I sometimes stood on the wall and saw them in the tube. “You see,” he then continued, still speaking with this extreme seriousness and obviously intent on finding a new truth within himself, “I rarely saw them as individuals. “No,” he said slowly, “I can’t say I ever thought that way.” He paused. “There were so many children did they ever make you think of your children, of how you would feel in the position of those parents?” Wirth said, ‘What shall we do with this garbage?’ I think unconsciously that started me thinking of them as cargo.” It had nothing to do with humanity-it couldn’t have it was a mass-a mass of rotting flesh.
#Franz stangl full
I remember standing there next to the pits full of blue-black corpses. “I think it started the day I first saw the Totenlager in Treblinka. “When do you think you began to think of them as cargo? The way you spoke earlier, of the day when you first came to Treblinka, the horror you felt seeing the dead bodies everywhere-they weren’t ‘cargo’ to you then, were they?” It was one of the few times in those weeks of talks that he made no effort to cloak his despair, and his hopeless grief allowed a moment of sympathy.
“They were cargo.” He raised and dropped his hand in a gesture of despair. "So you didn’t feel they were human beings?" At this moment he looked old and worn and sad. not knowing that in no time at all they’d all be dead.” He paused. “What do you mean?” But he went on without hearing, or answering me. I thought then, ‘Look at this this reminds me of Poland that’s just how the people looked, trustingly, just before they went into the tins. They were very close to my window, one crowding the other, looking at me through that fence. The cattle in the pens, hearing the noise of the train, trotted up to the fence and stared at the train. “When I was on a trip once, years later in Brazil,” he said, his face deeply concentrated and obviously reliving the experience, “my train stopped next to a slaughterhouse. “Would it be true to say that you finally felt they weren’t really human beings?” I made myself concentrate on work, work, and again work.” “No, I don’t mean to of course, thoughts came. I took a large glass of brandy to bed with me each night and I drank.” “In the end, the only way to deal with it was to drink. “Even so, if you felt that strongly, there had to be times, perhaps at night, in the dark, when you couldn’t avoid thinking about it.” There were hundreds of ways to take one’s mind off it I used them all.” I repressed it all by trying to create a special place: gardens, new barracks, new kitchens, new everything: barbers, tailors, shoemakers, carpenters. It was months before I could look one of them in the eye. “To tell the truth,” he then said, slowly and thoughtfully, “one did become used to it.” “Would it be true to say that you were used to the liquidations?” In 1971, journalist Gitta Sereny interviewed Franz Stangl, who had been the commandant of the death camp at Sobibór and, later, the camp at Treblinka.