SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR 83
the amount of “death-gas” showered on the victims, and starting, once
all inside were dead, the machinery opening the gas chamber floor, thereby
making corpses fall into “small carts” transporting them to the
mass graves.
Why would the inmates in camp III have misinformed Bahir and the
other Jews in camp I and II about the appearance and functioning of the
gas chambers?
Another recipient of smuggled-out letters was the young Stanis�aw
Szmajzner who migrated to Brazil after the war, where he published an
account of Sobibór in Portuguese and also appeared as a witness in the
extradition trials against Franz Stangl and Gustav Wagner. Szmajzner
claims that a friend of his working in camp III named Abrão (Abraham)
bribed the Ukrainian guard Klat to deliver messages for him. One of
them describes the killing process in detail, with the victims being murdered
with exhaust gas from “a large Diesel engine.” 185 While the victims
are gassed, dragged out from the chambers and thrown into “immense
ditches,” the SS “monsters” are “delirious with happiness, as if
they were at the opera.” 186
Abrão provided his friend with the following information in a later
letter: 187
“The manner through which the Jews were exterminated – asphyxiated
by the combustion gases of a Diesel engine – had been
abolished. They had also modified the bathroom-slaughterhouse and
they had closed the hole in the wall through which went the exhaustpipe
of the motor which had been taken away. Besides, they had installed
a moveable skylight [188] in the ceiling of the death shed. As
they did not think one ‘bathroom’ was enough, the Nazis had erected
another, which already obeyed the above-mentioned specifications.
[…] Abraham went on to explain that, to direct the massacre, a chief
of operations had already been appointed, the cruel Bauer. His main
activities were those of checking, through the skylight, the exact
moment when the shed was filled to saturation. At that moment he
issued an order, and the door was hermetically closed. Next he
opened the skylight, threw a can of gas on the compact mass of condemned
people, and closed it again. The gas was the deadly Zyklon
185 Cf. chapter 2.3.5.
186 S. Szmajzner, op. cit. (note 31), pp. 152f.
187 Ibid., pp. 190f.
188 Evidently meaning a skylight that can be opened.