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Treblinka Death Camp Survivor during World War 2 

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Treblinka Death Camp Survivor during World War 2 

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Treblinka's Last Witness: Documentary on Samuel Willenberg Story

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Treblinka's Last Witness: Documentary on Samuel Willenberg Story

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[music] Richard Rhodes: The death camps were something very special.

Michael Berenbaum: What Treblinka represented was an assembly line whose end product were dead Jews.

Richard: There were millions upon millions of Jews.

Christopher Browning: For Hitler, the Jews were a subhuman group.

There can't be Jews in the German Garden of Eden.

Richard: Once they decided the only thing they could do was to kill them, then they had a very large problem indeed.

[music] Yehuda Bauer: The percentage of survivors from Treblinka was zero, zero something percent of the people who were brought there.

Michael: Treblinka was total.

The devastation was complete.

[music] Richard: What they were doing was criminal.

That's why it was kept secret.

Michael: Everyone has a story, and everyone is an attempt to make sure that the memory of what happened is not left to oblivion.

[music] [marching music] [V.O.]

In 1933, Adolf Hitler seized control of Germany.

With pomp and ceremony, Hitler and his henchmen instilled in the German people an intense feeling of nationalism.

Convincing them that the Jews were responsible for all their trouble.

Richard: Hitler believed in the vast conspiracy theory that the Jews ran all of the powerful organizations of the world.

They were people who needed to be removed because they were, in the eyes of these German leaders, directly dangerous to Germany and to the German military.

[chanting] Christopher: Many Germans shared a broader kind of antipathy.

There were too many Jewish doctors, too many Jewish lawyers, too many Jewish businessmen, too many Jewish journalists, too many Jewish bankers.

The Nazis then could play upon this broader sense that the Jews had overstepped.

The Jews had become inordinantly influential.

Yehuda Bauer: The Jews were an obvious scapegoat.

They were a small minority.

They were powerless, and no possibility of resistance.

They were well known.

And they were strange.

[cantor singing] Michael: There were originally some 525,000 Jews in Germany.

Between 1933 and 1938, the policy of Germany was to be rid of the Jews to make Germany what they called Judenfrei, free of Jews.

They were regarded as a cancer on German society.

And just in the way we might take out a cancerous tumor, the idea was to get rid of them.

Germany reasoned that if it made Jewish life in Germany impossible, the Jews would leave.

Christopher: Getting Jews to leave Germany required ever intensifying persecution to persuade them that they had no future there.

[singing] [speaking German] [chanting] [glass breaking] [explosion] [music] Michael: You essentially had six or seven times the number of Jews living in Poland as living in Nazi Germany.

Part of the reason was that Poland had been home for Jews for so long.

Jews had lived in Poland for hundreds of years.

It had not always been a pleasant hundreds of years, but Poland was home.

Warsaw had Yiddish cinema.

It was the capital of Jewish films.

It was by far the most influential Jewish city in all of Europe.

[music] Christopher: Conquest is built into the Hitler program alongside getting rid of the Jews.

Michael: Germany kept expanding.

150,000 Jews had left Germany in 1938.

One night in March, 1938, they invaded Austria.

They incorporated Austria, and all of a sudden they were the home of 200,000 more Jews.

When they incorporated the Bohemian Moravia, the elements of what were Czechoslovakia, 90,000 more Jews came under the control.

When they invaded Poland, and remember they first invaded only the western part of Poland, the Soviet Union invaded the eastern part of Poland.

All of a sudden, they had two million Jews coming under control, and therefore if your desire is to get rid of the Jews to make Germany and German environs judenrein, and everywhere you invade you keep incorporating Jews, it's a strategy that can't work.

Christopher: With the conquest of Poland, almost immediately Hitler is beginning to envisage, in a sense remaking the demographic map of Europe.

Various proposals begin to come forward that propose some form of European-wide ethnic cleansing.

[marching music] [music] Christopher: What they envisage is that major parts of Poland are going to be annexed to Germany.

They will be Germanized, which means Poles and Jews have to be gotten rid of.

And those Poles and Jews will be dumped into central Poland, which will become a colony the general government, and hopefully expelled beyond that.

Richard: The moving of Jews into ghettos in Eastern Europe, I think had always been conceived as a stage and process toward killing them.

They couldn't process everybody at once, but for a number of different reasons, Jews in places like Warsaw, Poland and elsewhere were for awhile ghetto-ized into a region, the Warsaw ghetto being the most well known, I think, and allowed to live a sort of half existence.

The food rations were cut.

Their fuel supply was cut.

They were essentially being worked to death as much as possible.

Christopher: These reservations for Jews are not for their health.

