Jankiel Wiernik - Absurd claim re arms and legs

[HansHill]

If the mods decide to merge this with the existing Jankiel Wiernik thread, that's understandable. Re-reading through A Year At Treblinka, I remembered this claim:

It often happened that an arm or a leg fell off when we tied straps around them in order to drag the bodies away.

- Chapter 3

From preceding paragraphs it is clear that this is to drag bodies towards graves, so this was after a gassing. The implication here seems to be the bodies after a gassing had time to decompose, or in conjunction with the Carbon Monoxide gas, the arms and legs were "weakened" somehow (?) and were removed during the moving process.

Gentlemen what are our thoughts?

[pilgrimofdark]

All part of the trick so the Jews wouldn't suspect anything.

When Jews arrived at the camp, they'd witness:

• piles of dead, decomposing bodies
• the stench of decay
• vermin and bugs crawling all over the corpses
• rotting limbs falling off
• Ukrainians on the rooftops pointing machine guns at them

According to the official history, this experience reminded Jews so much of the shtetls and ghettos where they were used to living, that it gave them a false sense of security.

So they were tricked when they saw the fake train station with the fake signs to Bialystok and Palestine, and were given a piece of soap and a towel, then told to stand in line naked for 3 hours in the winter, while a faint scent of chlorine emanated from the bathhouses.

[Wetzelrad]

It's cartoonish, like much of what he wrote.

To be as charitable as possible to Wiernik, he would have to be referring either to the corpses he claimed to have seen on arrival at Treblinka ("The camp yard was littered with corpses") or some that arrived shortly thereafter by train ("Late in the afternoon another train arrived from Miedzyrzecz (Mezrich), but 80 per cent of its human cargo consisted of corpses.") This allows that they may have already been dead for a couple days. The other four groups of people or bodies he described by this point were all selected and killed after he arrived in camp so could not be decomposed.

Wiernik says he carried some corpses "out of the train" on his first day, then on the second day he was assigned to drag corpses "to their graves". This continued for "four days". So at the latest this could only be a description of his fifth day in camp.

Could corpses begin to decompose over five to seven days in August weather? That is possible. There is plenty of literature about this. They could smell bad and have maggots. Their skin could become degloved when handled by humans, a detail that Wiernik did not mention. But the literature has very little to say about limbs becoming detached in handling. This article in the Encyclopedia of Forensic and Legal Medicine twice mentions that when moving bodies their limbs can detach, first in the context of "significant decomposition" and second in a body that is "severely decomposed".

Unfortunately there are no numbers to go along with this, but it is difficult to imagine how bodies could reach a state of "severe" decomposition in the short timeframes described. It is also against common sense. Decay naturally starts at the outside of the body and in wet organs. Limb joints should not be one of the first things to decay.

I also can't see any reason why a pile of "mangled bodies" would be left in open view of the train station, as Wiernik described. Nor why the killing methods would be so diverse: blunt weapons, machineguns, and gassing, for different groups at the same time.