On one of his trips [in South America] ([Franz Stangl] confessed to Gitta Sereny in 1971), ‘my train stopped next to a slaughterhouse. The cattle in the pens, hearing the noise of the train, trotted up to the fence and stared at the train. They were very close to my window, one crowding the other, looking at me through that fence. I thought then, “Look at this; this reminds me of Poland; that’s just how the people looked, trustingly, just before they went into the cans . . .’”
’You said “cans”,’ Sereny interrupted. ‘What do you mean?’ But Stangl wasn’t listening to her as he continued:
’I couldn’t eat canned meat after that. Those big eyes . . . looking at me . . . not knowing that in no time at all, they’d all be dead.’ His wife, too, remembered that ‘he suddenly stopped eating meat at one point.’
–Alan Levy, The Wiesenthal File, 310.
Franz Stangl was the commandant at the Treblinka death camp.
