Jankiel Wiernik

[Stubble]

Not to move too far astray, but, I'd like to ask, can someone be killed with chlorinated lime?

If the room was hermetic, then the chlorinated lime wouldn't displace the air in the chamber. Basically the condemned would have died from lack of oxygen because of respiration, not because of breathing chlorine gas.

If it wasn't hermetically sealed, how much chlorinated lime are we talking for hundreds of people? Knee deep?

[pilgrimofdark]

In the Polish version of A Year in Treblinka, a "sorting" takes place in Warsaw first, then another selection takes place at Treblinka.

The Warsaw "sorting" is not included in English translations, despite its inclusion in the pre-print typescript and the printed version.

"He watched us, sorted us."
("Ogladal nas, sortowal.")

Spoiler

• Not in the English first edition published by the American Representation of General Jewish Workers' Union of Poland.
• Not in the English version included in Donat's The Death Camp Treblinka.
• Not in the newer English version published by Pickle Partners Publishing.

There are a number of sentences about Malkinia, the Treblinka train station, and selections that are left out of the English translations.

The passing train full of naked people are observed at Treblinka station. The English versions give the impression this happens at Malkinia.

But no! Wiernik is heading from Treblinka station towards the Treblinka camp while a train of naked people are heading in the opposite direction away from T-II (after their bath and while their clothes are being disinfected with chlorinated lime?).

[Stubble]

I believe Treblinka used steam delousing, but, yes, your reading appears to be correct Sir, and this is a bit of a doozy.

You have collected a fair number of real jewels just looking at source Sir, and I for one commend you.

Think these folks went to Majdanek? Or Auschwitz? To be further processed or put to work?

When looking at testimony of those transited west from Treblinka, the say they were given camp clothes after a shower but before 'what passes for German coffee'.

I know Auschwitz occasionally got chewed out for sending people 'in rags' (that may well have been literal), so, perhaps Treblinka and the other Bug River camps did something similar when they ran out of camp clothes.

Who knows.

Maybe it's all bullshit though. Hard to tell from my house. I mean, I'm not even sure the guy was ever at Treblinka.

[pilgrimofdark]

I believe Treblinka used steam delousing, but, yes, your reading appears to be correct Sir, and this is a bit of a doozy.

Possibly chlorinated lime for washing clothing (Teperman says he used it for bleaching his own clothes) and cleaning the trains, and steam chambers for delousing people and/or property.

Think these folks went to Majdanek? Or Auschwitz? To be further processed or put to work?

Or directly east, or to local work camps. Maybe the "fake signs" at the "fake train station" signify something. Other people know this area of research better.

But A Year in Treblinka confirming a trainload of people left T-II is important enough, as well as the suppressing of those details in the English versions. Kues did a lot of work finding hints of Jews further east, and I found an account of another Jew in the Minsk Ghetto who said Western Jews were kept in a separate ghetto apart from the Eastern Jews.

Maybe it's all bullshit though. Hard to tell from my house. I mean, I'm not even sure the guy was ever at Treblinka.

Agreed. I just didn't want to keep calling it the Wiernik Writing Committee

But it could be truthful eyewitness accounts accidentally surfacing from the thick layers of atrocity propaganda.

---

This is a summary of the early narrative, according to the Polish version. I changed "Wiernik" to "a resettler."

Jews are rounded up in the Warsaw ghetto. There is a sorting by the Germans in the ghetto before deportation.

A resettler is sent via train to Malkinia, a railway junction he is familiar with.

The train then takes a side rail to Treblinka Station, where it waits.

At Treblinka station (not Malkinia), the resettler observes a passing train full of undressed ("half-naked") people attempting to communicate with his train.

After that train passes, the resettler's train continues on to Treblinka Camp.

At Treblinka Camp, there is another selection, an undressing, and a bath.

[pilgrimofdark]

If you believe Wiernik wrote A Year in Treblinka, then Jankiel Wiernik is a direct eyewitness to a train full of people traveling in the opposite direction of T-II after undressing and surviving the baths.

