78 years after his grandfather, Harman, was sent to Sobibor with his wife Amalia and their son Fritz - "Israel Today" envoy to Europe, Eldad Beck, visited the extermination camp • Journey to the Inferno

• The excavations in Sobibor that revealed the mechanical tools used by the Germans to kill Jews // Photo: Yoram Chaimi, Israel Antiquities Authority

"My love, today is the last time we can write to you. We want to say goodbye to you, as we are helpless in the face of destiny." Thus opened the letter, which my grandfather, Harman Beck, sent on June 9, 1942, to his eldest son, Alfred, who lived during those terrible summer days with his Christian wife and their two "mixed" children in Germany.

The four also survived the Holocaust in Germany, unlike their remaining family in Vienna. Otherwise, it is doubtful that this letter and many other family documents were in my possession today. My grandfather also survived, thanks to being sent or fled from Austria to Eretz Israel, probably in 1933 - five years before the Anschluss. Harman Beck's creepy farewell letter ends with: "Yesterday, Fritz (the younger brother) finally returned straight from work to us, so that on Friday they would seal us and count us and send us like a herd of cattle. An unknown destination. Losing more words about the injustice is happening. We will be aimless. Stay healthy, your deepest kisses, their loyal parents. "

The transport, which includes 59-year-old Herman, his second wife Amalia and their 19-year-old son Fritz, left Vienna - according to records in the German National Archives and Austrian Archives - on Sunday, June 14. The human "freight", containing 996 Austrian Jews, was sent directly to the Sobibor extermination camp and arrived there on June 17. Eight days passed between writing the farewell letter and arriving in hell. We are told that European Jews did not know what awaited them in the East. After four years of Nazi terror, humiliation, robbery, marginalization, marking, exclusion and the law - my family had no doubt that traveling to the East was a trip to death. And knowing that, Harman Beck went through the last eight days of his life. Upon arrival in Sobibor, Harman and Amalia - if they survived the dreadful ride in the cramped train carriage - were sent to the gas chambers in the heart of the lush forests of eastern Poland.

"Experimental" period of murder

Young Fritz was separated from his parents and sent to forced labor. It was last seen in August 1942, according to an official document of the Jewish community in Vienna. He was murdered on August 26 of that year in the Majdanek extermination camp. My grandfather's sister, Irena, and her 8-year-old daughter, Ingrid, were sent from Vienna to the east on a transport leaving the Austrian capital on April 9. This "shipment" came to the "Transit Ghetto" Izbice, which was a "waiting room" for one of the two nearby extermination camps, Sobibor and Belzec. In the spring of 1942, the German extermination machine had not yet reached its "efficiency". It was an "experimental" period in the industrial murder of the Jewish people. We have no idea when and where Irena and Ingrid were murdered. It is likely that they also ended their lives in the Sobibor gas chambers.

On April 14, Irena sends a final letter from Izbica to her brother in Germany, Alfred, and her despair is evident in her dense, almost unreadable handwriting. She says, among other things, that her daughter Ingrid has health problems. The letter, which was part of the Nazi camouflage attempts, reached its destination in Reich 12 days later.

I grew up in a silence that enveloped the Holocaust issue. My grandfather died five months before my birth. On my father's side, I had only one uncle, some distant cousins ​​on his mother's side - who arrived in Palestine before the Holocaust from what was once Czechoslovakia - some in the US and Canada, and that's it. They didn't talk to us about the nightmare our families had in Europe. Here, it was dark across the abyss, when I was in high school, Eastern Europe, on its German murder centers, far beyond the "Iron Curtain," far and threatening, under hostile communist dictatorships.

The Holocaust was all of us, but mostly of others. That distance ended in the mid-1990s, when my father's cousin, Alfred's son, who survived the Holocaust in Germany and lived in communist East Germany, tracked us down and began sending us documents about the family we had not until then. I embarked on a long, personal journey into the inferno - which led me to Austria, Germany, Poland. Last January I first came to Sobibor. I have an urge to write that this is the end of the journey. But it is not. There is no end to our journey to the Holocaust. Nobody ordained us, that we did not inhale, forget or forgive the poisoned air to our lungs. And as time goes on, we know more about the inferno that destroyed a third of our German systematic efficiency.

One remnant from the camp

Unlike Auschwitz or Majdanek, there is almost nothing left of Sobibor, except for an original section of railroad tracks that led to the extermination camp. The Germans "shaved" the camp after the uprising of Jewish prisoners in October 1943, which took the lives of 11 SS members of the camp staff. Only archeological work, carried out with great care in recent years, not to damage the sanctity of the tens of thousands of Jewish victims whose bodies were burned in the camp, allowed the mass killings to be restored. Thus, the location of "Sky Street", which led the Jews from Camp 2, where all their property and clothing was taken, was identified with almost complete certainty - to the gas chambers in "Camp 3".

In the spring and summer of 1942, when my family members were murdered there, the bodies were further transferred from the gas chambers to mass graves. At the end of that summer, in view of the high number of bodies, and after the dead began to "poison" the groundwater and soil, it was decided to impose on Jewish prisoners to remove them from the graves and burn them.

Huge white stone fields today mark the areas where the dirt of those twice murdered was buried. I stand at the heart of the inferno, and winter breeze freezes my bones with a flame of thoughts, plays, fears, horror and indomitable anger.

 "Exhaustion" of genocide

The devil, says the proverb, is in the small details. The Germans left little details behind in Sobibor. These little details can be found in Auschwitz or Majdanek, in the mountains of personal belongings that the Nazis stole from the Jews before being sent to the gas chambers and prepared for shipment to Germany - where they were distributed to the German population for renewed use.

To me, the awfulness of the Holocaust is reflected in the hair of Jewish victims, who were shaved and transported to make clothes and shoes. In this, the German of the Holocaust was expressed. Genocide cases were before and after the Holocaust. However, I do not know another case of such a calculated and complete genocide for industrial "recycling" purposes.

The small details found in Sobibor, during the archaeological work there, are personal belongings of the victims, who "survived" the organized looting of the Germans, some of which will be displayed at the new museum which will open on the commemoration site this October, the anniversary of the prisoner's uprising - including several chain pendants. One of them appears to be holding the tablets of the covenant. Kill, steal, covet - these were the words of the Germans and their partners in the murder of our people. And we couldn't. Because Israel's eternity will not lie.