number of newcomers had to be quickly liquidated, the Germans cancelled
those speeches as needless.
Boards saying “tailors”, “cobblers”, “carpenters”, etc. were displayed in
certain spots on the square to convince the Jews that segregation according
to vocations was really taking place on the arrival square for the purpose of
sending vocational groups to work. Obviously, no such segregation has ever
been conducted.
Instead, the kapos quickly arrange the men into rows of 10 and order
them to take off their shoes, strip naked, and prepare for shower. Each man
is allowed to take a piece of soap and documents. In the meantime, the sorting-
square workers carry the laid-down clothes to their facility. Women and
children have to strip naked too. This is when the final act of the Treblinka
tragedy takes place. The terrorised mass of men, women and children sets out
on their last walk to death. A group of women and children walks first, incessantly
rushed forward with blows and nudges dealt by the escorting Germans,
who are holding whips. The escort hurries the group faster and faster. The
blows falling on the women, who are mad from fear and pain, are increasingly
powerful. The screams and moans of the women and the curses of the
Germans pierce the silence of the forest. The people finally realise they are
walking to death. The boss himself, a whip in hand, appears at the entrance
to house of death No. 1 and in cold blood rushes the women inside. The floor
of the chambers is slippery. The people slip and collapse but cannot get up
because many other victims, also rushed in by force, collapse on them. The
boss throws little children over the women’s heads into the chambers. When
the execution chambers become full to the brim, the door is hermetically
closed and the people begin to suffocate with vapour coming out of numerous
holes in the pipes. The stifled screams, initially coming from the inside,
slowly die out and after 15 minutes the execution is completed.
Now it is the gravediggers’ turn. Screaming and cursing, the German
supervisors rush the gravediggers to work, which consists in removing corpses
from the execution chambers. The gravediggers stand on the platform opposite
the hatches. The hatches open up, but none of the bodies fall out. The
vapour has fused all the corpses into one solid mass, stuck together with the
sweat of the murdered victims. In their pre-mortal agony, before breathing
their last, the people became interlocked in one big macabre tangle of arms,
legs and trunks. To enable the gravediggers to remove individual corpses,
