Warsaw by Richard Foreman Page B

with their families. They were
not going to be killed because the Germans "need us for their war effort.
It would be illogical, a false economy, for them to do away with us". Some
people believed them because they wanted to believe them. Or the promise of
food (bread and jam) lured desperate people onto the trains, which the Germans
offered the Jews if they complied to turn up the collection point "of
their own free will".
    Once caught within the Umschlagplatz a few evacuees might be
taken out again for a number of reasons: they might be considered fit for
certain work details, worth saving in return for the wealth that they
possessed. Or their petitioning of a policeman or soldier could be successful.
Few received a reprieve however.
    As many evacuees as inhumanly possible were loaded onto the
cattle trucks once there was a sufficient number rounded up in the
Umschlagplatz. People were beaten back with truncheons and rifle butts as the
sheer number of people meant that some spilled back out of the entrances to the
carriages. Doors were nailed shut. The warm air, noxious with the smell of
chlorine from where the trucks had been hosed out, soon became nauseating
through the stench of the diseased and filthy bodies crammed together. Often
families were split up during the loading of the trucks. Soldiers and policemen
were not concerned with who travelled with who. One train alone, consisting of
around sixty freight cars or cattle trucks, could evacuate 5,000-6,000 people.
The trains ran seven days a week. During one of the German offensives in Russia
a ban was implemented on many non-essential rail services and resources yet
still the SS demanded and continued to run their daily service from the ghetto
to Treblinka - situated 75 miles north-east of Warsaw.
     
    Adam Duritz observed the matinee idol of a Lieutenant
nodding in approval as he efficiently dispatched another “shipment" of
Jews to their destination. The SS officer had trained his men well, teaching
them to use force only when necessary. Disturbances were just that - time
consuming. The same brawny SS Private, who last week had nearly beaten a woman
to death as she tried to remain with her brother, was now reassuring a family
that everything was going to be all right - the work camp was half a day's
ride, during which the train would stop at a station for a water break. He even
put his arm around a woman and smiled.
    It was an undulating sea of people. With their various cloth
caps - and women wearing headscarves - so many of the bowed heads remained
faceless. So many weren't faceless though. If the Germans sustained this rate
of evacuation - extermination - then the ghetto would be all but empty by the
New Year, Duritz estimated. For so long it had been the policeman's mission to
survive the war; now his greatest wish was just to see the end of it. He had tried
his best again (and often he succeeded) to be posted away from the
Umschlagplatz - offering to police and dispose of the abandoned and randomly
executed dead littering the streets of the ghetto, but Duritz had to endure the
sight of the living once more.
    Yitzhak Meisel, with his trained eye in terms of the wealth
of people in rags and what was contained in their pockets, was weaving his way
through the troubled throng and confiscating valuables, such as ration cards
and watches. They would not need them where they were going was the argument
Meisel defended himself with, if indeed he felt the need to defend his actions.
If anyone resisted he would perform his usual trick of breaking someone's hand
or nose with his wooden cudgel. Duritz often liked to confront him with the
situation of what was going to happen when the ghetto was finally emptied and
there would be no one left to police. What did he think the Germans would do
with him? Meisel would argue back, as if now believing his own lies which he had
just spouted to evacuees, that the Germans would reward loyalty and he was too
valuable a worker.
    An