They are to not only remove them from some place else, but to decimate the population as well.

So there is a murderous component to these expulsion plans from the beginning even if they aren't yet the final solution, which is systemic complete and total extermination.

Michael: The ghetto was a place to contain Jews until a decision was made and the infrastructure was built to do something with the Jews.

[music] [V.O.]

On the 22nd of June 1941, with four million men along the 2,000 mile Russian border, Germany attacked.

175 divisions of young German soldiers poured into Russia, driving toward Moscow.

Christopher: The campaign goes very well.

And in the first four weeks, they are 2/3 of the way to Moscow.

They are at the point where they expect very quick victory.

Richard: When the German army invaded a country, the idea was that it was going to move on.

Someone had to move into place to pacify and control the areas behind the lines.

And this was the job of the Einsatz group.

[music] Michael: And their task was to go into village hamlet cities and towns, round up the Jews, the gypsies and the Soviet commissars, march them out of town to a valley, to a gulf, to a place that had been, had predug graves and to shoot them one by one by one, town by town, village by village, bullet by bullet, men, women and children.

[tense music] [gunshot] [music] Michael: Warsaw was the largest ghetto in all of Europe.

At its peak, it may have contained as many as 500,000 Jews.

It was located in the poorest district of Warsaw.

It had 2.4% of the territory of Warsaw and more than 30% of its population.

[music] Michael: The one thing you were sure was tomorrow would be worse than yesterday.

And to give you an idea of how difficult conditions are, the death ratio in the Warsaw ghetto in 1941 was more than one in ten.

Before a bullet was fired, before anybody had been systematically killed, more than ten percent of the population was dying, dying of starvation, dying of depression, dying of despair, dying of disease, dying of malnutrition and dying because they no longer had a reason to live.

And then the Holocaust took a very different turn, and Treblinka's a central part of this turn.

If instead of sending mobile killers to stationary victims you reverse the process, you make the victims mobile and you send them to stationary killing centers, then what you have is you have a process that can endure and that can endure over a long period of time with less personnel.

You have industrialized killing.

[train crossing signal] Michael: Treblinka was situated on the Warsaw to Bialystok rail line.

Treblinka, it's the middle of nowhere essentially.

It's great virtue as a location was that it was on this railroad line.

But as a place, it's even scarcely populated today.

Richard: So if you're going to bring people to a place to kill them in large numbers, you probably want to put the camps out somewhere where nobody could much see what's going on.

And Treblinka was in between major cities but out in a forest by itself.

[music] [music] Christopher: Some people are selected from labor.

Because there are deaths among the workforce, a few people may be chosen to become workers in the camp itself.

But that's a very, very small number.

Richard: The death camps were something very special.

There was no keeping people around in barracks.

They got off the train.

They were run through a tunnel to a gas chamber.

They were killed.

The bodies dragged out.

And the next day they started over.

It was very, very swift.

The whole thing took less than two hours.

[music] Yehuda: This was the first in human history that an industrial establishment was set up that produced something that had never been produced before in every human corpses.

Christopher: What they'd realized they can do is create special camps near to the ghettos where the largest populations are.

You can shift people all over Europe by rail.

And you can equip these camps with gassing facilities, and create what amounts to a factory of death where you murder people on an assembly line basis.

Richard: People were brought in by train in the morning, processed.

Yehuda: They were ordered to strip naked, and then they were driven separately, women, children, men, actually men first and then women, children, through a road or a path.

Richard: They went down this path.

And that's where the gas chambers were.

The doors were open.

They were pushed in.

Doors were closed.

And they were killed, and dragged out the other side.

Christopher: And then the bodies are taken out by Jewish workers to the burning pits behind the gas chambers.

Yehuda: The burial performed in Treblinka was holes, huge holes with huge numbers of bodies.

This is totally unprecedented.

This creation of killing camps, which were organized according to modern capitalistic industrial principles, and the more they produced family corpses, the better they were.

Michael: What Treblinka represented was an assembly line whose end product were dead Jews, but also whose possessions were confiscated, whose clothes were recycled, whose gold from dental teeth was taken, whose money and whose possessions were all taken away.

The clothes were shipped back to Warsaw from Treblinka, and then cleaned up by Jewish forced laborers and then sent back to Germany for utilization.

Richard: It was processed and sent back and given to SS widows and their children.

Famously at one of the death camps, a whole barracks full of shoes.

[music] A camp like Treblinka which is going to kill close to a million people within one year is going to have a staff of 30 SS men, about 100, 120 Ukrainian guards and about 800 work Jews.

That compared to the thousands of people committed to killing by bullets in the Soviet Union.

This is an astonishing progression in efficiency.

Michael: What you wanted in the Command and Control Center was somebody who could organize the system in such a way that it worked effectively, efficiently, ruthlessly.

Christopher: And this is when Franz Stangl is sent to build additional gas chambers and so Treblinka undergoes a significant expansion of gas chamber capacity in September of '42 and is reorganized by Stangl.

Christopher: In prison, he gave a long series of interviews to the journalist, Gitta Sereny, saying of course all this happened without any volition on his part.

He's a passive character.

And this is often how these stories are told by the perpetrator.

All these things happened to him.

This is his fate.

And he never lifts a finger to have it happen.

And so she says, "Well, if that's being the case, why of all the death camp commandants did you have to carry out your task so well that you were considered the best?"

And he said, "Of course I had to do that."

It was self-evident to him that if he was a commandant he was going to be the best commandant.

Knowing full well this meant killing nearly a million people in the course of 12 months.

[music] Michael: Gitta Sereny asked Stangl the question, "Why do you dehumanize the Jews if you're going to kill them anyhow?"

"Why do you spend so much time on degradation?"

And his response which was fast, and he said, "Made it easier."

If you have dehumanized the person and they don't share the same humanity with you, you don't regard them as fellow human beings.

[music] [singing] [singing] Michael: The juxtaposition of music with the macabre nature of the killing process was part of this brutal imagination also part of the degradation, the demoralization of the victims.

[singing] [sad music] [music] [cannon shot] Richard: Beginning in 1943 when it was increasingly clear that Germany was losing the war, when the Soviet Union had turned the tide and now was advancing in the other direction toward Germany, there was not so much a reduction in the killing.

In fact, by then, the killing was at its maximum because they had devised places all over Europe to continue it.

But they began cleaning up the mess.

They began digging up the bodies and burning them.

They were scrambling because they realized they were going to be held accountable for this monstrosity that they had perpetrated.

Information seeping into the people who worked as staff at the death camps and about the progress of the war was a two-edged sword.

It meant on the one hand that eventually there was the possibility this was all going to be over, and on the other hand, it meant that it was likely that the Germans weren't going to let them live.

They knew far too much.

Christopher: Traffic into the camps is declining very rapidly, and they begin to fear that soon the camps will be liquidated and that they in turn are going to be killed.

They are living on limited time.

Michael: If they stayed in the camp and did nothing, they were going to die.

Consequently, they decided to act.

[music] [music] Michael: They tried to storm the gates, but it happened in confusion because somebody acted precipitously.

Yehuda: Many died trying to get to the fences or on the fences or in the fences.

[music] Michael: They thought that they were going to all escape.

It would be a chance for everybody to escape.

[music] The problem was to survive then in the forest, which was very difficult because, of course, the Germans immediately sent out search parties, and they killed most of the people who fled.

There was nowhere to go.

Nowhere to go.

So what does Samuel do?

He goes back to a ghetto because in one sense it's the only place that he can be in any way safe.

[music] Michael: After the Treblinka uprising, Treblinka was closed.

That's the moment which the camp really ceased to operate as a death camp.

The Soviets were advancing from the east, and so they destroyed Treblinka as much as they could, eliminating all the evidence anyone might find.

Richard: They began cleaning up the mess.

They dug up hundreds and thousands of bodies in all conditions of decomposition and threw them on the fire.

Michael: They burned them in pits, very often on railroad tracks to be able to create the fire underneath them.

They decided to eradicate all memory of Treblinka, so what they did is they plowed it under.

Richard: Laid down a layer of soil and planted trees.

[music] [gunfire] [gunfire] [music] [music] [music] My parents never bought any German products.

They never traveled to Germany.

They didn't want to hear the German language.

So at first I told them that they have to ask my father for permission.

Architect Orit Willenberg.

Orit: The building itself, it's six modules of stone to represent the six million Jews that were exterminated during the holocaust.

And through all the building, we have a Jerusalem stone wall, which says, "A piece of Jerusalem in the heart of Berlin."

Orit: He did a series of sculptures which really burst out from him.

He couldn't stop.

He was working day and night.

He was eating with the sculptures, sleeping with the sculptures until the whole series came out of him.

Orit: It keeps him digging more and more into his memories and into his mind not to forget every tiny small little detail of what happened there.

And it's his mission in life, and I think that maybe it's mostly what keeps him alive and keeps him so lively and so focused is the fact that he feels that his mission is to transfer to all the next generations what were his experiences and what actually happened there because, you know, no one ever can ever believe that something like this existed.

Orit: What we have in mind is that there should be a place where people when they come in, they should get some kind of an explanation of what really actually happened.

And then after they get this explanation then they can walk out and see the area.

[music] This is a cursed land.

