POLAND: TREBLINKA EXTERMINATION CAMP

June 26, 2019

We met our driver at 6:30 AM for transportation to the Krakow John Paul II Airport. We had a short flight to Warsaw--about 40 minutes--and were picked up by Kasia and a driver who drove very, very, very fast. We left the airport and headed straight to the Treblinka Extermination Camp, completing what is usually a two-hour drive in an hour-and-a-half. Needless to say, I was a little on edge when we arrived.

Treblinka was a Nazi extermination camp from July 1942 until August 1943. In that 14-month period, around 800,000 Jews were killed in its gas chambers. About 300,000 were from Warsaw, and the other half million were from all over Europe. In addition, 2,000 Roma people, whom we would call gypsies, were also killed there. Overall, Treblinka was the second deadliest Nazi camp after Auschwitz.

Besides the gas chamber deaths, many of the inmates who worked in the penal camp portion, either in the gravel pit or cutting down trees in the forest for the crematoria, also died. In the three years the camp was operational, about half of the 20,000 laborers died from hunger, disease, overwork (over 12 hours/day of exhausting labor), and excessive punishment. Most of those who lived were evacuated to other camps when Treblinka was liquidated, and many died in those camps.

Treblinka was divided into two parts. Treblinka I was the labor camp opened in September 1941. The workers were mostly Polish civilians who were arrested at will and sentenced to work for at least six months in the gravel quarry, which supplied material for road construction.Conditions were horrendous.

Treblinka II was the extermination camp, one of three Nazi camps specifically built to facilitate mass murder.

We started our tour at a bare-bones visitor center looking at maps, seeing a few artifacts, getting background information, and watching three short videos.

There were not a huge number of barracks built at Treblinka like there were in Auschwitz. Only 1,000 prisoners were in the camp at a time. Everyone else who arrived was herded straight from the train to the gas chamber without even being recorded. None of the gas chambers remain at the site. The Nazis tried to destroy all the evidence of what happened here, dismantling everything. They even plowed the ground and seeded it with grass and flowers before they left.

Treblinka I

  

At first, the bodies from both parts of the camp were buried in mass graves, but when the Nazis realized bodies could be used as evidence against them, they had prisoners dig them up and burn them in huge cremation pits that can be seen in the reproduction below. There were no crematoria here like the ones at Auschwitz--just open pits of burning bodies.

Treblinka II

For many years after the war, not much was known about this camp, but interviews with survivors and witnesses, aerial photographic analysis, excavations, and other investigations slowly began to reveal the story.

Perhaps the most famous survivor of Treblinka, a Pole from Czestochowa named Samuel Willenberg, was part of a group assigned to sort through the belongings of the victims. He told researchers about a fake "hospital" known as Lazarett. The building hid an execution pit into which victims would be shot or thrown in alive. Willenberg wrote: 

By the way, Willenberg was part of an armed revolt in August 1943 and succeeded in escaping the camp about a hundred others. He made it to Warsaw and was part of the Warsaw Uprising in 1944.

Quotes from other survivors:

One of the gas chamber floor tiles with the mark of a Polish manufacturing company is on display:

When we finished there, we headed down the road to Treblinka II, the extermination camp.

I still can't get over the huge disconnect between this idyllic Eden and the hell of 1942-1943. I am having a hard time even going through my photos and writing this post.

If you can't read the print below, it says [misspellings are theirs]: "There was here a Nazi extermination camp. Between July 1942 and August 1943 more than 800,000 Jews from Poland, USRR, Jougoslavia, Czechoslomakia, Bulgaria, Austria, France, Belgium, Germany, and Greece were murdered.  On August the 2nd 1943 the prisoners organized an armed revolt which was crashed in blood by the Nazis hangmen. In a penitenciary labour camp at a distance of 2 km from here the Nazis murdered an estimated number of 10,000 Poles between 1941 and 1944."

Those words are engraved in stone in English, Russian, German, Polish, Hebrew, and French.

