The Saber and Scroll Journal Volume 8, Number 3, Spring 2020 | Page 47

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Operation Reinhard into motion.” 4 The
lack of documentation handicapped
any effort for the Holocaust and the
Jews’ struggle within it to survive posterity;
from the Soviet perspective, this
only aided their attempts to suppress
knowledge of it within Union borders.
Sent from ghettos in large cities
(and later transferred from overwhelmed
Einsatzgruppen in the east),
Jews and others who suffered arrived at
these camps to meet their doom. Treblinka
was positioned a little over sixty
miles northeast of Warsaw and in operation
between the summer of 1942
and fall of 1943. The guards and staff
maintained the ruse that the camp was
merely a transit hub to other camps.
“The Jews who arrived at Treblinka
were misled about the true nature of
the camp. David Novodvorski, from
Warsaw, who was taken to Treblinka
and escaped during the first week of
August 1942, related, after returning to
the ghetto, that when his transport had
first arrived in the camp, no one was
suspicious. Only after two days did he
discover its true purpose.” 5
Bełżec was almost 200 miles
southeast of Warsaw and was in operation
throughout 1942. With “secrecy
and deception of the victims” 6 as
“cornerstones of [the] extermination
process,” deportees who arrived could
not escape their fate. Reichsminister
Goebbels noted in his diary on March
27, 1942, that “the former Gauleiter of
Vienna [Globocnik], who is to carry
[the measure of liquidation and forced
labor in the Lublin district] through, is
doing it with considerable circumspec-