Szajn-Lewin, Eugenia

Eugenia Szajn-Lewin (1909 — 1944) was a Jewish journalist who lived in the Warsaw Ghetto and kept a diary of important events during this time. She was killed during the Warsaw uprising in 1944. On the rumors circulating about Treblinka, she wrote in her diary in late 1942 (Szajn-Lewin, pp. 83f.):

The worst thing is death in Treblinka. By now, all know of Treblinka. There they cook people alive. They know by now that Bigan has escaped from Treblinka. […]

He [Bigan] will build halls like the ones in Treblinka. Everything will be modern: the boilers that are heated by current, the steam-gas in there, the floor movable and sloping. ‘There I will drive in the Germans, all naked. Many, many Germans, so that every corner is made use of, every centimeter.’ And from the boilers the gaseous steam is conducted through the pipes, the boilers are red, and the steam… a hellish boiling bath. Four minutes suffice, then the floor flap automatically drops down, and the slimy mass of red, curled bodies flows away into the cesspit. And finished, the pits are simply filled with chlorine, and there is no more trace of what was once alive. ‘All this lasts only seven minutes, you hear me?’

However, the orthodoxy insists that mass murder in the Treblinka Camp was committed using Diesel-engine exhaust; the facility’s floors were not collapsible (a claim more frequently associated with the Sobibór Camp); and the corpses had to be hand-carried from the gas chambers to the mass graves. No Bigan who escaped from Treblinka is known, and if someone really escaped from there and brought news from what was going on at Treblinka, why was this news so terribly distorted?