far as Warsaw in boxcars attached to each transport. The bricks were loaded
by Jewish labourers at the Umschlagplatz in Warsaw. According to an eyewitness’s
testimony, the interior of this building is as follows: a three-metre-
wide corridor divides it in half and on each side there are five rooms or
chambers, each chamber approximately two metres high. Each chamber is
approximately 35 square metres.
The execution chambers are windowless but they have doors to the corridor
and a type of hatch in their exterior walls. Next to those hatches are platforms,
slightly concave, similar to large kneading troughs. The labourers fixed
pipes there for the steam to come through. It is to be house of [26] death No. 2.
The forest road (9) leads past this building and runs along its western
wall, among the trees in the forest, to come to an end by the next building
(12) – house of death No. 1 (14), perpendicular to house of death No. 2. It
is a brick building, much bigger than the other one. It consists of only three
chambers and a boiler room. Along its other wall is a corridor, from which the
chambers can be accessed through the doors. The exterior wall of the chambers
is equipped with hatches (not long ago there were doors, but they were
changed for hatches for utilitarian considerations). Here too there is a platform
shaped like a kneading trough on the level of the hatches (15). The boiler
room (15a) is adjacent to the building. Inside the boiler room is a large boiler to
produce vapour, which goes into the chambers through the pipes with a sufficient
number of holes running through the death chambers. When this
deathly machinery operates the doors and hatches are hermetically sealed.
The floor in the chambers is lined with terracotta tiles, which become very
slippery when covered with water. Next to the boiler room is a well, the only
one in the entire Treblinka II area. Near the death house, on the south side,
beyond the barbed wire entanglements and the fence, is a camp for gravediggers,
who live in a barrack (19), next to the kitchen buildings. There are
two watchtowers (17, 20) on both sides of this camp. The remainder of the
Treblinka II area has been designated as the burial site of the murdered victims.
An enormous cemetery (22, 23 and 24) already constitutes a large part of
the area. Initially, the graves were dug by Poles employed in the camp. Later
on, with the intensification of the murder activity and increased demand
for pits, special digging machines were brought and they dig graves day
and night. Powered by diesel engines, their clatter is a typical sound of the
Treblinka II murder site.
