Abraham Bomba, Barber of
Treblinka
By Bradley R. Smith
[Chapter 11 from Confessions of a Holocaust
Revisionist]
I HAVE NOW SEEN the complete nine and one half hour documentary
Shoah, which purports to be "An Oral History of the
Holocaust." It was produced, directed, narrated and is now being
promoted by Claude Lanzmann. From the newspapers I gather that
Lanzmann is an assimilated French Jew who speaks neither Hebrew nor
Yiddish. He is presently 60 years old. He worked as a journalist for
many years in association with Jean Paul Sartre and Les Temps
Modernes until 1970, when he turned his attention to making
movies.
That is, Claude Lanzmann worked for twenty-five years in the eye of
the intellectual storms that swept across France following the end of
World War II. As a journalist he certainly learned during those
twenty-five years how to conduct professional interviews. He
certainly learned, through his associations with Sartre, de Beauvior,
Camus and those who criticized the great triad, how to pursue a train
of thought, considering the high-powered company he kept. It's a real
eye-opener then to watch Lanzmann reveal his intellectual corruption
in scene after scene of this shoddy movie, which he claims took ten
years to complete.
My favorite interview in Shoah is the one with Abraham Bomba, the
Barber of Treblinka. I'm not alone in my fondness for Bomba either.
Many critics have commented on his performance. They gave him rave
reviews. George Will of ABC Television, for example, wrote in the
Washington Post that Bomb's narrative was "the most stunning
episode in this shattering film."
Some eyewitnesses to alleged gas chamber horrors recount stories that
are so lacking in credibility that they can be dismissed out of hand.
Others repeat stories that cannot easily be shown to be false but
reveal the characters of the tale-bearers to be so sniveling and
shameless that one feels compromised by even listening to them. Bomba
is becoming an important character in the
Holocaust-survivor-eyewitness scenario in that he embodies much of
both of these characteristics.
The way Bomba tells the story, he had been interned in Treblinka
about four weeks when the Germans announced that they wanted some
barbers for a special detail. Bomba volunteered, of course, then
helped the SS identify 16 other Jewish barber among the internees.
They were all taken to the second part of the camp where the alleged
gas chamber was. They were led inside the gas chambers where a Kapo
(almost certainly a Jew; note 1) explained that
the 17 barbers were to shear the hair from the woman who would arrive
to be gassed. Lanzmann asked Bomba about the greatest murder weapon
of all time, the German homicidal poison gas chamber.
Lanzmann: How did it look, the gas chamber?
Bomba: It was not a big room, around twelve feet by twelve
feet. (note 2)
And there you have it. Claude Lanzmann is finished with his
in-depth investigation of how the Treblinka gas chamber looked. It
takes all kinds. If I had been in Lanzamann's shoes I could have
thought of a few more questions to ask about "how it looked."
Particularly if I had some feelings about the stories that maybe a
million of my kinsmen had been exterminated in it. Maybe I would have
wanted to know what Bomba could tell me about what material the walls
of the gas chamber were made of - what the roof was made of. How
would Bomba describe the ventilation system? Where and how, exactly,
did the "gas" enter the room? Maybe Bomba would have remembered if
the room had been illuminated or not. If it had been, how? What were
the doors made of? How did they seal so that the "gas" could not
escape? As historians have not bothered to ask these simple
questions, Lanzmann could have done their work for them and helped
uncover one of the great mysteries of the 20th century -- how the
fabled Nazi gas chambers really looked.
As to whether Bomba is being honest about having seen a gas chamber
at Treblinka consider Rachel Auerbach's description of that gas
chamber in her The Death Camp Treblinka (note
3). Auerbach is given a place of honor in this, the most
comprehensive book published on the camp. As she was (she died in
1976) a permanent research staff member of the Yad Vashem Holocaust
Memorial museum in Jerusalem, her description of the gas chamber
should not be dismissed out of hand.
... The floor of the gas chamber was sloping and
slippery. The first ones in would slip and fall, never to rise
again. Those who followed would topple over them ... About 25 to
45 minutes later -- [after the "gassing" began, that is]
-- the chutes on the other side could be opened and the corpses
tumbled out."
