Ivan the Terrible, the operator of the gas chambers at Treblinka.

This is Treblinka. At this location between July1942 and August 1943 around 900,000 people were murdered here, or, on their way here. Most of its victims died of suffocation, either in the gas chambers or in the hellishly cramped wagons that brought them here sometimes in the heat of summer.
Today the location of the camp is a memorial. It is unlikely that anyone who saw it in 1942 would recognise it now. The monument was built in 1964 and what had been a lightly forested area around it is now a thickly forested area. That forest is now part of the former camp grounds. Stones bear testimony to the many Jewish communities in Poland that were annihilated by National Socialism.
The method of killing was thus. Jews would be rounded up in a ghetto and forced onto a train. The train left for Małkinia station. At Małkinia the train would manoeuvre so that instead of pulling the wagons, it pushed them. The distance to Treblinka station was around five kilometres. The train halted there. Part of the train was then decoupled – usually around 20 wagons, enough to fill the gas chambers in one go. Then that part of the train was pushed into the camp. At the camp, the victims were forced off the train and entered the camp grounds, men to the right and women and children to the left. There were two large barracks. Initially the men took off their clothes outside, later they used the barracks. The women disrobed in the barracks. The men were then forced to enter a passage called the Himmelstrasse, the gas chambers were at the end. There they were forced into the gas chambers and murdered. The women followed behind.
The process was repeated until the empty wagons could leave Treblinka station to make way for the next death transport.
For a location that killed so many people, Treblinka did not have many staff members. Treblinka was managed by 20 to 25 SS overseers who were from Germany or from territory occupied by Germany such as Austria or the Sudentenland. There were also some 80 to 120 men from the Soviet Union. These were former Red Army prisoners who had volunteered to serve in German formations in order to get out of the POW camps where death by starvation was the only likely course. As they had been trained at the camp at Trawniki, they became known as Trawniki men. Of all these Trawniki men, one stood out in particular and he was called Ivan the Terrible, in Russian, Iwan Grozny – named after the sixteenth century Tsar.
The surname of Ivan was Marczenko. This Ivan was noted for the way he tortured the victims. Other guards said that he carried a sword – perhaps it was a long knife – and he used it to cut off the ears of prisoners or the breasts of women who showed reluctance to enter the gas chamber. He was one of those that forced the prisoners into the chambers, and encouraged the final prisoners to get in quickly using extreme violence towards them.
"Marczenko ... had a sword with which he mutilated people. He cut off the breasts of women ..." testifed guard Pavel Leleko.
After WW2 a number of former Trawnikimen were discovered and put on trial in the Soviet Union. After the collapse of that country, a lot of evidence became available for researchers, some of this referred to Ivan Marczenko.
Marczenko’s German war record file exists. According to Personalbogen 4476, issued 1 November 1941 at Trawniki, "Iwan Martschjenko" was born 3 March 1911 in Dniepropetrovsk Oblast, in Soviet Ukraine, to Iwan and Aksania Marczenko.
Marczenko must have looked younger than his age. Most of the guards put him in his mid twenties during his time at Treblinka when in fact he was over thirty.
His personnel file describes him as 180cm tall, with an oval face, black hair, gray eyes and a scar on his neck. The scar was also mentioned by one guard who later remembered him. Many of them also added that Marczenko was heavy-set.
Marczenko was married with three children when he was conscripted into the Red Army as an infantryman on 27 May 1941. An unfortunate case of bad timing as Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union less than one month later. He was captured by the Germans on 10 July 1941 and sent, according to the statement of a guard who appeared to know him personally, to prisoner-of-war camp "A" in Chelm, Poland.
Tens of thousand of people died in the camps in Chełm and when I was last there there were no memorials. During one of my visits, the area of the former camp was in the process of being redeveloped and there were large quantities of barbed wire.

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