Unlike Auschwitz-Birkenau, with its massive slave-labor force, the Jews selected to live and work were a small fraction of those deported to the death camp. In the first phase of the camp’s existence, the Jewish work brigade consisted of 100–150 men. In the second phase, a total of 500 prisoners in Camps I and II were utilized, the vast majority of this number employed on removing corpses from the gas chambers and burying them. There was also a small orchestra.
From the initial transports, Christian Wirth selected between 100 to 150 Jewish men to form various work brigades; they were used to unload people from the cattle cars, collect together their luggage, another work brigade to drag the bodies out of the gas chambers, then throwing them into the tip-up trucks, in the early phase, and bury them in mass graves.
Another work brigade took the collected luggage and belongings of the victims to an abandoned locomotive shed near the Belzec station. In this building, everything was sorted and stored prior to shipment to the main Aktion Reinhardt depot on the Alter Flugplatz in Lublin, which was near the Lublin concentration camp.
Once a transport arrived at Belzec, it was met by SS guards, Trawnikimänner, and Jewish workers under the supervision of the so-called Zugsführers—these were the Jewish supervisors of the permanent Jewish work brigades. Jewish prisoners helped with the undressing, and eight barbers were employed to shave the women’s and girls’ hair before they were gassed in the chambers. The men had been gassed first. A small team of dentists, armed with pincers, extracted gold teeth from the corpses.
Rudolf Reder recalled the living quarters for the work brigades:
In the camp there were two barracks for the death crew, one for general workers and the second for the so-called skilled workers. Each barrack held 250 workers. The bunks were two-level. Both barracks were the same. The bunks were bare planks with a small tilted board under the head. Not far from the barracks stood the kitchen, and further on the warehouse, administration laundry, stitching workshop, and finally the elegant barracks for the askars (Trawnikimänner).[95]
Chaim Hirszmann, deported with his family from Zaklikow in early November 1942, recalled how he was selected to work as a barber, and among those who emptied the gas chambers; he testified before the Jewish Historical District Commision in Lublin on March 19, 1946:
The train entered the camp. Other SS men took us off the train. They led us all together—women, men, children—to a barrack. We were told to undress before we go to the bath. I understood immediately what that meant. After undressing we were told to form two groups, one of men and the other of women with children. An SS man, with the strike of a horsewhip, sent the men to the right or to the left, to death—to work. I was selected to death, I didn’t know it then. Anyway, I believed that both sides meant the same—death. But, when I jumped in the indicated direction, an SS man called me and said, “Du bist ein Militärmensch, dich können wir brauchen” (“You have a military bearing, we could use you.”)
We, who were selected to work, were told to dress. I and some other men were appointed to take people to the kiln. I was sent with the women. The Ukrainian Schmidt, an Ethnic German, was standing at the entrance to the gas chamber and hitting with a knout every entering woman. Before the door was closed, he fired a few shots from his revolver and then the door closed automatically and forty minutes later we went in and carried the bodies out to a special ramp. We shaved the hair of the bodies, which were afterwards packed into sacks and taken away by Germans.
The children were thrown into the chamber simply on the women’s heads. In one of the ‘transports’ taken out of the gas chamber, I found the body of my wife and I had to shave her hair. The bodies were not buried on the spot, the Germans waited until more bodies were gathered. So that day we did not bury.[96]
Rudolf Reder recalled how the money and valuables were collected and sent on from the death camp:
Valuables, money and dollars were taken out of the storehouse each day. The SS-men collected it themselves and put it into suitcases which workers carried to Belzec, to the headquarters. A Gestapo officer went first, with Jewish workers carrying the suitcases. It was not far, only a twenty-minute walk, to the Belzec station. The camp in Belzec, that is, the torture chamber in Belzec, was under this headquarters. Jews working in administration said that the whole shipment of gold, valuables and money was sent to Lublin, where the main headquarters was, with authority over the Belzec headquarters.[97]
Reder continued his account:
The torn clothes of the unfortunate Jewish victims were collected by workers and carried to the warehouse. There were ten workers there, who had to unstitch every piece of clothing very carefully, under the supervision and whips of the SS, who between themselves divided up the money found…. The Jewish workers sorting and unstitching the clothing couldn’t misappropriate anything, and didn’t want to.[98]
Chaim Hirszmann told his second wife Pola about his experiences at Belzec, and she later recalled:
The prisoners were constantly beaten and every day many of the workers from the regular staff were killed. Typhus was prevailing, but one had to avoid admitting the disease. The sick were murdered on the spot. Getting medical treatment or lying down was out of the question. Sick with typhus and with a fever of 40 degree Celsius, my husband worked and somehow managed to conceal his conditions from the Germans……….