In his trial in 1970, Franz Stangl (the camp commandant who had fled to Brazil after the war and was eventually tracked down by Simon Wiesenthal) was asked how many people could be killed in Treblinka in a day. He replied: "According to my estimation, a transport of thirty freight cars or with 3,000 people was liquidated in three hours. When the work lasted for about fourteen hours, 12,000 to 15,000 people were annihilated. There were many days that the work lasted from the early morning until the evening. . . .  I have done nothing to anybody that was not my duty. My conscience is clear." 

Stangl was sentenced to life in prison and died of heart failure six months later.

A warning in concrete that we are now entering the oboz zagłady--the extermination camp.

At this point, our guide Kasia pretty much leaves us to experience Treblinka on our own.

One thing about Treblinka is that it is off the beaten path and much less known and/or publicized than Auschwitz. Where Auschwitz was crowded and we had to join a tour in order to go inside, Treblinka is almost empty. The silence is eerie.

To our right are concrete blocks that mark the train tracks that took prisoners to within a few hundred yards of to the gas chambers.

A cobblestone path runs parallel to the tracks.

Our guide told us that the path is covered with rocks to intentionally make the way hard and uncomfortable for visitors.

We notice what looks like caution tape strung between trees to keep tourists from going into the forest. 

And while it might indeed serve that purpose, as we approach . . . 

. . . we see that it has names written on it. We assume these are some of the victims.

The ribbon might also represent the two rows of barbed wire fences that surrounded the camp. The inner fence was covered with tree branches to keep curious eyes from seeing the activities happening within.

We come to the area where the trains would have stopped to unload their human cargo. It was here that a few prisoners were pulled out to be workers, and the rest were told to remove their clothes to prepare for "disinfection" before they were herded naked down a path sarcastically named Himmelfahrtstrasse by the Nazis--the Road to Heaven--a path that ended at the gas chambers. Rock pillars are evenly spaced like sentries on one side of the symbolic tracks.

We emerge into a large clearing. Eleven large rocks stand guard. Each has the name of a country engraved in Polish on its front. From left to right: Macedonia, Greece, Austria, Germany, Bulgaria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, France, Yugoslavia, Belgium, USSR. These are countries whose inhabitants' ashes are scattered in this strange place.

Ahead of us we see a large stone memorial surrounded by thousands of irregular greyish-white stones. From afar, the stones look like old, falling down tombstones.

A marker tells visitors this is "The road of death leading to the gas chambers."

Treblinka opened with three gas chambers, but by the end there were as many as ten, and some sources say fourteen. Unlike Auschwitz, where the Nazis used the gas Zyklon B (hydrogen cyanide) to kill their victims, the gas chambers here were filled with carbon monoxide from engine exhaust that traveled through pipes from an army tank into the room. Among the first victims were 245,000 Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto.

We turn from the ominous warning to walk towards the 26-foot-tall granite tower that looms over everything else. There is a crack that runs down its middle and a slab on top. Our guide says it represents Jerusalem's Wailing Wall.

Close to the tower is a stone with the emotional, desperate, resolute plea "Never Again" inscribed in Polish, Hebrew, Russian, English, French, and German.

A mass of contorted, skeleton-like bodies is carved into the front and sides of the top slab.

We walk around to the back . . . 

. . . and see a seven-arm menorah. The traditional Hanukkah menorah has nine arms. This version is a "temple menorah," the kind used in the temple in Jerusalem and the symbol of Judaism long before the Maccabean Revolt. This is the menorah found on the coat of arms of the modern state of Israel.

Propped against this back wall is a fresh-flower wreath in the shape of a Star of David with Hebrew writing on the ribbon.

At the very peak of the killing period, as many as 17,000 people were killed each day. Now 17,000 stones of varying sizes and shapes surround the center monument. They are placed are in five different circular areas--the burial sites for the victims' bodies and later for their ashes. The stones represent the cities, villages, and districts whose citizens lost their lives at Treblinka. There are so many. Most are unmarked, as anonymous as the 800,000 dead.

