Russia at war 1941-1945

ovens was strewn with parts of charred human skeletons. Here was a whole chest with its ribs, here a piece of skull, here a lower jaw with a molar on either side, and nothing but sockets in between. Where had the false teeth gone? To the side of the furnaces was a large high concrete slab, shaped like an operating table. Here a specialist—a medical man perhaps?—examined every corpse before it went into the oven, and extracted any gold

fillings, which were then sent to Dr Walter Funk at the Reichsbank...

Somebody was explaining the details of the whole mechanism; the furnaces were made

of fibreproof brick, and the temperature had always to be maintained at 1,700°

centigrade; and there was an engineer called Tellener who was an expert in charge of maintaining the right temperature. But the corroded condition of some of the doors

showed that the temperature had been increased above normal to make the corpses burn more quickly. The normal capacity of the whole installation was 2,000 corpses a day, but sometimes there were more corpses than that to deal with, and there were some special days, like the great Jew-extermination day of November 3, 1943, when 20,000 people—

men, women and children—were killed; it was impossible to gas them all that day; so

most of them had been shot and buried in a wood some distance away. On other

occasions many corpses were burned outside the crematorium on enormous funeral pyres soaked in petrol; these pyres would smoulder for weeks and fill the air with a stench...

Standing in front of the great crematorium, with human remains scattered on the ground, one began to listen to all these details with a kind of dull indifference. The "industrial report" was becoming unreal in its enormity...

Besides the charred remains of Mussfeld's house, there lay piles of large black cans, like enormous cocktail shakers, marked "Buchenwald". They were urns and had been brought from that other concentration camp. People from Lublin who had lost a relative at

Maidanek, somebody said, would pay substantial sums to the SS-men for the victim's

remains. It was another loathsome SS racket. Needless to say, the ashes with which the cocktail shakers were filled were nobody's ashes in particular.

Some distance away from the crematorium, a trench twenty or thirty yards long had been re-opened and, looking down through the fearful stench, I could see hundreds of naked corpses, many with bullet-holes at the back of their skulls. Most of them were men with shaved heads; it was said that these had been Russian war prisoners.

I had seen enough, and hastened to join Colonel Grosz, who was waiting beside the car on the road. The stench was still pursuing me; it now seemed to permeate everything—

the dusty grass beside the barbed wire fence, and the red poppies that were naively

growing in the midst of all this.

Grosz and I waited there for the rest of the party to join us. A Polish youngster with tattered clothes and a torn cap, and barefooted, came up and talked to us. He was about eleven, but talked of the camp with a curious nonchalance, with that nil admirari that had become his outlook on fife after living for two or three years in the immediate proximity of the Death Camp... This boy had seen everything, at the ages of nine, and ten and

eleven.

"A lot of people in Lublin," he said, "lost somebody here. In our village people were very worried, because we knew what was going on in the camp, and the Germans threatened

to destroy the village and kill everybody in case we talked too much. Don't know why they should have bothered," the boy said with a shrug, "everybody in Lublin knew anyway." And he recounted a few things he had seen; he had seen ten prisoners being beaten to death; he had seen files of prisoners carrying stones, and had seen those who collapsed being killed with pickaxes by the SS-men. He had heard an old man screaming while he was being chewed up by police dogs... And, looking across the fields of

cabbages growing on human ashes, he said, almost with a touch of admiration:

"Everything is growing well here—cabbages, and turnips and cauliflowers... It's all land belonging to our village, and now that the SS are gone, we'll get the land back."

There was much coming and going on the road—hundreds of men and women were

going into and out of the camp; Russian soldiers were being taken in large parties to be shown the pits and the gas chambers and the crematoria; and Polish soldiers of the 4th Division and new Polish recruits. It was policy to make them see it all, and to impress upon them—in case they were not yet sufficiently impressed—what kind of enemy they

were fighting. A few days before a crowd of German prisoners had been taken through

the camp. Around stood crowds of Polish women and children, and they screamed at the Germans, and there was a half-insane old Jew who bellowed frantically in a husky voice: