The other RA eyewitnesses don't mention anything specific about the muder method.
- Częstochowan: "death chamber" / "torment"
- Polish Krzepicki: bathhouse smelling of chlorine
- Nowodworski: "torment -- lying in a row" / "bath at about 4 o'clock"
- Rabinowicz: *unfinished sentence*
The November 1942 report states it's based on "dozens of survivors" and was written by two doctors of history and an accountant -- the highest-ranking members of the Oyneg Shabes group.
But no single eyewitness whose account has survived includes details upon which the report could have been based.
Wetzelrad wrote: ↑Wed Apr 22, 2026 8:50 pmNow unless someone can show me the "eyewitness" who provided this information to the Ringelblum group, I am forced to conclude it was their invention.
I would like to suggest the possibility that Wiernik wrote it, despite the anachronisms that requires. Wiernik at least would qualify as an eyewitness to the thirteen gas chambers.
I'm willing to push this into wild speculation territory and follow an opposite direction.
Supported in the literature:
Oyneg Shabes is preparing the November 1942 report, creating/repeating unsubstantiated rumors. They assign Auerbach to expand Krzepicki's account with the intent to publish as a "secret brochure."
She writes the draft, but it's never completed for publishing. Some details never align with the November report.
Events overtake the project -- second deportation
aktion in January, Ringelblum leaves ghetto in February, Auerbach leaves in March, Krzecpiki dies in the ghetto uprising in April.
Not supported (yet):
Auerbach, still working with the remnants of Oyneg Shabes and the Jewish-Polish underground on the Aryan side, makes the Krzepicki material available.
Using it as a base, Krzepicki is rewritten in 1944 and extended with the new rumors/information -- Katyn, Himmler visit, mass cremations, revolt.
Instead of Krzepicki the Jewish anti-German resistance fighter, the repurposed account is attributed to Wiernik the Jewish anti-German communist propagandist.
(There are only tenuous links so far between Auerbach, Wiernik, the Bermans, Zegota, etc. So this is all a hypothesis where details would need to be filled in, if they even exist.)
Supported again:
By August 1944, the Soviets have a copy of Wiernik's book and have translated it into Russian. They use it extensively during their August-September investigations at Treblinka. Numerous witnesses remember highly-specific details from Wiernik's book, whether accurately or in somewhat degraded form.
Key Questions
When did the 10-chamber building first appear? In the November 1942 report?
It was supposedly completed near the end or after the Great Deportation of Warsaw's Jews (attributing murder of 2 million Jews to the 3-chamber building). In a couple reports, the stated purpose was extending the mass murder to non-Jewish Poles.
Disclaimer: I'm taking all these accounts at face value to evaluate the development/spread of the information. If someone's argument is none of this happened, so it doesn't matter, that's just a different topic. I generally also don't like using "irony quotes" because then it's unclear what is irony and what is an actual quote from a source.