It would seem that while he was being interviewed for Shoah
Mr. Bomba forgot about how slippery the floor is supposed to have
been in his little gas chamber. It seems he forgot how it slanted
steeply in the direction of the chutes. As a matter of fact, Mr.
Bomba forgot to mention the chutes. If Lanzmann had read the
literature even superficially he would have been aware that Bomba was
leaving a few things out of his story. As Lanzmann claims he worked
for ten years on Shoah, I'm going to guess that Lanzmann is
aware of Auerbach's description of the Treblinka gas chamber and
chooses to ignore it.
In any event, once Lanzmann's curiosity was satisfied about how the
gas chamber looked (not big), he wanted to know happened next.
Lanzmann: Can you describe precisely?
Bomba: Describe precisely ... We were waiting there ...
inside the gas chamber ... until the transport came in. Women with
children pushed into that place ... They were undressed, naked,
without clothes, without anything else -- completely naked --
because they come from the undressing barrack ... where they had
undressed themselves.
Lanzmann: What did you feel the first time you saw all
those naked women?
Bomba: I felt that accordingly I got to do what they ...
[Germans] ... told me, to cut their hair ...
There you have in a nut shell how eye witnesses to the gas chamber
atrocities typically describe their behavior. They did whatever the
Germans or anyone else requested of them. When they received a
request to help prepare their kinsmen -- and even their own families
as well as shall soon see -- to be exterminated, or genocided or
whatever, these fellows say they hopped right to it. I don't believe
them, but that's the persona that they have chosen to project to the
world at large. In the neighborhood where I grew up men who behaved
like Bomba claims he behaved would have been spit on. In the
upside-down world of Holocaust survivordom, however , the Abraham
Bombas are seen as martyrs and even heroes. It's a peculiar
psychological slant on manly behavior.
Lanzmann expresses a little more curiosity about how Bomba cut his (
for hasn't Bomba according to his own story become a working partner
in the alleged genocide of his people?) victims hair than he did
about how the gas chamber looked. He asked if Bomba had shaved them,
if he had used scissors, and if there had not been mirrors available
inside the gas chamber. Bomba said that he did not shave the women,
and that the Germans had not provided the barbers with mirrors.
Lanzmann: "There were no mirrors?"
Bomba: "No, there were no mirrors. There were just benches
- not chairs, just benches . . . .
There's an interesting note. According to Bomba the Germans had
provided benches inside the little gas chamber for the ladies and
their children to sit on. We're not told how many benches. There
could have been 17 individual ones, but more likely Bomba would have
said -- if Lanzmann had thought to ask him -- that there were maybe
four or five, half a dozen perhaps. Two or more ladies with their
kids could have sat on each bench. No matter how you slice it,
traffic is picking up. Seventeen barbers, the benches for 17, and now
the 17 women and their kids are all there together inside the gas
chamber, which is about the size of a small bedroom in the rear of an
ordinary tract house -- and the hair is flying. But we re not
finished yet:
Lanzmann: "You said there were about sixteen . . .
[Lanzmann has forgotten that Bomba makes the seventeenth]
. . . barbers? You cut the hair of how many women in a one
batch?"
Bomba: "In one day there was about, I would say, going into
that place between sixty and seventy women in the same room at one
time."
You might think that Claude Lanzmann is about to express some
doubt about how Bomba is blocking out this scene for him. Sixty to
seventy naked women in the 12-square-foot room. Lanzmann isn't going
to express doubt, however, about anything told to him by a survivor.
Lanzmann is a Holocaust fundamentalist. The role of the
fundamentalist in any cult is to accept absolutely the testimony of
those who claim to have been eyewitnesses to the original sacred
event. Once the original story is made to fly, the most elegant minds
can elaborate on it endlessly in good faith.
Two thousand years ago there were Jews who believed utterly that the
son of their God had been nailed to a pole and executed and that he
rose from his tomb to sail off the planet into the heavens. That tale
was a runaway hit. Now we have Jews everywhere committed to the
proposition that millions of them were exterminated in itty-bitty gas
chambers, were cremated, and rose up toward the heavens in smoke.
This one has all the signs of becoming a real blockbuster too. We
Gentiles used to be made of sterner stuff. It took the Jesus story
more than three hundred years to be accepted as Truth by the State.
In our own time the State bought the Holocaust story at the first
screening.
What was the rush, one wonders?
