The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust (Shoah)

Shofar FTP Archive File: camps/aktion.reinhard/treblinka//siedice.002


Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Holocaust Almanac: Siedice, a Wehrmacht Soldier's Diary
Reply-To: kmcvay@nizkor.almanac.bc.ca
Followup-To: alt.revisionism
Organization: The Nizkor Project, Vancouver Island, CANADA

Archive/File: camps/aktion.reinhard/treblinka siedice.002
Last-Modified: 1994/10/19

   From the diary of Hubert Pfoch, an Austrian infantryman who
   maintained a diary and photographs detailing his observations
   regarding the Holocaust...

   "At last the time came for the soldiers to continue their journey
   eastwards to the frontline. 'When at last the train leaves the
   station,' Pfoch wrote, 'at least fifty dead, women, men, and
   children, some of them totally naked, like along the track.'

   Eventually the soldiers' train was routed behind the Jewish train.
   Both were going in the same direction, the soldiers to the war
   zone, the Jews to Treblinka. As the soldiers' train followed the
   deportation train, Pfoch noted:

      ... we continued to see corpses on both sides of the track -
      children and others. They say Treblinka is a `delousing camp`.
      When we reach the station the train is next to us again - there
      is such an awful smell of decomposing corpses in the station,
      some of us vomit. The begging for water intensifies, the
      indiscriminate shooting by the guards continues.

   Did Pfoch and his fellow soldiers know of the ultimate fate of
   those whose terrible journey they had glimpsed such awful moments?
   It was only August 1942, and yet in his diary he was able to write,
   tersely and accurately: 'Three hundred thousand have been assembled
   here.  Every day ten or fifteen thousand are gassed and burned.' He
   added: 'Any comment is totally superfluous.'" (Gilbert, 117, 119)

                           Work Cited

   Gilbert, Martin. Final Journey: The Fate of the Jews in Nazi
   Germany. New York: Mayflower Books, 1979

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