Witness Teigman: Actually, they were replaced. But, at the end, when they took us into the building, after Stangl's speech, they retained the team permanently, in fact. But, day after day, they would execute some and add others to the team.

Q. For a special reason, or just at random?

A. Usually, there were special reasons. And there were also times when they did so for their amusement. It is impossible to define this accurately.

Presiding Judge: Thank you, Mr. Teigman, you have concluded your testimony.

Attorney General: I call the next witness - Mr. Eliahu Rosenberg.

[The witness is sworn.]

Presiding Judge: What is your full name?

Witness: Eliahu Rosenberg.

Attorney General: You are a storeman by profession?

Witness Rosenberg: Yes.

Q. Where do you work?

A. At Jaffa port.

Presiding Judge: How old are you now?

Witness Rosenberg: Thirty-five.

Attorney General: Until 1942, you were in Warsaw?

Witness Rosenberg: Yes.

Q. And on 11 July 1942, you were deported to Treblinka?

A. It was in the summer.

Q. When you reached the railway station at Treblinka, in the midst of the great confusion, did a Jew come up to you and say something to you?

A. He did not say it to me, but to his friend, an acquaintance of his, in Yiddish: "Moshe, chap a besem un rateve sich!" (Moshe, grab a broom and save yourself!)

Q. And what did that man do?

A. This man took hold of a broom that was lying at the side, went into the freight cars and began sweeping the cars.

Q. What did you do?

A. I overheard this. At that time, an SS man arrived, by the name of Lolka, that's how he was called there.

Q. Who was he?

A. Kurt Franz. He passed by with a Peitsche (whip) in his hand, and took men from the ranks who were sitting on the floor, several men, about thirty of them. When I saw this, I jumped into this group, with a parcel in my hand, and I stood there together with them.

Q. Were your mother and three sisters in the same transport?

A. Yes, Sir. When we alighted from the freight cars amidst the shouting, they transferred my mother and my sisters to the left-hand side. I managed to exchange one word with my mother: "If you reach any place, write a letter to a Pole named Kowalski in Warsaw, and I shall also send a letter to you, and in this way we shall know where we are."

Q. You thought you would meet again?

A. I thought we would meet again, and that I would know where she was.

Q. You did not know that you were in an extermination camp?

A. No, Sir. I did not know.

Q. Did you see your mother or your sisters after this?

A. No, Sir. I got to know that they were in a particular grave.

Q. Where were they buried - in Treblinka?

A. Yes.

Q. What happened to the group which you joined?

A. When Kurt Franz chose the working party of thirty men, when he finished this selection, he began to shout and ask: "Who came in here without permission?" Naturally, none of these men knew who the extra one was. I was then saved from certain death. He made a sign to the Ukrainian standing by his side, I don't know what it was, but they began chasing us towards the first camp. Inside the first camp, they told us to throw down the parcels we had with us, and we began sorting the parcels, an enormous heap of parcels: shoes separately, clothing separately, children's wear separately, gold separately, and all kinds of articles separately. And I worked in this way the whole day.

Q. And the next day?

A. The next day, we went out in the morning - it was 11 o'clock - to a roll-call. After the roll-call, they directed us to a heap, to do roughly the same thing - to sort out all these goods. After a short while, SS Scharfuehrer Matthias appeared and shouted: "Twenty men volunteers." I was standing near him. I was afraid that as I was standing near him and if I did not step forward, he would take revenge on me or strike me. I stepped forward. He said: "You are going out to light work for ten minutes." They then took us to Camp 1, the death camp.

Q. Where did they take you?

A. They took us towards the gate which was camouflaged with pine branches.

Q. Please look behind you, Mr. Rosenberg, are you able to identify what this picture is?

A. That is the Treblinka camp.

Q. Please be good enough to approach the picture. You say this is the Treblinka camp. Which way did they take you to the camouflaged gate? Will you please point to it?

A. [Points] The gate was here, at this place, camouflaged with pine branches. We reached this point. When they opened the gate, we went in, here. All of us were automatically in a state of shock, for we saw a pile of corpses. And the German Matthias began shouting to this group - "An die Tragen" (to the stretchers). We did not understand what was going on. We began running around the bodies. The Germans and the Ukrainians who were present there hit us. We did not know what we were supposed to do.

The Jews who worked on removing the bodies said to us: "Take hold of the stretchers and put a body on each." We seized a stretcher, another person and I, I don't know what his name was, we went up to this pile, and we took a body away on a stretcher. We walked to the graves at this spot - 150 to 200 metres to the grave, and we threw the bodies down below.

Q. Please show us where you lived in Treblinka 2 subsequently.

A. In this hut [points to the hut between the building containing the gas chambers and the watch tower].

Q. What was the depth of the grave into which you cast the bodies?

A. The grave was six to seven metres deep. It was built with a slope, in a conical shape.

Q. And throughout the day you worked moving the bodies?

A. The entire day I worked in transferring the bodies from the gas chambers to the graves.

Q. And you also worked on this afterwards?

A. The work was somewhat strange. When we left for work in the morning, SS men divided us into working groups. There were three kinds of labour there: there were the gas chambers, the transfer of the bodies to the graves, and after that, there was the burning of the bodies.

Q. On the first night, the men who arrived together with you could not overcome the shock?

A. Correct.

Q. What did they do?

A. Many of them hanged themselves with their belts. One asked the next to pull the chair from underneath him, so that he should not suffer; we helped each other.

