them–to avoid arbitrary punishment or death. Those working in Treblinka became inured to the horrors surrounding them such that only extraordinary events affected them. That December, the SS began burning corpses after previously burying them in lime pits. On the night the guards started the fires, Glazar remembers being overwhelmed by the sight of the giant flames and the sound of a young accordionist and opera singer (whom the SS had selected from the prisoners) playing a song for the guards.

In the fall of 1942, the SS began allowing the working Jews a 30-minute lunch break, during which they began talking about a rebellion. When the camp opened, the Jews working at Treblinka hid 25 prisoners in one of the departing trains to get a warning out. Some of the workers began trying to escape; Franz executed those caught and promised to kill ten prisoners for every person who tried to escape from thereon.

Though their fates would ultimately be the same, Western European Jews were treated vastly differently than Eastern European Jews upon arrival to Treblinka. Western European Jews hadn’t experienced pogroms as Eastern European Jews had and thus were more likely to resist violence. Consequently, the SS went to great lengths to disguise the camp’s true purpose to Western European Jews. Stangl ordered the disembarkation point to be made up like a real railway station, and the guards politely asked the prisoners to disembark. These methods lulled the Western Europeans into thinking Treblinka was merely a resettlement center. It was only after the guards asked them to undress for a decontamination shower that they dropped the act, using whips to drive them, naked, into the gas chambers.

The Holocaust’s architects knew such deceptions were unnecessary to keep Eastern European Jews compliant because they were accustomed to the violence of pogroms. The Ukrainian guards, backed by the SS, whipped them out of the trains directly to their deaths.

The Western European Jews had more in common with their German guards than they did with the Eastern European Jews. Those from the west were generally educated, well-off people who identified more with their country than their religion. In contrast, those from Russia and Eastern Poland were poor, uneducated, and both religiously and culturally Jewish. The SS exploited this difference by selecting mainly Western European Jews for work.

After months in Treblinka, Stangl stopped seeing the people being driven with whips as people and saw them instead as cattle. He avoided the undressing barracks completely; Sereny suspects this was so that he wouldn’t see the transition from person to animal affected by the undressing.

Unlike Stangl, his adjutant Franz was sadistic; however, Stangl did nothing to curb his sadism. Franz whipped people to death, trained a dog to attack people’s genitals, and forced prisoners to race and fight to the death. According to Suchomel, Stangl only cared about having the camp run efficiently. This meant that even after Hitler forbade torture in the camps, Stangl didn’t stop the guards from using whips because they were essential to quashing any resistance, and he didn’t want to interfere with the efficiency of the killing.

Despite Stangl’s efforts not to see the prisoners as human, some occasionally forced him to see them as individuals. He was impressed and ashamed when a slave maid, Tchechia Mandel, misinterpreted a question of his as a sexual advance and refused him. (Sereny notes that no one she interviews from Treblinka ever saw Stangl pursue women.) Despite the impression she made on him, Stangl didn’t save her when Franz sent her to work in the death camp as punishment when her lover, Dr. Choronzycki, attacked him with a surgical knife.

Stangl made one prisoner, Blau, who he knew from Austria, the Oberkapo of the Jews. Blau was an informant to the SS and, according to Suchomel, tried to retain his position by being more brutal with his whip than the Ukrainians. One day, Blau’s grandfather arrived on a transport. In Stangl’s telling, Blau begged for his life; Stangl refused because of the man’s age. Instead, he allowed Blau to feed his grandfather before he was killed in the Lazarett, the fake field hospital, instead of the gas chambers. Stangl frames this as a magnanimous act.

According to the survivors of Treblinka, Dr. Choronzycki played a big role in planning the revolt. After Franz found gold in the doctor’s possession, the doctor attacked Franz, who fled. Dr. Choronzycki poisoned himself before Franz could return for retribution. Franz beat his lifeless body and threatened to kill all the Jews who worked as goldsmiths if they didn’t share information. None of them did, and he didn’t kill any of them because their work processing plundered gold was too valuable.