And there is no escaping that this detail is omitted in every English edition of his book.

Here are the parallel quotes.

Polish original (AI translated):

...we reached Malkinia. We stood there all night. Ukrainians boarded the carriage and demanded valuables. ... In the morning, the train departed, and we arrived at the Treblinka station. I noticed a train passing by, carrying ragged, half-naked, starving people. They spoke to us, but we didn't understand.

English first edition:

...we finally reach Malkinia, where our train remained for the night. The Ukrainian guards came into our car and demanded our valuables. ... In the morning our train got under way again. We saw a train passing by filled with dishevelled, half-naked, starved people. They spoke to us, but we couldn't understand what they were saying.

Donat:

...we finally reach Malkinia, where our train stopped for the night. Ukrainian guards came into our car and demanded our valuables. ... The next morning our train started to move again. We saw a train passing by filled with tattered, half-naked, starved people. They were trying to say something to us, but we could not understand what they were saying.

[borjastick]

Good stuff pilgrimofdark. There can be little doubt that many train loads of travellers went into and out of Treblinka. Plenty of reports say that as do many dead see pedestrians who were on those trains. My next question would be why were they forced to stop the night at Malkinia Junction? Presumably if Treblinka were a 'death camp' as claimed they would be at it 24/7.

But the simple answer is that Malkinia Junction was the last point for the travellers before they went east into the Russian hinterlands. Thus Treblinka was a short stop transit facility where they were scrubbed, relieved of some possessions and then sent back to Malkinia Jct. prior to shipping out. It was reported that Malkinia Junction was very busy and often couldn't cope with the trainloads of big noses arriving thus Treblinka was brought into service. It's all very simple to read and understand when you don't have an agenda of 6m deaded jews in gas chambers oy vey...

[pilgrimofdark]

But the simple answer is that Malkinia Junction was the last point for the travellers before they went east into the Russian hinterlands. Thus Treblinka was a short stop transit facility where they were scrubbed, relieved of some possessions and then sent back to Malkinia Jct. prior to shipping out. It was reported that Malkinia Junction was very busy and often couldn't cope with the trainloads of big noses arriving thus Treblinka was brought into service. It's all very simple to read and understand when you don't have an agenda of 6m deaded jews in gas chambers oy vey...

The 5000-7000 Jews traveling north from Treblinka that Wiernik observed were likely headed to a transit station where the train service would switch from Polish railway workers to the Wehrmacht.

Strange how Wiernik is responsible for identifying more Jewish survivors of Treblinka than anyone else in 80+ years. Stranger how that part was left out of the English translations of his work for that long.

This "Overview map of the Eastern Railway" indicates the jurisdictional borders of the Generaldirektion der Ostbahn (GEDOB).

Malkinia and Sobibor are very close to the limit of GEDOB.



Polish state archives Reference code: 29/663/0/7/1288
Link

Things to notice:

Sobibor and Treblinka are very near the borders of the Ostbahn/GEDOB.

Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka are also very near or on internal Ostbahn district borders.

[Stubble]

We have a rough date, a line, and a tentative time.

We need to find the ticket/bill of lading.

My apologies for saying the royal 'we'.

Pilgrimofdark, pilgrimofdark has found this. I will be looking for a ticket or BoL.

[Stubble]

Would anyone mind second checking T-454 to see if I missed it? I will move on to another in the series. I didn't see the transport Northbound out of Treblinka.

I could be inept, my brain could be tapioca, it could be the wrong series, or it might not be there...

(SO MUCH STUFF IN T SERIES!!! Brain, feels, like, mush)

https://catalog.archives.gov/search-wit ... naId%3Aasc

[Stubble]

I ran across this today;



It appears to be in line with the official historiography.

Edit: Found playlist and embedded playlist instead of a scrollfest of single embeds.

[pilgrimofdark]

I ran across this today;
...
It appears to be in line with the official historiography.

