As a standard "feature" of the death camps, a camoflaged barbed wire
"tunnel" was used to funnel new victims into the gas chambers. At
Treblinka, the German and Ukrainian troops would beat the victims with
pipes and sticks to keep them moving.... One Treblinka survivor, who
wrote of his experiences in 1944 (See the reference and the bottom of
this article), described the process:

"To avoid the blows, the victems ran as fast as they could to the gas
chambers, the stronger pushing aside the weak. At the entrance to the
gas chambers stood ... Ivan Demaniuk and Nikolai, one armed with an
iron bar and the other with a sword, and they, too, urged the people
on with blows to push their way in -- 200-250 in a chamber of 16
square meters. When the gas chambers were full, the Unkrainians closed
the doors and started the engine. Twenty to twenty-five minutes later,
an SS man or one of the Ukrainians would peep into the chambers
through a window in the door. When they thought everyone had
suffocated, they orderd the Jewish prisoners to open the rear doors
and remove the bodies. When the doors were opened, all the corpses
were standing; because of the crowding and the way the victims grasped
one another, they were like a single clock of flesh." <1>

"To drown out the victims' screams on their way to the gas chambers --
so that they would not be heard throughout the camp -- the SS arranged
an orchestra."

<1> Jacob Wiernik, "A Yor in Treblinke" (A Year in Treblinka), New
    York, 1944, pp.20-21

Excerpted from....----------------------------------------------
BELZEC, SOBIBOR, TREBLINKA - the Operation Reinhard Death Camps
Indiana University Press - Yitzhak Arad, 1987. ISBN 0-253-3429-7
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