Q. Did you witness the whole process of the extermination?

A. I saw the entire process.

Q. Describe it briefly to the Court.

A. The people arrived from this famous "Himmelstrasse," which led from Camp 1 to Camp 2. In the Himmelstrasse, SS men, the entire staff of Camp 2, stood there with dogs, with whips and bayonets. The people walked past in silence. That was at the beginning, in summer 1942. They did not know where they were going. When they entered the gas chambers, two Ukrainians stood next to the entrance - one was Ivan and the other was Nikolai. They introduced the gas.

Q. Where did the gas come from?

A. The gas came from an engine.

Q. They did not bring it from outside - it was produced on the spot?

A. It was Ropa - Ropa gas.

Q. Was it manufactured by an engine, from the exhaust of a diesel engine?

A. Yes. It was gas from an engine. They put in Ropa, which was a kind of oil, a crude oil, and the fumes entered the gas chambers. The people who were the last to enter the gas chambers, the very last, received stabs in the bodies from the bayonets, since the last persons already saw what was going on inside and did not want to enter. Four hundred people were put into one small gas chamber. And when they forced them in, they, on their part, pressed inwards and in this way reached the full capacity, so that only with difficulty could the outer door of the chamber be shut.

When they shut them in, we were standing on the outside. We only heard cries of "Shema Yisrael," "Father," "Mother"; thirty-five minutes later they were dead. Two Germans stood there listening to what was going on inside. Afterwards they said, "Alles schlaeft" (They are all asleep). They ordered us to open the door. We opened the door and removed the bodies.

Q. At a certain stage they began burning the bodies in the camp. Is that correct?

A. That was in February 1943.

Q. Did someone visit the camp?

A. In January 1943, Himmler arrived with a group of senior officers. They inspected the camp. After their visit an order was given to remove the bodies from the graves.

Q. After the visit, did they begin exhuming the bodies from the graves?

A. After the visit, they began removing the bodies from the graves with dredgers.

Q. Where did they remove them from - are you able to point that out on the sketch?

A. Yes. Here [he points to the pits] were the graves, and here were the incinerators. The dredgers removed the bodies, dumped them on the ground, and here, using wooden stretchers, we threw the bodies and parts of bodies down next to the incinerators and with pitchforks threw the bodies into the incinerators which were set alight with matches.

Presiding Judge: What are these walls between the pits - was this how it was?

Witness Rosenberg: These were piles of sand which were dug from the graves.

Attorney General: Please return to the witness stand, Mr. Rosenberg.

During the time you were in Treblinka, did a transport arrive every day?

Witness Rosenberg: In 1942, a transport arrived every day, until the winter of 1943. Then the daily transports stopped, and they used to arrive once in two or three days.

Q. How many men worked with you in removing the bodies from the gas chambers?

A. In Camp 2, there were roughly two hundred men.

Q. How many were engaged in this work?

A. All of them.

Q. Did the people who arrived at Treblinka remain there overnight, or were they exterminated the same day?

A. They were exterminated the same day. And when a large transport arrived, they put them into the gas chambers, and we took them out the next morning. They did not remain alive until the following morning.

Presiding Judge: I did not understand that. When were these people from the last transport exterminated - that same evening?

Witness Rosenberg: When the last transport arrived, it was already night-time - they evidently were afraid to let us work at night, so they put us into our huts, and those who arrived in the evening were put into the gas chambers at night, and we transferred them to the graves in the morning.

Q. When did they introduce the gas?

A. At night.

Attorney General: Where did the people who were exterminated in Treblinka come from?

Witness Rosenberg: At the beginning, they came from Poland, from Warsaw, Czestochowa, from the small towns. Afterwards from almost the whole of Europe - they came from Belgium, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Holland and Serbia.

Q. How do you know that?

A. When I removed the bodies from the gas chambers, the people, mostly women, had hidden all kinds of documents and money in their private parts, and they fell out afterwards, and we saw them. There were many cases of people from the gas chambers who remained alive.

Q. What happened to them?

A. Those who survived were mainly children, small children who slipped to the floor, and when we opened the gas chambers and removed the bodies, we saw children underneath who had remained alive. The Germans took them away and shot them.

Dr. Servatius: I have no questions to the witness.

Judge Halevi: Which part of the camp did Himmler visit?

Witness Rosenberg: We were then spread throughout the entire camp; we were engaged then on all sorts of tasks. The Germans came that day and made us go into our hut. It was about 11.00 a.m. This is the hut here [indicates it on the sketch]. On the other side, there were small apertures in the door. The hut was open. Himmler stood precisely on this spot with all his entourage. From here, it was a distance of seven to ten metres, and I looked at him. He stood speaking there for about ten minutes, he gave some orders, he indicated something with his hand and left.

Q. Who put the people into the gas chambers?

A. I have already pointed out that these buildings were the gas chambers. There were three chambers in this one. Four hundred people went in here. The people came from the Himmelstrasse, from the place we called "Schlauch", they went in here, there was a corridor inside, and they were pushed into the gas chambers. Ukrainians and Germans pushed them with bayonets, so that they should enter more quickly, so that they should press inside fast, and after that they shut them in.

Q. Did SS men do that - or the Ukrainians?

A. Both together.

Q. Were the Ukrainians in uniform?

A. Yes, they were in uniform.

Q. What uniform?

A. Black.

Q. Like that of the SS men?

A. No, the SS men wore green uniforms. And they had a symbol - the death head.

Q. And who introduced the gas - only the two Ukrainians?

A. Yes, Ivan and Nikolai.

Q. Always?

A. Yes, always.

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