cold, which fills all intestines and nerves, stifling all willingness to rebel and
fight. Each night brings a number of new victims of frost and hunger – they
seem the most fortunate ones from among the crowd of one thousand people.
No, for these “camp inmates” Treblinka means just a formal ending to
the process of gradually advancing death.
The daily meal is one big nightmare. The camp inmates (babies, children,
mothers, the elderly, and cripples) eat the food, a mixture of cooked potato and
swede peels, from pig troughs using their hands. The 21 days of compulsory
stay in the transit camps kill the victims’ instinct for life and their desire to
fight. Typhus, dysentery, cholera, mental diseases, and the watchtowers cause
a marked decline in the number of people transported to Treblinka. Madness,
but a methodical and logical one – Hitlerism.
[75] The hospital in Treblinka. Treblinka has its own hospital and its own
“orderlies”. The horrible hospital is worthy of the camp where it is located. The
German management entrusts the people unable to work (sic!), the elderly,
the infirm, the sick and children without carers, to the Jewish “orderlies”,
who, by the way, wear armbands and the sign of the Red Cross. The latter are
to take the former to the “hospital”. It is a strange hospital. An enormous pit
surrounded with evergreen trees, with vapours belching out – a product of
the activity of various caustic substances – and wisps of smoke coming from
burning waste and rubbish. The people are escorted to the pit. Before death the
victims must strip naked (why, the Jewish clothes and money should not go
to waste). They then have to stand in a row by the pit. A shot in the head and
a kick in the stomach conclude the “treatment procedure”. It very often happens
that the victims fall into the grave with a head or neck wound and that
they burn alive in the “hospital” pit. Such incidents were typical during the
period of destruction of the Jews of Warsaw. Suffice to say that all the patients
of the Jewish hospital in Warsaw who were “resettled” on 12 September this
year concluded their “treatment” in this hospital.
cUtile cum dulce.c⁷⁵⁶ In line with Treblinka’s utilitarian objectives the
Germans freely dispose not only of Jews’ property, but also of their bodies.
What this means is the confirmed fact that the Germans cut out the dead
Jews’ body parts, prepare them in a special way and then send them to army
hospitals for transplantations during surgical operations.
756 c-c (Lat.) The useful with the agreeable.