He leads off one video with a photo of Galewski, hilarious.

Did you notice if this YouTuber adds anything new? Most of the sources in each video's bibliography are the standard ones. A few in German I haven't seen before.

I was hoping his video on the Franz photo album actually showed more images. There aren't good scans of every page online. We could use a better look at the excavators, because the photos appear more consistent with the gravel quarry than any location at T-II.

---

I think the entirety of the 1944 Soviet investigation is here. It's all in Russian, but has transcriptions of each page, which can be auto-translated in a browser.

(There are a ton of sources on that site with archival references. Just search Russian Cyrillic words for "ghettos," "annihilation battalions," or anything.)

Reading through the interrogations, they often share a similar pattern and themes.

1. Property sorting and cleaning. Almost everyone interviewed was sorting and packing pens, using chlorinated lime to wash clothing, and watching others transport chlorinated lime around the camp.

2. Random atrocities. From poison gas bullets to homicidal chlorine lime gas, almost everyone adds a bizarre story that is then ignored and never mentioned again in any book.

3. A Year in Treblinka book club. The Russian translation of YIT was done on August 15, 1944. Not a single witness was interrogated before this date about the "death camp." In a garbled manner, each witness half-remembers some details from the Wiernik book. Some even mention Wiernik, although they get his name wrong. Some mention other characters from YIT. Few of the witnesses mention each other. The sole thread holding it together is the YIT book club discussion.

4. Soviet-Polish continuity. Six of the witnesses from the Soviet investigation were also present at the 1945 Polish investigation. That's not counting Wiernik, whose book the Soviets had in advance of their investigation. Counting him, there is a Soviet-Polish overlap of 7 out of 13 witnesses.

• Jankiel Wiernik - (book present at Soviet) + Polish
• Aleksander Kudlik - Soviet + Polish
• Henryk Poswolski - Polish
• Abe Kon - Soviet + Polish
• Aron Czechowicz - Polish
• Oskar Strawczyński - Soviet + Polish
• Samuel Reisman - Soviet + Polish
• Hejnoch Brener - Soviet + Polish
• Stanisław Kon - Soviet + Polish
• Eugeniusz Turowski - Polish
• Henryk Reichman - Polish
• Szyja Warszawski - Polish
• Leon Finkelsztein - Polish

(also many witnesses exclusive to the Soviet investigation)

[Stubble]

To my knowledge, nothing new. Just the official narrative in condensed form.

I also laughed at the panned in picture of the 'Warsaw theater' there...

[pilgrimofdark]

We have the Soviet "Wiernik book club" and the Warsaw "Wiernik Theater Troupe"

We also have secret German military maps of the Malkinia/Treblinka area.

I wonder what the troops at the artillery batteries directly east of T-II thought of the clouds of fire and constant stench of burning corpses. The lava-spewing pyres must have made it difficult for the anti-aircraft guns north of Treblinka town to be very effective.

Looks like the Germans may have planned and built a small canal through the north side of the Treblinka settlement.

The maps are dated 1944, so may not reflect what was happening in 1942-1943.

Large Map of work projects and paved roads.

"All roads not marked by overprinting are unpaved. The base map is unreliable in its representation of road conditions."

Large Map of military placements.

[pilgrimofdark]

People should check out those secret German military maps and interpret them better for us. Or maybe they're already well-known by others but just new to me.

Anyway, I'm glad a list of fake names was shared elsewhere, because it got me to look for Abraham Krzepicki's early "December 1942" report that wasn't published until 1956.

Things I noticed:

• the handwritten manuscript is written by numerous people
• it looks quite different from the Donat translation

Do the handwriting styles resemble some from the Wiernik Writing Committee?

Krzepicki, Jakub Abram. Account of a Treblinka escapee

[Stubble]

I'm not in the field of 'textual analysis', but, I have to tentatively say 'yes'.

That's entirely too funny, and you can't make this shit up!