SO many--one day of genocide.

There are wide, grassy gaps between the groupings, like the fields between towns or oceans between countries.

Pits of black basalt, a rock created in the furnace of a volcano, mark cremation pits.

Small, white "remembrance stones" are balanced on top of the pieces of basalt.

The ribbon bearing names of some of the dead encircles the field.

I read the names on the stones. Three hundred of the 17,000 identify a city or village from which the Jews arrived. Many of them are places I have never heard of.

But here and there I come across a place we've been, a name that's familiar, and my heart aches.

Among all the stones, only one bears the name of a person: Janusz Korczak. Beneath his name is the name "Henryk Goldsimit," which was his real name, Janusz Korczak being his pen name. Beneath those names are the Polish words i dzieci, which translate to "and children."

There is probably no greater Polish hero of the death camps than Janusz Korczak, a Polish-Jewish educator, pediatrician, and children's author. He was the director of a Warsaw orphanage that became part of the Warsaw Ghetto. In August 1942 he was notified that the 192 children in his care were being transported to Treblinka. At that time he was offered sanctuary by the Polish underground, but he refused, saying he must stay with his children. 

One story says that when Korczak arrived at the railway station, an SS officer recognized him as the author of his favorite children's book and offered to help him escape, but again Korczak refused. He said he must stay with his children. The train took Korczak and the children to their deaths.

At first, we are alone in this graveyard. Eventually two or three more people join us, but we walk quietly, not calling out to each other, speaking in low voices when we need to communicate. It is a record-setting day of heat, almost 100° F. The heat intensifies the heaviness we feel.

Here and there I see timid bits of color, and I remember that the Nazis seeded this place with wildflowers after they plowed it under, but someone says those were lupines. These are not lupines, but rather the typical wildflowers that grow among weeds.

A Venezuelan flag is tied to a post, and I wonder what the story is. This place is bursting with stories.

I notice a lone sign and walk over to see what it says.

We have been walking around for a while, and it is time to move on to the other half of the camp, Treblinka I, the work camp. It's about a mile walk down a road that was named "the Black Road" by the prisoners because of the horrible things that happened here. We pass the gravel pit, which looks quite benign--again, a huge disconnect from what occurred here 75+ years ago. I guess the land has had some time to heal, and I'm glad about that.

Some things remain in Treblinka I. For example, this was the site of the "magazyn," or a storehouse used to store tools used by inmates.

A sign in another spot notes that there was a "barrack for the sick" that no longer survives, but that imaging has revealed part of the foundation underground. People sent here didn't receive medical care. The majority were executed if they didn't recover quickly on their own. Saul Kuperhand, a Treblinka survivor, wrote, "One barracks to which none of us wanted to transfer was the quarantine bloc. By no stretch of the imagination did that barracks constitute a hospital or clinic. Rather, it was a vestibule to the crematorium."

The kitchen cellar remains. The diet of the prisoners usually consisted of 1/2 liter of watery soup or porridge for breakfast; 1 liter of watery soup for lunch (made from potato peels, turnip, or cabbage); and a cup of black "coffee," 10-20 g of bread, and occasionally a small bit of margarine or marmalade.

A sign near the well has this quote from another survivor: "They find a grenade on him . . . . They were to take him to the abattoir but he jumped into the well. The Germans begged him to get out. They lowered a chain with a plank for him to sit on. He stayed there for several hours. They pleaded with him and promised to exonerate him . . . . They lifted him out. He confessed and got a guarantee that he would be pardoned. They lay him down and chopped him up with an axe, while he was still alive."  

Incomprehensible.

On the other side of Treblinka I is another monument--three or four rows of crosses. A red rock memorial erected in 2014 notes that these are "In memory of Roma and Sinti murdered by the German occupiers in the forced-labour camp and in the extermination camp during the Second World War. Pain and suffering of the victims took that land, which hides the ashes of thousands of innocent people. We bend our heads over your martyr's death."

