“My God, Chris! Men have always destroyed each other. They always will. You can’t pull out because you’ve been hurt once.”
“Do you really believe that goddamned world out there is going to be moved by this report? It’s you who is the fool, not me. No one’s going to care about murdered Jews or starving Indians or floods in Holland or earthquakes in Japan so long as their stinking bellies are full! Your goddamned conscience of man is a myth, Andrei.”
Andrei hovered over Chris. He shook Chris’s shoulders, but the man would not unbend. Andrei slowly sank to his knees. “Chris, I beg you on my knees to help us.”
Gabriela jerked angrily at Andrei. “Get off your knees!” she commanded. “Get off your knees! You will never do this again before any man!”
Chris turned his sweaty face up to her enraged expression. He tried through bleary eyes to beg her to stop.
“You sanctimonious son of a bitch,” Gabriela quivered. “You sit up there on your throne and watch all us little ants scramble in fright to survive and you make your terse comments and your snide observations. I present to you, Christopher de Monti—champion of the press! Oh God, no. Don’t dirty your precious hands with our blood.”
“All I ever wanted is for Deborah to live—that’s all—that’s all I’ve ever wanted. I know she’ll never see me again, but I want her to live—that’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
“Your sister is a very fortunate woman, Andrei. In a single lifetime she has had two upstanding men like Paul Bronski and Christopher de Monti who would sell their souls for her.”
Andrei was limp with weakness and humiliation. “My sister is a woman,” he whispered. “She will take her life and the life of her children before she allows you to save her at the expense of a betrayal to the Nazis.”
“That’s enough, Andrei,” Gabriela said. “Look at him. He is completely degenerated.”
Andrei gave up. He walked to the door. “You were right, Gabriela. We should not have asked him. I’d like to spit on you, Chris, but I must save my strength.”
Andrei left the room.
“You’re not worthy of his spit,” Gabriela said, and followed.
Chris slumped over the table, weeping, choking on his own saliva and tears. His hand fell on the report. He pulled his head up. He gained control of himself and turned the first page.
COMBINED JEWISH ORGANIZATIONS’ REPORT ON EXTERMINATION CENTERS IN OPERATION WITHIN THE GENERAL GOVERNMENT AREA OF POLAND, JULY 1942
We are able to authenticate firmly the existence of four centers in the General Government Area created for the sole purpose of conducting mass exterminations. In addition, two combination concentration-extermination camps are in existence. There are five hundred labor camps in Poland, of which a hundred and forty are reserved for Jews. All of them contain some sort of murder facilities.
The only conclusion to be drawn is that a master German plan is in effect for the absolute destruction of the Jewish people. In the beginning, mass starvation, disease, and executions decimated the various ghettos by tens of thousands. After the invasion of Russia, Kommandoes of four Special Action groups massacred additional hundreds of thousands. The culmination of this plan is now assembly-line murder. The master plan, it must be concluded, comes from Hitler through Himmler and Heydrich. The actual execution is performed by the so-called 4B section of the Gestapo (Jewish affairs) under the direction of SS Sub-Colonel Adolf Eichmann.
The extermination centers are located at railheads and generally in secluded sites. They are guarded by Waffen SS and Ukrainian and Baltic Auxiliaries. A staggering amount of planning, material and manpower is being used to carry out this operation at a time when Germany is conducting a war on many fronts. For example, rail cars are at an urgent premium for the purpose of shipping war materials to the Russian front, yet importation of Jews from German-occupied countries into Poland seems to have taken a priority over army needs. In addition, thousands of engineers, scientists, and key personnel are tied up in this operation as well as desperately needed manpower. We can safely estimate that from two to three hundred thousand men are directly or indirectly involved. All of this effort testifies to the insane will of the Nazis as well as to the urgency of our situation.
These camps follow a basic pattern. Deception is carried out and secrecy maintained. This certainly indicates the Nazis are aware of the evil they are perpetrating. At each camp, deportees arrive and are weeded at selection centers. A few are set aside for slave labor. The rest, including women and small children, are moved to a “sanitation center” under the illusion of receiving a disinfectant shower. Hair is shorn. The guards play out the game to the end by issuing bars of soap (which later turn out to be made of stone), and victims are asked to remember the number of the peg on which their clothing is hung. Many women attempt to hide children in their clothing or throw them off trains to peasants, but they are almost always found out.
When the occupants are in, an iron door is sealed and an attendant carries out the gassing. The first gassings were from the carbon monoxide exhaust of engines. This method proved slow and petrol costly, therefore a prussic acid mixture called Cyclon B was developed by the Hamburg Insecticide Company. Death is in minutes.
Jewish slave laborers clean the chambers and remove the corpses to crematoriums, where they are burned. At first cremation was in open pits, but the stench was unbearable. The Jewish laborers generally last only a few weeks before losing their sanity.
There are many variations, but this is the general pattern. Gold teeth are pulled from the corpses before burning. Anything of value is taken for the German war effort. Everything else—clothing, eyeglasses, shoes, artificial limbs, even dolls—is stored in warehouses, then scrutinized for hidden valuables. Hair is baled and shipped to Germany for use in the manufacture of mattresses and to waterproof submarine periscopes. In one camp, bodies have been boiled down for their fat content, to be used in the making of soap.
In addition to the Polish camps, we have reason to believe several camps in Germany have extermination facilities. Dachau, among others, is used as an “experimental medical” center. Humans are compelled to undergo experiments, such as the grafting of bones, transplants of organs, testing beyond human limitations in freezing, electrical shock, etc. In all camps, extermination and labor, the indignities, abuses, torture, and rape are universal. These are amplified in the attached supplementary reports.
The German extermination facilities are capable of murdering a minimum of a hundred thousand persons a day in Poland. We do not have the additional numbers who are killed inside Germany. The Polish camps are currently working at full capacity. New gas chambers and crematoriums are being constructed to increase the rate.
The Polish camps are:
LUBLIN DISTRICT
Belzec—Located on the Lublin-Tomaszow rail line near Rawa Ruska, handling Jews from the Lwow-Lemberg area with a capacity of ten thousand a day.
Sobibor—Near Wlodawa, between Wlodawa and Chelm. Capacity believed to be six thousand a day.
Majdanek—An early concentration camp in the Lublin suburb Majdan-Tartarski under the personal direction of Odilo Globocnik, SS Gruppenführer of Poland. Capacity in excess of ten thousand a day.
WESTERN POLAND
Chelmno—The oldest extermination center (in operation at the end of 1941), nine miles from Kolo, on the rail line between Lodz and Poznan, exterminating Jews in western Poland.
CENTRAL POLAND
Treblinka—Most recently discovered by underground efforts, located in the Sokolow Podlaski province near Warsaw, liquidating Jews from the Warsaw ghetto as well as Radom, Bialystok, Grodno, the Baltics, Czenstochowa, Kielce.