Eli Rozenberg Testimony (doc. 301/481)

Original, manuscript, 2 pages, 235 x 340 mm, Polish language

I, Eli Rozenberg, born in 1924 in Warsaw, at 25 Gęsia Street. My father was murdered by the Germans in 1940. In August 1942, I was deported from the ghetto to Treblinka along with the rest of my family, we were packed 100 to a wagon. When the train stopped, it was already dawn I saw the Małkinia station through the little barred window, at that moment the Germans started detaching groups of 15 wagons that went on a special side-track leading to the camp, and when the wagons stopped, they started shouting raus, raus. Women and men were separate, saying good-bye to my mother and sisters, I managed to get to the men’s side, where the Germans ordered us to sit on the ground, telling us that the baths are here and that when we are bathed then everyone would be reunited with their family, would get new clothing and we would travel on further to where we would be working. At this point a German ran up to us as we were sitting on the ground, picking out 30 boys and me, telling us that we are going off to work, happy that I would see my mother and sisters again, we took us to a big yard where there were huge piles of clothing, suitcases, men’s and women’s shoes, baggage, money, and mounds of other things, then the German ordered us to take off our coats and start working, the work consisted of sorting every thing: shoes with shoes, coats with cots, etc. Not knowing anything about what was going on there, I asked a few boys, but no one gave me a real answer, I just found out that we were not permitted to talk to each other, suddenly I recognized someone I knew who used to live in one of the buildings in our courtyard, he was taken away 4 days before I was, so having asked him what this was here and where all the men and women were, he turned away, and with tears in his eyes, he told me just one word: you don’t have any mother or sister any more. Before he managed to tell me what happened to them and how, 2 Germans ran up to us and started to thrash us in the head with whips, then an additional 25 blows on our bare bodies. I got up from the ground with great difficulty, after we sorted things for another 2 hours until 10 o'clock in the evening, they herded us to the barracks, suddenly they started shouting in German: they stabbed Maks 1Note 1: SS‑Unterscharführer Max Bialas was killed on September 10 or 11, 1942 by Meir Berliner, a prisoner. As retaliation, the Germans killed 160 prisoners. with a knife, who then was dying for a couple of hours, then they started to shoot at us and torture us mercilessly, with whatever they could. We pushed against each other like sheep, and when I fell to the ground, I was hiton the fingers with a bayonet. After an hour of being chased like that, they killed 100 boys, including the hero [who had stabbed Max], and chased us to the barracks, and it was only in the barracks that I managed to rip a piece of my shirt off to bandage my hand, each one of us laid down on the ground, crying and in pain, to rest a little. The boys who had already been there for a few days or weeks already knew that we had to get up when the light was still grayish outside and wait until they open the barracks, but this time they didn’t open the barracks, they only threatened us with machine guns and said that they would all kill us in a minute, so waiting impatiently for death. They opened the barracks only at 11 o'clock in the morning, shouting alles raus, they put us in rows and took 200 boys away, shot them with a machine gun and herded the rest to work, punishing them for 3 days by giving them no food or water. In the afternoon, a German came to the group that was sorting shoes and took 50 boys away including me, telling us that we were only going to do some light work for 10 minutes, and took us through the whole yard to some gate, and when we went through that gate my blood froze, I saw a heap of dead people lying on the ground, and bloodied boys going up to them with stretchers, grabbing corpses by the hands and legs, they laid them on the stretcher and ran away with them, thinking about all of this, I looked on with tears in my eyes, and all of a sudden I felt a blow to my head with a riding crop, the boys who were already there for a few days told us that two boys should take a stretcher and carry corpses to the pit, I went quickly to the stretcher, and taking the stretcher back, we went in the direction of the gas chambers, on the way to the gas chambers they hit us with whips, shouting: faster, you dogs. I ran to the ramp quickly, we put the stretcher on the ground and clumsily laid the corpse onto the stretcher, at this moment the Germans began to torture us mercilessly, they threw me to the ground and kicked me in the head, shouting that I hadn’t picked up thecorpse the right way, that we were supposed to pick them up by the hands and feet and lay them down evenly on the stretcher. I got up off the ground with difficulty and taking the stretcher with my friend, we ran in the direction of the pit, on the way to the pit boys were running with corpses, on after another, and coming closer to thepit I saw another tragic scene, in the pit I saw only a huge puddle of blood and when the corpses were thrown into the pit, they sunk into the blood, I carried corpses for a whole month, then they moved me to the ramp, that work was very hard, pulling out gassed corpses. I pulled out corpses for 5 months, all of those corpses were thrown into pits and spread with chlorine, in 1943, in February, the order was issued to dig out all those corpses and burn them, so 3 diggers were brought in that lowered their buckets into the pit and grabbed the pieces of flesh and bones with their teeth and then threw them onto the ground above, boys standing nearby with pitchforks put the pieces of flesh and bones on stretchers and took them to the fire, burning 8 thousand people a day.