After the anonymity of the stone graveyard, it is almost a shock to see names of the dead written on these crosses. Of course, there are just a few hundred, not even close to the 10,000 or more who died in the labor camp, but still, it is almost a relief to see that some of the dead are named.

At a 2010 interview in his apartment in Tel Aviv, Treblinka survivor Samuel Willenberg said, "I live two lives, one is here and now and the other is what happened there. It never leaves me. It stays in my head. It goes with me always." 

Willenberg died February 19, 2016, three days after his 93rd birthday.

We walk back to the car, knowing how lucky we are.

READING

Our guide Kasia told us that her grandmother's best friend and children, who were Jewish, were killed at Treblinka. When Kasia learned more about them and their story, suddenly the Jews became "her people," and she started to study Jewish history, Jews in Poland, and Treblinka. I think reading the stories of the individuals who are associated with Treblinka is an important part of the experience. The Nazis did everything they could to wipe them out, to make them "non-people." We have to fight against that.

The Last Jew of Treblinka: A Memoir by Chil Rajchman 

 Only 160 pp. long, this is a quick but horrifying read about a camp that existed primarily for the murder of Jews. The only way to survive even a few hours open arrival was to be selected from among the “cargo” to perform one of the needed functions related to the camp—cut off the hair as the prisoners arrived, sort the clothing and belongings, pull the teeth of the dead, bury the bodies—and then unbury them when it was decided to burn them to remove evidence, etc.  How anyone could come out of this ordeal with any shred of sanity is beyond my understanding. 

When Rajchman arrived in Treblinka as part of the Warsaw Ghetto liquidation, he was one of the "lucky" ones selected to cut the hair off women on their way to the gas chambers, pull the gold teeth from dead bodies, and burn corpses. He was part of the Treblinka Revolt in 1943 and managed to escape.

Originally written in Yiddish and published in 1945, the book was not published in English until 2011.

King of Children: The Life and Death of Janusz Korczak by Betty Jean Lifton
This book was recommended to us by our tour guide. It is the biography of the only man named among the 17,000 stones in the Treblinka II memorial.

The back cover of my copy reads: "Known throughout Europe as a Pied Piper of destitute children prior to the onslaught of World War II, he assumed legendary status when on August 6, 1942, after refusing offers for his own safety, he defiantly led the orophans under his care in the Warsaw Ghetto to the trains that would take them to Treblinka."

Meticulously researched, this book is an interesting, though sometimes plodding, look into the life of a rather quirky man whose own early traumatic childhood and young adult experiences greatly influenced his work. The section about the Warsaw Ghetto was heartbreaking. It was almost as bad as life at Auschwitz as far as starvation, freezing, and cruel treatment goes.

The author is herself a psychologist and a leading advocate of adoption reform.

King Matt the First by Janusz Korczak
Of the many children's books Korczak wrote, this is his most popular and the first to be translated into English. In fact, it is said to be as popular in Poland as Peter Pan was in the English-speaking world. There is much for adults in the story as well as it is a transparent allegory of political and social events in Poland.

The book tells the story of a child prince whose parents die, making him the king at a very young age. Refusing to give up his power to adults, he enacts many reforms, particularly those that involve children, and including giving children chocolate every day and sending the adults back to school while the children take over. Some of his reforms work and some do not, and in the end he is overthrown and exiled to a desert island.

At times I loved the "turning of the tables" and the creative solutions King Matt came up with, and at other times I was tired of what seemed entirely nonsensical. Children, however, might be delighted by that nonsense.

A book on my nightstand that I will come back to review after I have read it:

Surviving Treblinka by Samuel Willenberg
From Amazon.com: "The author describes his experiences at the Treblinka death camp, explains how he and a small group of prisoners escaped, and recounts his life as a fugitive in Warsaw."

The photo on the right is Willenberg at a 2013 visit to Treblinka.