Lanzmann urged Bomba to say something more about how he felt as he
went about preparing the women and their children to be exterminated.
Something more perhaps than the homely: "I felt that accordingly I
got to do what they told me, to cut their hair . . . ."
Bomba: "I tell you something. To have a feeling
about that . . . It was very hard to feel anything . . . your
feelings disappeared, you were dead. You had no feeling at all.
This is a universal response by eyewitnesses to the alleged gas
chamber murders. The claim Bomba makes that his feelings were "dead,"
that he had "no feeling at all," resembles the "temporary insanity"
claim murderers use to diminish their responsibility for their
behavior in the eye of the State. The ordinary murderer claims that
his mental process was so diminished at the time he murdered that he
was not responsible for his act. The eyewitness to the alleged gas
chamber murders claims that his sensibilities were so diminished
while he worked as a link in the murder process that he was not
responsible for his behavior. The murderer was out of his "mind,"
while gas-chamber eyewitnesses ran out of "feeling." When Bomba
describes himself as being inwardly "dead' he is saying that he
cannot be judged guilty of being an accomplice to mass murder. He can
accuse Germans of whatever he likes -- participate in the crimes he
accuses them of -- yet remain forever innocent while Germans remain
forever guilty. It's a nice set-up.
In the film Bomba goes on to illustrate how dead he was inwardly
while working for the SS at Treblinka. He describes how he shared the
hair from women he knew personally from his home town, from his own
street: ". . . and some of them were my close friends." They would
ask Abe: "What's going to happen to us?" But Abe would hold his
tongue. With Abe it was just snip, snip, snip. "What could you tell
them?," he asks Lanzmann. "What could you tell?"
Snip, snip, snip.
Now Bomba relate to Lanzmann the story that reviewers have remarked
on more than any other in Shoah. (note
4)
Bomba: A friend of mine worked as a barber -- he
was good barber in my hometown -- when his wife and his sister
came into the gas chamber . . . . I can't. It's too horrible.
Please.
Lanzmann: "We have to do it. You know it."
Bomba: (holding back tears) "I won't be able to do it."
Lanzmann: (very quietly) "You have to do it. I know it's
very hard. I know and I apologize."
Bomba: (struggling) "Don't make me go on, please."
Lanzmann: "Please. We must go on."
Bomba: (unable to control tears, leaving the frame for a
moment, returning) "I told you it's going to be very hard. They
were taking that . . . [hair] . . . in bags and
transporting it to Germany."
Lanzmann: "Okay, go ahead. What was his answer when his
wife and sister came?"
Bomba: "They tried to talk to him and the husband of his
sister. They could not tell him this was the last time they stay
alive, because behind them was the German Nazis, SS, and they knew
that if they said a word, not only the wife and the woman, who
were dead already, but also they would share the same thing with
them. In a way, they tried to do the best for them, with a second
longer, a minute longer, just to hug them and kiss them, because
they knew they would never see them again."
To tell the truth, this is my kind of story, simple and lurid.
There is also some new information in it. In addition to the 60 to 70
women and their kids, and the barbers and the benches, there were
also "SS men" inside the 12-foot by 12-foot gas chamber. We don't
know how many, but as Bomba speaks in the plural he must mean that
there were at least two. If Lanzmann had thought to ask him about it,
Bomba might have said that there were 10 or 15 SS men in there. And
then there is the welcome news that the SS would allow the Barbers to
hug and kiss certain of the naked women inside the gas chamber. Bomba
speaks only of married couples. Lanzmann might have asked perhaps how
the SS were able to identify which of the naked women were married to
which of the barbers. It must be doubtful that the naked women
entered the gas chamber carrying their marriage certificates. Maybe
the barbers had previously petitioned the SS to keep their own copies
of their marriage certificates on the chance that just such a reunion
as Bomba claims he witnessed would take place. On the other hand,
maybe the SS men took the barber's word for who was married and who
wasn't. If they did, it would betray a generosity of spirit that is
not usually ascribed to the SS by Jewish survivors.
Imagine trying to visualize this scene from the wife's point of view.
