Bomba, Abraham

Abraham Bomba (9 June 1913 – 19 Feb 2000) was a Polish Jew who appeared as a witness in several postwar trials on Treblinka. Furthermore, he gave several interviews in later years. The first interview was conducted by Claude Lanzmann in September 1979. On 28 August 1990, Bomba gave an interview to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and another one on 14 August 1996 to the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation.

Bomba claimed that he was deported to the Treblinka Camp on 30 September 1942. After having been there for about four weeks, he claimed to have been deployed, together with 16 other men, to cut the hair of naked women. For the first week or two, this shearing supposedly happened inside one of the camp’s homicidal gas chambers, which was disguised as a shower room. After that, the shearing operation was allegedly moved to the undressing barracks.

Bomba claimed in 1979 that the alleged gas chamber was 12 ft × 12 ft in size. This fits the orthodoxy’s description of the rooms inside the claimed first gassing building, which allegedly measured 4 m × 4 m (13 ft × 13 ft).

The room was allegedly furnished with benches. In addition to these benches and the 17 barbers, some 60 to 70 women came into the room to be shorn. Hence, a room of 144 or 170 square feet (13 or 16 m²) was occupied by a minimum of 77 people. Therefore, each person had about two square feet to stand on (five to six persons per square meter). To this, we must add the benches. This is clearly a physically impossible density of people in that small room. Shearing the hair of a sitting person requires at least a square meter of room for each sitting person and the barber.

There were only two reasons to shear off someone’s hair: for hygienic reasons, to reduce risk of lice-borne diseases like typhus; or to collect the hair for later use (or both). The former practice was in-tended to improve inmate health and save lives. Hence, it is inconceivable in an extermination camp, but makes perfect sense in a transit camp. In the latter case, the hair obviously had to be collected afterwards. This means that the women had to leave the alleged gas chamber after the shearing, so the benches could be removed, and the hair collected. After that, the women (or other victims) would have reentered the same room for their execution – provided they could be convinced a second time to enter such a room.

Since this is a highly inefficient procedure, the orthodoxy claims that this shearing, if it happened at all, occurred elsewhere, but certainly not inside a gas chamber.

According to Bomba, the operation was moved to the undressing barracks only a week or two after he started this assignment. Because he arrived at Treblinka end of September, and started his barber job four weeks later, this means that the shearing operation was relocated in early to mid-November 1942. However, Treblinka had been active already since late July of 1942. Therefore, if we follow Bomba’s timeline, the shearing inside the gas chamber had been done for almost four months, hence was a long-lasting routine. This is highly unlikely.

Bomba moreover asserted that he and his other fellow inmates worked and lived in the section of the Treblinka Camp where no extermination activities happened. They had no access to the other, prohibited part of the camp, presumably called Camp 2, where all the extermination activities allegedly unfolded. He even stated that this part of the camp was as distant and unreachable for them as Australia is for people living in the U.S. As a result, Bomba insisted that he never saw the results of a gassing; he knew no details about how the gas chambers operated; he had no first-hand knowledge about how the bodies were presumably removed from the gas chambers; and he had never seen how they were hauled to mass graves.

At the same time, however, he asserted that, for a week or two, he cut the hair of women right inside a gas chamber, hence evidently in the core of that very prohibited and inaccessible Camp 2.

He also insisted that he escaped from Treblinka before the large-scale open-air incinerations of bodies on pyres are said to have begun in the spring of 1943. Hence, he had no knowledge about this either.

In other words, Bomba’s knowledge is limited to trivial maintenance operations of the camp, and how women had their hair shorn.

(The interviews mentioned are all accessible on YouTube and the website of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.)