After a while they started burning the corpses?
In February 1943.
Did any of the high-ranking officials visit the camp?
Himmler came in January 1943. He ordered that the bodies be removed from the graves. We took the corpses out with excavators and burned them.
Did the transports arrive every day?
Yes. Until the winter of 1943. Then they came less often. A transport would arrive every two or three days.
How many people worked on removing the corpses from the gas chambers?
About two hundred.
Were the people who arrived at Treblinka killed that same day?
Yes. Very quickly.
Where did the people who were killed at Treblinka come from?
At first they came from Poland. Later from all over Europe, from Belgium, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, from Serbia, from the Netherlands…
How do you know?
When I carried the corpses out of the gas chambers, I saw documents falling out of their anuses and vaginas. There were those who remained alive, too.
What happened to them?
Sometimes when we were removing the corpses we’d find a child still alive. The Germans immediately shot all survivors.
Were the Ukrainians in uniform?
Yes.
What sort of uniforms?
Black.
Like the S.S. men?
The S.S. men had green uniforms. With a skull.
Were there several gas chambers in every building?
In one there were three chambers, in another five on one side and five on the other. I remember when all the chambers were working simultaneously. In forty-five minutes ten thousand people went in. Thirteen thousand people arrived at Treblinka that day.
The gas chambers were hermetically sealed?
Yes.
I call witness Avraham Lindwasser.
I am Avraham Lindwasser.
How old are you now?
If I were alive, I would be eighty-seven.
On 28 August, 1942, you arrived at Treblinka from Warsaw?
Yes.
Was there a sign at the station, in German and Polish?
Yes.
What did it say?
It read: after you have bathed and changed your clothes, your journey will continue to the east, to work. But then they opened the freight carriages and started shouting, Get out! Get out! and they beat us with their clubs. We didn’t understand what was happening. We were chased to the square and ordered to hand over our money and jewellery. We were told to take off our shoes. Then they lined us up in threes and went on beating us. Then a man with stripes appeared, I later learned he was called the Hauptmann with spectacles, and he began asking us one by one what our professions were. When he came to me he looked at me — I also wore spectacles, in a golden frame, he came up close and asked, Is that frame made of gold? and I said, It is, it is gold, and he then said, Do you know what gold is? Do you know what silver is? Do you know what jewellery is? and I said, Yes, and he struck me again with his club. Then he told me to step forward. A Jew was standing next to me, an electrical engineer, and he was also ordered to step forward. We were the only two to step forward from the line.
How many people were there in that transport?
More than a thousand.
When you came, did you know where you were?
No. Only that we had arrived at Treblinka.
You had heard about Treblinka in Warsaw?
We had heard.
Did you know that Jews were being exterminated at Treblinka?
We did not believe those stories.
You did not believe?
One simply could not grasp that it was possible — extermination. But when we set out from Malkinia towards Treblinka, I saw the Polish railway workers making signs at us — they were drawing their fingers across their throats. I remembered that later.
Did you see corpses when you got off the train?
Yes.
And?
At first I thought they were the corpses of those who had died on the trip, that they would be bathed and buried. Then Matthes took me into a building at Treblinka 2 and ordered me to begin dragging bodies towards the graves.
In the evening, you again came across the Hauptmann with spectacles?
Yes.
What did he say when he saw you dragging bodies?
He asked why I was dragging bodies. He said, After all, you’re a dentist, you shouldn’t be dragging bodies.
You are a dentist?
No, I am not.
And?
He pulled me by the sleeve, seized me by the hand, dragged me by force, again with blows to the back — I want to stress this — he kept hitting me, and he brought me to a well. Next to the well there were basins with gold teeth and also pairs of forceps for extracting teeth. He said, take the forceps and start extracting teeth from those corpses over there. The corpses were lying by the back exit of the gas chambers.
From where they took them to the graves.
Yes.
And you extracted their teeth?
I did.
You extracted teeth from corpses until the revolt?
Not exactly. I extracted teeth for about a month, a month and a half, until I recognized my sister’s body.