SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

82 J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR
In the Zukerman account found in the Novitch anthology the skilled
cook turns the thick crumb pie into a “dumpling,” and instead of the
theatrical reply we get the curt “You shouldn’t have asked. People are
being gassed, and we must bury them.” 180 Leon Feldhendler, elsewhere
described as the leader of the camp underground, 181 and a certain Shlomo
Goldstein are here revealed as the people to whom Zukerman confided
the “substance” of the message. Nota bene: he did not show them
the actual letter.
Zukerman was not alone in supposedly receiving messages smuggled
out from camp III. At the Eichmann trial Dov Freiberg affirmed
that the inmates “had contact with Camp 3.” In his 1987 book, however,
he omitted to mention this. The above-mentioned Moshe Bahir tells us
of letters even more remarkable than the one mentioned by Zukerman:
182
“Sometimes we would find notes stuck to the sides of the empty
buckets that were brought back from the gate. In these notes the men
who worked at burning the bodies described what went on in Lager
No. 3. One note told of a bloodstain which could not, by any means,
be cleaned or scraped from the floor of the gas chamber. Finally,
experts came and determined that the stain had been absorbed into
the chamber’s floorboards after a group of pregnant women had
been poisoned and one of them had given birth while the gas was
streaming into the chamber. The poison gas had mingled with the
mother’s blood and had created the indelible stain. Another note
said that, one day, the workers were ordered to replace a few floorboards
because several fragments of ears, cheeks and hands had become
embedded in them.”
Thanks to these letters the inmates in the other parts of the camp “all
knew what was done” in camp III despite the fact that, as noted by Bahir
himself, “it was impossible […] to see what was going on in that
Lager”! 183 Bahir’s description of the gas chambers 184 bears a strong resemblance
to that of Biskovitz, with Erich Bauer portrayed as looking
down into the gas chamber (in singular) through a “window,” regulating
180 M. Novitch, op. cit. (note 39), p. 107.
181 “The leading figure in the circle of those with ideas for resistance was Leon Feldhendler
[…] a former head of the Judenrat in the �o�kiewka ghetto”; Y. Arad, op. cit. (note 49),
p. 299.
182 M. Novitch, op. cit. (note 39), p. 148.
183 Ibid., p. 147.
184 Cf. chapter 3, p. 72.