Try imagining what might have gone through her mind at the moment she
spied her husband. The hope that must have jumped in her heart. Then
what her thoughts were as her husband sheared off her heir without
speaking to her. Imagine what she must have felt as he held her
silently for a minute or so, his cheek pressed lovingly against her
scalp, then turned with scissors and comb to the next patient lady
waiting her turn. Did his wife run her fingers over her skull and
think:
"Ah, I've always known what kind of man you are. A schmuck when I
married you and a schmuck today."
There are a number of observations that can be made about my
presentation of Lanzmann's presentation of Bomba's testimony. It
could be observed that while Rachel Auerbach's research suggests that
Bomba is inventing his gas chamber story out of whole cloth, it can
still be claimed that we are left with Auerbach's scholarly outline
of the alleged Treblinka gas chambers. Therefore, while Bomba's
investigations may destroy his own credibility as a witness, the
Treblinka gas chamber story itself remains as it was, an extensively
documented story of a weapon used to annihilate about a million Jews.
To give you a quick fix on Ms. Auerbach's scholarly instincts and her
even-handed objectivity, I will quote from her famous essay "In the
Fields of Treblinka."
As I read such passages in Rachel Auerbach's essay I take the trouble
to remind myself that after the war was she was "one of the first
active members of the Jewish Historical Committee in Poland;" that
after emigrating to Israel she became a "permanent research staff
member of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum," and that this
In-the-Fields-of-Treblinka essay was thought worthy of reprinting as
recently as 1979 by The Holocaust Library, which was found and is
managed by survivors themselves and is distributed by a major Jewish
publishing house, Shocken Books.
Polish people still talk about the way soap was
manufactured from the bodies of Jews. 'Sent away for soap!' was
the expression the Poles would use when they spoke of transports
to Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor. The discovery of Professor
Spanner's soap factory in Langfuhr near Danzig proved that their
suspicious had been well founded. Witnesses tell us that when the
corpses were burned on pyres, pans would be placed beneath the
racks to catch the fat as it ran off, but this has not been
confirmed. But even if the Germans in Treblinka or at any of the
other death factories failed to do this, and allowed so many tons
of precious fat to go to waste, it could only have been an
oversight on their part. They were fully capable of doing things
like that. It was entirely in keeping with their proclivities.
Only the newness of this branch of manufacturing was to blame for
this omission. If the Germans ever would make another drive across
Europe, they would not make this mistake again.
Professors Spanner's "soap factory" in Langfuhr near Danzing was
apparently an invention of active members of self-proclaimed Jewish
historical committees, based upon the entrepreneurial reports of
professional slanderers, and has since been kept alive by research
staffs at Jewish Holocaust memorials around the world. A photograph
of this "factory," with no documentation, appears in the scholarly
Encyclopedia Judacia, published in Israel and shelved in many
of the larger libraries across the United states.
Polish Jews such as Rachel Auerbach witnessed Germans destroying
their culture. They witnessed Germans tearing apart Jewish families
during the titanic, brutal resettlement programs. Those Jews can be
forgiven their credulity and even some of their hatred, expressed in
their eagerness to believe every accusation made against Germans, no
matter how corrupt. Americans, however, who suffered nothing of what
European Jews suffered at the hands of Germans, have little right to
indulge themselves with it. Which brings me to Mr. George Will,
Washington Post columnist and ABC Television commentator.
I am willing to accept Mr. Will's own assessment of himself. He is a
brilliant and principled man. I disagree with some of his viewpoints,
particularly with his obsessive-compulsive attachment to the state of
Israel, but I can't show that attachment to be morally wrong. As luck
would have it, Mr. Will has written a column about Shoah where
he makes a remarkable observation.
The most stunning episode in this shattering film lasts
about five minutes and involves 'only' the talk of a barber now in
Israel. While he clips the hair of a customer he talks, never
needing to raise his voice to be heard over the small sounds of a
familiar ambiance. He describes his duties in Treblinka, cutting
hair from naked women on the threshold of the gas chamber, and the
day a fellow barber saw his wife and sister enter the room.
(note 5)
Remarkable, eh? Cutting hair from naked women on the "threshold"
of the gas chamber. Do you see it? The threshold is the place
directly below the door to a room. A door sill perhaps. An entrance
or a doorway. According to Mr. Webster it is a "place or point of
beginning." Taking Mr. Will's own obvious assessment of himself, he
is the proud possessor of a formidably organized intellect. A man who
always distinguishes carefully between similar but different points
of fact. While doing so enrages those lesser men who cannot do it
themselves, it gives Mr. Will a lot of pleasure, which is why he does
it so regularly. That being so, what am I to make of the fact that
Mr. Will has changed the wording of Mr. Bomba's testimony?
