Word: treblinka
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...brand of cruelty to stand out amid the horrors of the Holocaust, but "Ivan the Terrible" was no ordinary sadist. As a Nazi guard, Ivan earned his sobriquet by ushering thousands of prisoners - sometimes hacking them with a sword as they passed - into the gas chambers at Poland's Treblinka death camp. After the war, he vanished. Decades later, in the late 1970s, U.S. authorities fingered a suspect: John Demjanjuk, a retired autoworker residing in a Cleveland suburb...
...scarred witness in Shoah. One of them, Simon Srebnik, was a boy of 13 at the time. Returning to Chelmno, he visits townspeople who were once enchanted by his beautiful singing voice. They also remember the screams of Jews locked in the local church before being taken away. At Treblinka, site of the Nazis' most efficient gas chambers, villagers recall standing by the railbed watching Jews inside the trains. With a smile, the villagers would draw their fingers quickly across their necks: a warning and a wicked taunt to those about...
...chambers, the regimen of the SS killer-bureaucrats--and arranged them in a vast mosaic that exposes but does not explain the mystery of extermination. Many of the details are riveting. Former SS Officer Franz Suchomel (whom Lanzmann filmed with a camera concealed in his shoulder bag) sings the Treblinka marching song--"No Jew knows that today"--and describes a pit that consumed discarded bodies: "There was always a fire in the pit. With rubbish, paper and gasoline, people burn very well." Auschwitz Survivor Rudolf Vrba manages a smile of roguish irony as he recalls the Germans' insistence that Jewish...
...second Jewish survivor of Chelmno, "thanks God for what remains, and that he can forget." But Lanzmann will not let him forget; he even questions the man's fixed smile. Finally, Podchlebnik surrenders to the director's ghoulishness and quietly sobs. Abraham Bomba was once a barber at Treblinka, charged with cutting the hair of women and children in the gas chambers immediately before their execution. Today he cuts hair in Israel, and in a bizarre "photo op," Lanzmann asks Bomba to display his Holocaust tonsorial technique on the customer who now sits in his barber chair. Later, overwhelmed...
Bergen-Belsen was one of some 100 camps created to effect Hitler's Final Solution, the extermination of the Jewish people. The terrible roster of major concentration camps includes Auschwitz in Poland, where 4 million people were murdered; Treblinka, also in Poland, which had the capacity to kill 25,000 people a day; Buchenwald, near Weimar in eastern Germany. The assembly-line exterminations of the Jews began by the summer of 1942; by the end of the war in May of 1945, 6 million Jews had died, nearly two-thirds of the entire European Jewish population. At least 4.5 million...