Once you threaten to kill somebody if they don't do what you say, no other means of persuasion will be effective. You will do what he wants because you fear death or you won't do what he wants because you don't fear death. You won't do what he wants because you believe his promises of a better place to live.
Well, the Nazis "threatened" to kill fugitive Polish Jews in mid-October 1941 by issuing an ordinance stating that Jews found wandering outside areas designated for them would be executed. Over the next nine months this threat was carried out on numerous occasions, with e.g. publicised notices in the Warsaw ghetto informing the residents that batches of however many Jews breaching the ordinance had been shot. Meanwhile, the German police guards took potshots at ghetto inmates who were trying to sneak out, as well as some who were simply going about their business, and kept score in their battalion mess hall with hash marks over the entrance.
This did not stop smuggling, nor did it stop tens of thousands (one calculation extrapolated a figure of 28,000 from incomplete sources) of Warsaw Jews deciding they stood a better chance of survival if they fled to the 'Aryan' side in July/August 1942, when the big action started.
The big action was carried out by among others, Jewish ghetto policemen who had been threatened with execution if they failed to fulfill their quotas per day of rounded-up fellow Jews; along with German police and a Latvian collaborator battalion. It lasted nearly 2 months; tactics varied. At one stage the Germans offered bread and jam for volunteers who would turn up. Then they switched to combing through cordoned-off streets. 5,000 Jews were shot dead in the whole operation.
Long before the end of the operation, news had filtered back to quite a few in the ghetto - certainly to all the activists of the countless political parties present in the ghetto - that the deportees were being murdered at Treblinka. But by that time, the whole operation was being conducted by force.
Once on the trains, a number of the Jews of Warsaw attempted to break out of the trains, despite knowing that this would provoke firing from the police guards accompanying each transport, and that once they were on the run, they were at risk of summary execution. Some succeeded, many were killed.
Not all attempted this, because of the fear of summary execution if they went on the run, and fear of being shot jumping off the train, and because many were really in no physical condition to try and survive in hiding, or they did not want to be separated from their families, or felt that it was a fool's errand for an obviously traditional religious Jew with accented Polish with no money to try and survive in hiding.
Most of all, despite the coercion they had experienced since 1939 and in harsher and harsher form since October 1941 and then during the big operation, they did not necessarily
know what would happen to them for sure.
On arrival at Treblinka, the trains were unloaded in sections, and experienced various greetings. Some detrained virtually directly into machine-gun fire because the Ukrainian guards had lost control of the latest batch who had panicked and stampeded. Towards the end of August 1942, the camp degenerated into complete chaos, and transports had to be suspended while vast numbers of bodies were cleared away from the camp forecourt area.
However, other transports were unloaded to be greeted with a modicum of politeness, along with the sight of armed guards located at various spots around the transport. The SS then told the deportees a bunch of lies about how they were going to be resettled and begin a nice new life somewhere else, therefore they needed to be deloused and showered.
The same routine was practiced at other camps: armed guards off to one side, barbed wire enclosures visible, and deceiving exhortations to go this way or that way and then to undress for a 'shower' or delousing, with promises of hot coffee/soup and happy new lives somewhere else.
It's utterly impossible to say whether coercion or deception played a bigger role in such a situation; there was
implicit coercion without overt death threats, coupled with
overt deception. That is, unless someone panicked, at which point the bullets would start flying, and there would be no more talk of fairy-tales about 'resettlement' to the Ukraine.
Warsaw was one of the extreme cases; the typical Jewish experience in western and central Europe was to be arrested (i.e coerced), interned in a holding camp (i.e. coerced) then after a period of time be scheduled onto a deportation train (i.e. coerced) then packed off without any overt violence, because there was clearly no escaping such a situation, and no weapons available for resistance. Nor any certain knowledge of what would transpire at the other end. Drancy inmates nicknamed the unknown, never-named destination 'Pitchipoi', which was in fact, Auschwitz. It was accepted that deportation was a bad thing, which is why Jews tried to avoid it wherever possible, just as non-Jews often avoided conscription to work in Germany.
After all the coercion of getting them onto the (guarded) trains, Jews from western and central Europe arrived at Auschwitz to find more guards, more barbed wire and more implicit coercion, along with shouting, barking dogs and blows from truncheons delivered to those who were a bit slow. Then some deception and lies, backed up with yet more coercion (i.e. armed guards). The lies were aimed as much at those being selected for work and separated from their relatives as at the victims selected to die.
It generally took 1-2 days after registration for newly arrived Jewish Auschwitz inmates to fully accept that their relatives had been killed, although they usually had an opportunity to ask an 'old hand' what might have happened to their relatives shortly after arriving in the quarantine barracks. It was evidently a very common reaction to disbelieve at first the news that their relatives had gone up the chimney. People cling on to false hopes in such situations.
