Documents on the Here as elsewhere, according to conformist history, the Nazis did a thorough job of erasing all trace that they had ever been here. March 7, 2007 (Wednesday) Wlodawa – Sobibór – Lublin – Warsaw (Poland) AFTER breakfast I set out with Alan to visit the site at Sobibór, seven kilometers away. He is nervousness personified. He is the only person I know who has felt-penned a web of cracks onto both wing-mirrors of his car to discourage would-be wing-mirror-thieves.

That’s Poland for you. The land of car thieves: “Welcome to Warsaw,” goes the local joke. “Your car is already here somewhere.” His car boot is filled with leaky cans of diesel, which is good thinking. But he is surprised when I fold the black woollen overcoat I have borrowed onto the back seat, instead of consigning it to the car’s boot, and he agonizes perpetually that somebody may steal it one night.

We drive out to Sobibór in weak winter sunshine through idyllic sandy pastures and then birch forests. The site is windswept and remote, another logging camp. Not an unattractive place to die, I remark to Alan — because it seems clear that a lot of people have at one time died here. Next to the little Sobibór railroad station, which has five or six tracks and sidings, there are two or three houses for logging workers, built in the post-war communist shoebox style.

Three or four more houses face the little station, but they are all post-war. The villa occupied in 1942 by Franz Stangl and the other Sobibór commandant Franz Reichleitner , a green structure, is still standing here, its light green roof just visible above the railroad waggons. Not far away, a modern museum building dominates the little parking lot, but it is open only from May to October.

A few feet from the museum are loose concrete covers with iron handles, and there are possibly wells or cesspits beneath. Like Treblinka, the site is set deep in the forest.

Most of the trees are pre-World War II and deeper into the forest we find at least two man-made pits or depressions round the back of the site, each about fifty yards long, three yards wide, and two or three feet deep ( see below ), with much younger trees growing on their floor, only a few years old and flanked by much older coniferous trees.

Here as elsewhere, according to conformist history, the Nazis did a thorough job of erasing all trace that they had ever been here after the camp closed, which was after a prisoner-uprising

on October 14, 1943. One plaque rather oddly proclaims that “250,000 Jews and 1,000 Poles” (sic) were killed here. I suspect that the American Jewish Committee had a hand in the wording; they never did like each other.

The now familiar tasteless monuments mark what they estimated to have been the heart of the Sobibór site: one is a thirty-foot tall square tower with sides of crazy-paving slabs, innocent of any entrances or inscription, another is a statue built of three or four terra-cotta stone blocks piled on top of each other, and hewn roughly into the shape of a woman and possibly a child; a hundred yards or more away, between them and the pits we found, there is the main monument, a round shallow

dome-shaped mound, evidently representing a heap of ashes, about a hundred meters in diameter. The area is untidy with a litter of candles and receptacles, a beer bottle etc, left behind by the living visitors who have come to commemorate the dead. I am reminded of what Generaloberst Alfred Jodl wrote in his last letter from Nuremberg, “The dead march way out in front, followed by the living” — voraus die Toten, dahinter die Lebenden .

THEY have now cleared a broad avenue through the forest, quite recently, and lined it with young firs — they look like Christmas trees — and small football-sized stones, each with a memorial plaque pinned to it naming a family’s or individual’s departure date from Holland or Germany and the date of their arrival here (presumably from transport records), the latest date I saw being July 1943, the earliest around March or June 1942; for example, there is one plate for a Louis de Jong and his

family from Arnhem, Holland. They are mostly Dutch or German, very few Poles. No plates mark the sites of the alleged gas chambers. Alan points out one site, about twenty yards square, but I remark that there is a tree stump in its center that is clearly older than sixty years (which does not mean that the other clearings would not have been large enough). Alan says he picked up bone fragments on earlier visits, but I doubt he has the forensic knowledge to recognize such things.

The whole site reveals no forensic evidence of homicidal activities, to supplement the relatively strong documentary evidence which exists. Barbed wire has been found and archeological digs and probes have provided evidence of bone fragments indicating possible gravesites. They found 1,200 small-arms cartridge cases where the gas chambers were believed to be (possibly used to finish off survivors of gassings, it is surmised).

They also found many such small-arms cartridge cases near the Lazarett (camp hospital). These are on display in the museum, says Alan, along with photos of the camp’s dramatis personae . The principal sources of information on its homicidal activities are Franz Stangl , the commandant here (and later at Treblinka), and survivors like Stanislaw Szmajzner and Thomas Blatt , and now of course the Höfle document . WE drive at a leisurely pace from Sobibór