TREBLINKA - THE KILLING BEGINS
23 JULY 1942

"The first transport of 'deportees' left Malkinia on July 23, 1942, in
the morning hours. ...It was loaded with Jews from the Warsaw ghetto.
... The train was made up of sixty closed cars, crowded with people.
The car doors were locked from the outside and the air apertures
barred with barbed wire. ...It was hot, and most of the people in the
freight cars were in a faint."  <1>                           

The killing was about to begin....

"During this early period, before mid-August, 5,000 to 7,000 Jews
arrived in Treblinka every day. Then the situation changed, the pace
of transports increased, and there were days when 10,000 to 12,000
deportees arrived, including thousands who had died en route and
others in a state of exhaustion. This state of affairs disrupted the
"quite welcome" designed to deceive the deportees into believing they
had arrived at a transit station and that before continuing their
journey to a labour camp they must be disinfected. Blows and shooting
were needed to force those still alive but exhausted to descend from
the freight cars and proceed to the square and the undressing barraks.
Abrahman Goldfarb, who arrived at the camp on August 25th., relates:

	When we reached Treblinka and the Germans opened the 
	freight-car doors, the scene was ghastly. The cars were
	full of corpses. The bodies had been partially consumed by
	chlorine. The stench from the cars caused those still alive
	to choke. The Germans ordered everyone to disembark from
	the cars; those who could were half-dead. SS and Ukrainians
	waiting nearby beat us and shot at us ... <2>

"Oskar Berger, who was brought to Treblinka on August 22, describes
the scene:

	As we disembarked we witnessed a horrible sight: hundreds
	bodies lying all around. Piles of bundles, clothes, valises,
	everything mixed together. SS soldiers, Germans, and
        Ukrainians were standing on the roofs of barracks and firing
	indescriminately into the crowd. Men, women, and children
	fell bleeding. The air was filled with screaming and weeping.
	Those not wounded by the shooting were forced through an open
	gate, jumping over the dead and wounded, to a square fenced
	with barbed wire." <3>

<1> Franziszek Zabecki, "Wspomnienia dawne i nowe" Warszawa, 1977, pp.
    39-40
<2> A. Goldfarb testimony, Yad Vashem Archives 0-3/1846, pp. 12-13
<3> Eugen Kogon, "Der SS-Staat" Bonn, 1974, p. 218

Excerpted from....----------------------------------------------
BELZEC, SOBIBOR, TREBLINKA - the Operation Reinhard Death Camps
Indiana University Press - Yitzhak Arad, 1987. ISBN 0-253-3429-7
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