Two Czechoslovak Jewesses were working in the camp office. They too, had never entered the camp. They even enjoyed a certain freedom of movement. They often went with the SS men to town to arrange different matters. One day they were told that they would visit the camp. The SS men showed them around the camp and in a certain moment they led the women to the gas chamber and when they were inside, the door closed behind them. They finished with them in spite of the promise that they would live.
The Germans ordered the prisoners to set up a football team and on Sundays games were being played. Jews played with SS men, the same ones who tortured and murdered them. The SS men treated this as a matter of sport, and when they lost a game, they had no complaints……. There were also women employed in the camp, but their number was much smaller than the number of men. There were no children at all. Women worked. They were selected from the transports.[99]
Reder described the workers who toiled in the extermination area of Camp II:
I belonged to the permanent death crew. There were five hundred of us all together. Only 250 were ‘skilled’ workers, but of these 200 worked at jobs for which they didn’t have to be specialists: digging graves and dragging corpses. We dug the pits, the enormous mass graves, and dragged the bodies. Besides doing their work, the skilled workers also had to take part in this. We dug with shovels and there was also a machine that loaded sand and lifted it above ground level. The machine threw the sand out at the side of the grave. A sandpile formed, which was used to cover the graves, when they were filled with corpses. About 450 people were always occupied with the graves. It took one week to dig one grave.
Reder remembered the brutal guard Heini Schmidt, a Volksdeutsche, who supervised the grave diggers:
We were watched all the time we worked by a thug named Schmidt, who beat and kicked. If someone was not—in his opinion—working quick enough, he would order him to lie down and give him twenty-five lashes with the whip. He ordered him to count, and if he miscounted he gave him fifty instead of twenty-five. Fifty was too much for any tormented man to bear; the victim usually dragged himself to the barracks and died the next morning. This happened several times a day.
Also thirty to forty workers were shot each day. The physician usually submitted a list of those who were exhausted, or else the so-called Oberzugsführer, the main foreman of the prisoners, produced a list of ‘offenders’ so that thirty or forty died each day. They were led out to a grave at dinnertime and shot.[100]
He also recalled the tasks of the work brigade who had to remove the dead bodies from the gas chambers:
Aside from digging graves, it was the task of the death crew to pull the corpses out of the chambers, throw them into a high pile, and then drag them all the way to the graves. The ground was sandy. It took two workers to drag one corpse away. We had leather straps with buckles. We put the straps over the arms of the corpses and pulled. The heads often got caught in the sand. We were ordered to sling the corpses of small children over our shoulders two at a time and carry them that way. We left off digging graves when we dragged the corpses….. we had to work that way from early morning until dusk. Dusk ended the working day, because the ‘work’ was done only by daylight.[101]
Reder continued by describing how a typical working day started and continued:
At three-thirty in the morning, the askar sentry who walked around the barracks at night was already pounding on the door and shouting ‘Auf Heraus!’—before we could get out of bed, the thug Schmidt burst in and chased us out of the barracks with his riding crop. We ran out holding one shoe in our hands or barefoot. We usually hadn’t undressed, and we even slept in our shoes because we couldn’t have managed to get dressed in the morning.
At twelve noon we received a meal. We filed past two small windows. At the first one we got mugs, and at the second a half a litre of barley soup, in other words water, sometimes with a potato. Before dinner we had to sing songs; we also had to sing before the evening coffee.[102]
A typical working day ended thus:
In the evening the lights burned for half an hour. Then they were turned off. The Oberzugsführer prowled around the barracks with a whip and didn’t allow people to talk. We spoke very quietly with our neighbours. The crew was mostly made up of people whose wives, children and parents had been gassed. Many had managed to get a tallith and tefillin from the warehouse, and when the barracks was locked for the night, in the bunks we heard the murmur of the Kaddish prayer. We were saying prayers for the dead. Then it was quiet.[103]
He recalled how women workers were treated in Belzec:
In October a transport of Czech Jewish women arrived from Zamosc. There were several dozen women whose husbands worked in the death crew. A decision had been made to keep several dozen women from that last transport.
Forty were assigned to work in the kitchen, laundry and stitching workshop. They were not allowed any contact with their husbands. In the kitchen they peeled potatoes, washed pots and carried water. I don’t know what became of them. They surely shared the common fate. These were all educated women. They’d arrived with luggage. Some of them had portions of butter with them, they gave us whatever they had.
And they helped everyone who worked in the kitchen or near the kitchen. They lived in a small separate barracks and had a Zugsführerka over them. During work—I fixed stoves everywhere and went all around the camp—I saw how these women spoke with each other. They were not as mistreated as we were. Their work ended at dusk and they lined up in twos for soup and coffee. Like us they’d not had their own clothing taken away or been given striped uniforms.[104]