The deportees” state: pitiful — filthy, dusty, holding out bowls and cups, gesturing to their mouths, crying with thirst. Behind them in the trucks lie the dead and those too sick to move — Weidemann says their journey began four nights ago. SS guards force those able to walk into two lines. As families separate, they shout to one another. With many gestures and calls the columns march off in different directions. The able-bodied men go towards the work camp. The rest head towards the screen of trees, with Weidemann and myself following. As I look back, I see the prisoners in their striped clothing clambering into the freight cars, dragging out the baggage and the bodies.
8.30 am: Weidemann puts the size of the column at nearly 2,000: women carrying babies, children at their skirts; old men and women; adolescents; sick people; mad people. They walk five abreast down a cinder path for 300 metres, through a courtyard, along another path, at the end of which twelve concrete steps lead down to an immense underground chamber, 100 metres long. A sign proclaims in several languages (German, French, Greek, Hungarian): “Baths and Disinfecting Room”. It is well-lit, with scores of benches, hundreds of numbered pegs.
The guards shout: “Everyone undress! You have 10 minutes!” People hesitate, look at one another. The order is repeated, more harshly, this time, hesitantly but calmly, they comply. “Remember your peg number, so you can recover your clothes!” The camp trusties move among them, whispering encouragement, helping the feeble-bodied and the feeble-minded to strip. Some mothers try to hide their babies in the piles of discarded clothing, but the infants are quickly discovered.
9.05 am: Naked, the crowd shuffles through large oak doors flanked by troops into a second room, as large as the first, but utterly bare, apart from four thick, square columns supporting the ceiling at twenty-metre intervals. At the bottom of each column is a metal grille. The chamber fills, the doors swing shut. Weidemann gestures. I follow him out through the empty changing room, up the concrete steps, into the air. I can hear the sound of an automobile engine.
Across the grass which covers the roof of the installation bounces a small van with Red Cross markings. It stops. An SS officer a doctor emerge wearing gas masks carrying four metal canisters. Four squat concrete pipes jut from the grass, twenty metres apart. The doctor SS man lift the lids of the pipes pour in a mauve granulated substance. They remove the masks, light cigarettes in sunshine.
9.09 am: Weidemann conducts me back downstairs. Only sound is a muffled drumming coming from the far end of the room, from beyond the suitcases the piles of still-warm clothes. A small glass panel is set into the oak doors. I put my eye to it. A man’s palm beats against the aperture I jerk my head away.
Says one guard: “The water in the shower rooms must be very hot today, since they shout so loudly.”
Outside, Weidemann says: now we must wait twenty minutes. Would I care to visit Canada? I say: What? He laughs: “Canada” — a section of the camp. Why Canada? He shrugs: nobody knows.
Canada. 1 km. north of gas chamber. Huge rectangular yard, watchtower in each corner surrounded by barbed wire. Mountains of belongings — trunks, rucksacks, cases, kitbags, parcels; blankets; prams, wheelchairs, false limbs; brushes, combs. Weidemann: figures prepared for RF-SS on property recently sent to Reich — men’s shirts: 132,000, women’s coats: 155,000, women’s hair: 3,000kg. (’a freight car’), boys” jackets: 15,000, girls’dresses: 9,000, handkerchiefs: 135,000. I get doctor’s bag, beautifully made, as souvenir — Weidemann insists.
9.31 am: Return underground installation. Loud electric humming fills the air — the patented “Exhator” system, for evacuation of gas. Doors open. The bodies are piled up at one end [Illegible] legs smeared excrement, menstrual blood; bite claw marks. Jewish Sonder-kommando detachment enters to hose down corpses, wearing rubber boots, aprons, gas masks (according to W., pockets of gas remain trapped at floor level for up to 2 hours). Corpses slippery. Straps around wrists used to haul them to four double-doored elevators. Capacity of each: 25 [Illegible] bell rings, ascend one floor to …
10.02 am: Incineration room. Stifling heat: 15 ovens operating full-blast. Loud noise: diesel motors ventilating flames. Corpses from elevator loaded on to conveyor belt (metal rollers). Blood etc into concrete gutter. Barbers either side shave heads. Hair collected in sacks. Rings, necklaces, bracelets, etc dropped into metal box. Last: dental team — 8 men with crowbars pliers — removal gold (teeth, bridgework, fillings). W. gives me tin of gold to test weight: very heavy. Corpses tipped into furnaces from metal pushcarts.
