Zdzisław then gestures for us to come into his tiny office in the next room. A single chair, a single table, a single-bar electric fire. And everywhere, folders full of material, papers, photographs he’s been researching on Chelmno for the last years. On the perpetrators, on the victims, on the (very few) survivors. He starts to show us a folder containing the names and known data on the SS guards and drivers stationed here – most of them from the Prinz Eugen Waffen SS unit – all written out carefully, in pencil, in his neat capital letters:
BURMEISTER, Walter (driver)
GIELOW, Hermann Friedrich Oskar (driver)
LAABS, Gustav (driver)
HERING, Oskar (driver)
HÄFELE, Alois (guard)
MÖBIUS, Kurt (guard)
HEINL, Karl (guard)
MEIER, Martin (assistant driver)
BOCK, Walter (guard)
BURSTINGER, Erwin (gaswagen supervisor)
KÖNIG, Bruno
PILLER, Walter (deputy commandant)
There’s also Srebnik’s evidence here from one of the trials (session 66/document T/1299). There’s a newspaper article from 31 March 1963, reporting the outcome of a Chelmno Trial in Bonn, where Laabs and Häfele were given fifteen-year sentences (with hard labour), and Burmeister, Möbius and Heinl were given shorter sentences. It seems there had been another, earlier, trial in Poland, in Lodz, in 1945, after which Piller and Gielow were executed. There’s also information about a survivor I hadn’t heard of – Mordechai Zurawski. Lanzmann states at the opening of Shoah that ‘of the 400,000 men, women and children [sent to Chelmno] only two came out alive: Mordechai Podchlebnick and Simon Srebnik’, but this appears to challenge that statement.fn2 And Gilbert also relates the testimony of another Chelmno survivor – Yakov Grojanowski, whose story I’ll relate in a moment. Zdzisław is now pressing the book we’d heard about into my hands: Chelmno/Kulmhof, Ein vergessener Ort des Holocaust? (Chelmno: A Forgotten Site of the Holocaust?).
No computers, no scanning, not even a photocopier here. Just a staggering sense of this man’s single intent, this man’s singular determination that memory shall survive in this place. And at this moment I think back to Dr Kastelmann at Saurer’s office in the Swiss lakeside town, ‘We’ve got a history, but we don’t live on this history … it’s a completely different company than it used to be. We don’t live in the past’. I think about all the corporate executives across the world wanting difficult histories to go away, wanting the past to be buried under a blanket of continual nowness, continual promise of future growth. As John Gray puts it in False Dawn, ‘Free markets are the most potent solvents of tradition at work in the world today. They set a premium on novelty and a discount on the past. They make of the future an infinite re-run of the present.’
Zdzisław’s life and work, these two small rooms, are the utter antithesis to almost everything that our current world tells us to value. In place of forgetting and ‘moving on’, a tender excavation of the past; instead of speed and software, the patience of a hand and a pencil; in place of promise and PR and profit, the relentless seeking of facts. Because it is the only thing that can now be done for the hundreds of thousands of people who died here. And in his humanity and his understanding that memory and justice are inseparable, I find a hope that moves me so much I have to turn away.
Now he’s beckoning us outside. We walk maybe fifty yards behind the hut and Zdzisław is scraping the snow away with his hands to show us the foundations of ‘Schloss Kulmhof’, as the SS called it – the small castle that was the centre of killing operations between December 1941 and April 1943. During this period the cellars were used to house the ‘gravedigger squad’, the Sonderkommando of Jews, including Mordechai Podchlebnick and the young Yakov Grojanowski from the nearby village of Izbica Kujawska, one of the very few men ever to escape this Sonderkommando, who then provided only the second direct eyewitness account of the exterminations. When he eventually reached the Warsaw Ghetto at the end of March 1942 and communicated what he’d witnessed, the historian Dr Emanuel Ringelblum urged him to write down every detail.
For fourteen days in Chelmno and RzuchÓw forest, Grojanowski was forced to see and do things that are beyond human understanding. His ‘job’ and the work of those in the Sonderkommando was to empty the gaswagen of the dead when they arrived at the Waldlager in the forest, remove the valuables and then bury the Jews and Roma in mass graves, packing them in tightly to save space. Often the men would come across relatives or friends amongst the corpses they were burying. On the eighth day, Grojanowski heard his parents and his brother had been buried. Of the thirty or so members of this squad, at the end of each day, the eight who had buried the corpses had to lie face down on them, where they would then be shot in the head. Grojanowski arrived here on 6 January 1942 and escaped on 19 January. These words are his words:
When we came into the second courtyard we were pushed out of the lorry. From here onwards we were in the hands of black-uniformed SS men, all of them high-ranking Reich Germans. We were ordered to hand over all our money and valuables. After this fifteen men were selected, I among them, and taken down to the cellar rooms of the Schloss. We fifteen were confined in one room, the remaining fourteen in another. It was still bright daylight outside but down in the cellar it was pitch dark. Some ethnic Germans on the domestic staff provided us with straw. Later a lantern was also brought. At around eight in the evening we received unsweetened black coffee and nothing else. We were all in a depressed mood. One could only think the worst, some were close to tears. We kissed each other and took leave. It was unimaginably cold and we lay down close together. In this manner we spent the whole of the night without shutting our eyes. We only talked about the deporatation of Jews, particularly from Koło and Dabie. The way it looked we had no prospect of ever getting out again.
During the second phase, when Chelmno was reactivated as an extermination centre in summer 1944, the Schloss became the main gathering point for deportees, the collecting point for the gaswagen. Throughout its existence as a death camp this relatively small site (the Schloss and some outbuildings, perhaps a square of no more than 100 yards across by 200 yards long) was surrounded by high wooden fences and heavily armed groups of SS. Franz Schalling was one of these guards:
Our guard post was in front of the castle.4 The Jews arrived, half dead already, from the ghetto. An SS man stood at the top of the steps … Then the Jews were taken down to two big rooms where they undressed, gave up their rings. Then they had to run down more steps, along an underground corridor into the gaswagens. They were beaten and screamed. It was frightful, frightful. The trucks were like removal vans, pretty big trucks with double doors at the back … the driver fed the pipe into the bottom of the van via a hose … there were two trucks, a big one and a small one. From the gate we could hear the revving of the engine. The truck was starting and then it began to move. We opened the gate and they drove off towards the woods. You couldn’t hear anything as they drove by.
Some details that Schalling omits to mention are extremely telling because they indicate the level of thought and acute cynicism that went into the psychology of mass murder. Grojanowski tells of the testimony of another prisoner, Mahmens Goldmann, the only person who ever experienced what happened inside the Schloss and survived. He’d arrived with his community of Jews from Kłodawa on 11 January 1942, and later related this account to a member of the Sonderkommando: