SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

72 J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR
ber. The people who were moved out ran around naked and hid outside.
The Germans killed [them] with chlorine.”
If we follow Hella Felenbaum-Weiss, chlorine was used to kill the
deportees during the journey: 132
“The arrival of another convoy distressed me in the same way. It
was thought to come from Lvov, but nobody knew for sure. Prisoners
were sobbing and told us a dreadful tale: they had been gassed on
the way with chlorine, but some survived.”
Stanis�aw Szmajzner, on the other hand, spoke of Zyklon B in 1996,
as J. Schelvis tells us: 133
“Szmajzner believed that the victims were initially killed by
means of exhaust gases, but that Zyklon B was used later on.”
An unnamed witness, however, speaks of victims “who were usually
executed by means of electricity and gas.” 134
The story about the “little window in the ceiling” through which the
man in charge of the gassing process would watch the agony of the victims
and the tale of the collapsible floor of the gas chamber reappear in
later accounts as well. In his memoirs, “written in about 1950” and published
“in Tel Aviv in 1970,” Moshe Bahir writes: 135
“Lager [camp] 3 was closed to all sides to the prisoners of Sobibór.
It was impossible for us to see what was going on in that Lager
because of the grove of pine trees which surrounded it. We saw
only the roof of the ‘bathhouse’ which protruded through the trees.
Thus we saw the murderous face of Oberscharführer Bauer, who
used to stand on the roof of that building and peep through the little
window into the death chambers.
We all knew what was done inside the building. We knew that
Bauer looked through the window in order to regulate the amount of
death-gas which streamed through the ducts, which were in the form
of an ordinary shower. He was the one who saw the victims suffocating
from the gas that was showered upon them, and he was the one
who ordered that the flow of gas be increased or stopped. And he
was the one who ordered the victims in their final agony and in their
death. At his order the machinery which opened the floor of the
‘bathhouse’ was activated, and the corpses fell into small carts,
132 M. Novitch, op. cit. (note 39), p. 50.
133 J. Schelvis, op. cit. (note 70), p. 82.
134 Ibid., p. 269.
135 M. Novitch, op. cit. (note 39), p. 147.