Russia at war 1941-1945

—and it was completely dark there, except for a small skylight in the ceiling and the spyhole in the door—the process of gassing began. First some hot air was pumped in

from the ceiling and then the pretty pale-blue crystals of Cyclon were showered down on the people, and in the hot wet air they rapidly evaporated. In anything from two to ten minutes everybody was dead... There were six concrete boxes—gas-chambers—side by

side. "Nearly two thousand people could be disposed of here simultaneously," one of the guides said.

But what thoughts passed through these people's minds during those first few minutes while the crystals were falling; could anyone still believe that this humiliating process of being packed into a box and standing there naked, rubbing backs with other naked

people, had anything to do with disinfection?

At first it was all very hard to take in, without an effort of the imagination. There were a number of very dull-looking concrete structures which, if their doors had been wider, might anywhere else have been mistaken for a row of nice little garages. But the doors—

the doors! They were heavy steel doors, and each had a heavy steel bolt. And in the

middle of the door was a spyhole, a circle, three inches in diameter composed of about a hundred small holes. Could the people in their death agony see the SS-man's eye as he watched them? Anyway, the SS-man had nothing to fear: his eye was well-protected by

the steel netting over the spyhole. And, like the proud maker of reliable safes, the maker of the door had put his name round the spyhole: "Auert, Berlin". Then a touch of blue on the floor caught my eye. It was very faint, but still legible. In blue chalk someone had scribbled the word "vergast" and had drawn crudely above it a skull and crossbones. I had never seen this word before, but it obviously meant "gassed"—and not merely

"gassed" but, with that eloquent little prefix ver, "gassed out". That's this job finished, and now for the next lot. The blue chalk came into motion when there was nothing but a heap of naked corpses inside. But what cries, what curses, what prayers perhaps, had been uttered inside that gas chamber only a few minutes before? Yet the concrete walls were thick, and Herr Auert had done a wonderful job, so probably no one could hear

anything from outside. And even if they did, the people in the camp knew what it was all about.

It was here, outside Bad und Desinfektion II, in the side-lane leading into the central avenue, that the corpses were loaded into lorries, covered with tarpaulins, and carted to the crematorium at the other end of the camp, about half-a-mile away. Between the two there were dozens of barracks, painted the same soft green. Some had notice-boards

outside, others had not. Thus, there was an Effekten Kammer and a Frauen-Bekleidungskammer; here the victims' luggage and the women's clothes were sorted out, before they were sent to the central Lublin warehouse, and then on to Germany.

At the other end of the camp, there were enormous mounds of white ashes; but as you

looked closer, you found that they were not perfect ashes: for they had among them

masses of small human bones: collar bones, finger bones, and bits of skull, and even a small femur, which can only have been that of a child. And, beyond these mounds there was a sloping plain, on which there grew acres and acres of cabbages. They were large luxuriant cabbages, covered with a layer of white dust. As I heard somebody explaining:

"Layer of manure, then layer of ashes, that's the way it was done... These cabbages are all grown on human ashes... The SS-men used to cart most of the ashes to their model farm, some distance away. A well-run farm; the SS-men liked to eat these overgrown cabbages, and the prisoners ate these cabbages, too, although they knew that they would almost certainly be turned into cabbages themselves before long..."

Next we came to the crematorium. It was a great big structure of six enormous furnaces and above them rose a large factory chimney. The wooden structure that used to cover the crematorium, as well as the adjoining wooden house, where Obersturmbannführer

Mussfeld, the "Director of the Crematorium" used to live, had been burned down.

Mussfeld had lived there among the stench of burned and burning bodies, and took a

personal interest in the proceedings. But the furnaces stood there, large, enormous. There were still piles of coke on the one side; on the other side were the furnace doors where the corpses went in... The place stank, not violently, but it stank of decomposition. I looked down. My shoes were white with human dust, and the concrete floor around the