Lanzmann: "Excuse me. How did it happen when the
women came into the gas chamber? Were you yourself already in the
gas chamber?"
Bomba: "I said we were already in the gas chamber, waiting
over there for the transport to come in. Inside the gas chamber --
we were already in."
If Mr. Bomba swears that he was inside the gas chamber at that
particular time, why does Mr. Will write that he barbed those naked
women on the "threshold" of the gas chamber? Mr. Bomba can be seen on
film saying that he was inside the gas chamber when he did it. In the
text of the film published by Mr. Lanzmann, Mr. Bomba again insists
he was inside the thing. What happened in Mr. Will's brain as he
wrote "threshold" rather than "inside" or "in?" Is it possible that
Mr. Will found Mr. Bomba's story ludicrous? He wouldn't want to say
so publicly of course as Mr. Will is one of our brightest and best
Holocaust fundamentalists. Nevertheless, having the kind of
relentlessly rational mind that he does, something at the bottom of
it might not have bought Mr. Bomba's story the way Mr. Will would
have preferred to buy it. Maybe a single wire got crossed in the
depths of Mr. Will's brain, out of the millions that are twisted
around in there. Maybe Mr. Will wanted to express some doubt about
Mr. Bomba's story but could not bring himself to do it. He may have
been in that peculiar place where writers sometimes find themselves
-- smart enough to know that something needs to be said but without
enough character to go ahead and say it. When this happens it causes
a psychological malfunction known as writer's block. Mr. Will isn't
the sort to be bothered with writer's block, he has the habit of full
production, but if he wasn't going to spill the beans he had to turn
somewhere. It looks like he turned to invention. I suppose in the
moment it was easy enough for a man wired the way Mr. Will is wired
to invent a threshold image and use it to replace the one Mr. Bomba
invented. You can judge how much more intelligent Mr. Will is than
Mr. Bomba when you compare the rationality of their two opposing
visualizations.
Now that Mr. Will had Mr. Bomba on the threshold of the gas chamber
rather than inside it, Mr. Will could go on indulging his fantasy
about Mr. Lanzmann's Shoah. As the threshold to an exterior
door not only leads inside, but turning about leads to the great
outdoors and indeed to the survivors who claim to have actually seen
a homicidal poison gas chamber. In this scenario, as the eyewitness
testimony is not allowed to be challenged, the genocide theory can
not be challenged either, and if that is so then European Jews had
every right to conquer Palestine and the U.S. Government is morally
obligated to protect forever the Israeli State. That is the line that
has been spoon-fed to American so successfully for 40 years now. Mr.
Will's threshold caper is a small example of how our intellectual
elites accept the use of invention on the one hand and the
suppression of good sense on the other to bolster a world view that
is based, incredibly, on a handful of stories told by a handful of
Abraham Bombas.
I believe the worldwide Jewish community is being betrayed by the
coupling of such men as Abraham Bomba and George Will. Jews are being
betrayed by their own spokesmen, and they are being betrayed by
gentiles who profess to be friends and allies of the Jewish community
but who in reality are merely supporters of a Zionist leadership,
entrapped by the rhetoric of the Holocaust Lobby, too ashamed to
reveal the immense fraud and falsehood on which so much of its
influence has been built.
Notes
- Kapo: German for "trustee".
- Shoah: An Oral History of the
Holocaust, by Claude Lanzmann. Pantheon Books. New York,
1985. Unless otherwise noted, all the passages quoted in this
article are from the Pantheon Books edition, pages 111-117.
- The Death Camp Treblinka,
Ed. by Alexander Donat, Holocaust Library (New York, 1979). See
Rachael Auerbach's contribution, In The Fields of
Treblinka.
- The parenthetical descriptions of Bomba's
reactions here are not in the published text. I have added them
from memory. While I watched the film I could not help but be
touched by Bomba's sincere distress. His tears brought tears to my
own eyes. At the same time I was aware of what a laugh I thought
his story is. A nice irony for the psychotherapists.
- The Washington Post (Nov 15,
1985)
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