There are corpses, bodies, ghosts, terrible things that remind us what happened.

I believe that if you put all those sculptures together in that kind of space, it can really tell the story.

[music] [music] Announcer: You can find out more information about this topic by visiting our website at wlrn.org/treblinka.

Treblinka's Last Witness is available on dvd for $25 plus shipping and handling.

To order a copy online, please visit shop.wlrn.org.

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A first-hand account of life as a Jewish prisoner of the Treblinka death camp.

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Samuel Willenberg was a Jewish prisoner who was forced to work in the Treblinka extermination camp. He was born on February 16, 1923, and passed away on February 19, 2016.

Samuel arrived at the camp at 19 years old and was forced to assist in the mass murder of men, women, and children.

Samuel was one of 150 Jewish prisoners who planned an escape from the camp. They stole weapons and set the camp on fire as they fled into the woods at night. Samuel was shot in the leg but kept running. After escaping, he was able to remain inconspicuous in the countryside due to his non-Jewish features. He eventually made his way to Warsaw, where he joined the Polish underground and fought against the Nazis in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.

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Kalman Taigman was a former Jewish prisoner who worked in the Treblinka camp as a slave laborer. He was born on December 24, 1923, and passed away on July 27, 2012. At 19 years old, he was taken from the Warsaw Ghetto with his mother and transported to the Treblinka camp. He arrived at the camp in July 1942. Kalman was separated from his mother when they were told that women should go to the left and men to the right. That was the last time he saw her, as she was taken to the gas chambers.

Kalman remembered being herded into cattle cars and taken to Treblinka in October 1942, where he had an encounter that saved him from dying with the others. When the train stopped, he saw someone familiar who told him, 'Tell them you're a bricklayer.' Then an SS guard asked where the bricklayer was, and Kalman pointed to himself. He was taken as a slave laborer at Treblinka. He recalled these moments as hellish and horrifying. He was one of the Jewish prisoners forced to dig up mass graves and burn the bodies. On August 2, 1943, he escaped with other Jewish prisoners, fleeing into the woods at night. After running for 15 minutes, he looked back and saw everything burning, feeling an overwhelming sense of disbelief that he had made it out. He avoided capture and hid in the Polish countryside for nearly a year after escaping.

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After World War 2, Samuel made his way to Israel, where he settled permanently and raised a family. He became a surveyor in Israel’s housing ministry and memorialized his experiences through bronze sculptures and drawings. Samuel and Kalman remained good friends, as they had shared similar experiences and wanted to continue telling the world about Treblinka. Samuel passed away on February 16, 2016, at the age of 93.

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April - 16. April 1943. (Photo: National Archive, courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives.)

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 Jews being taken from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka camp

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 Jews being taken from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka camp

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The Germans deported approximately 265,000 Jews from Warsaw to Treblinka and killed around 35,000 Jews inside the ghetto during the operation.

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"There was death, just death, God must have been on holiday. I looked for Him, but there was only beautiful Polish sky"

This quote from Samuel expresses his overwhelming sense of despair and abandonment during the Holocaust. He explains that the constant presence of death made it feel as though there was no sign of mercy, and the only contrast to human cruelty was the calm nature of the "beautiful Polish sky."

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"It was hell, absolute hell. A normal man cannot imagine how a living person could have lived through it - killers, natural-born killers, who without a trace of remorse, just murdered every little thing."

Kalman says this to express the unimaginable horror he endured during the Holocaust. He describes the Nazis as inhuman to emphasize the disbelief that such cruelty could be inflicted on people.

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Treblinka was a Nazi death camp in occupied Poland, operating from July 23, 1942. It consisted of two sections Treblinka I, a forced labor camp and Treblinka II, an extermination camp where an estimated 870,000 people of mostly Jews but also Romani being murdered. Victims were killed immediately upon arrival often in gas chambers, with no registration or forced labor for most. At its peak the camp killed up to 15,000 people a day. Strong young men were sometimes spared temporarily to assist with labor at the camp. On August 2, 1943, around 150 prisoners launched a revolt, setting fires and escaping into nearby woods. The Nazis knocked down the camp afterward and built a farmhouse over it to cover up the genocide.

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After the war, Kalman made his way to Israel, where he lived for the rest of his life. He built a family and a career running a successful import business. In 1960, Kalman took part in the sensational trial of Adolf Eichmann, where he and other Holocaust survivors confronted Eichmann. Eichmann was later convicted of crimes against the Jewish people and hanged in 1962. Kalman and Samuel remained close friends, as they were among the last two survivors of Treblinka, and they continued to speak about the horrors of the camp until Kalman's passing on July 27, 2012, at the age of 88.