WJU Students and Classrooms without Borders: Treblinka

Map of Treblinka Camp

Our second post on WJU's trip to Poland with Classroom without Borders is writtem by Si Gammache, class of '15.

Situated in a remote location, Treblinka, part of Operation Reinhard, oversaw the deaths of some 870,000 to 925,000 European Jews between its opening in November 1941 (July 1942 for the death camp) and its closure in July 1944. The camp was staffed by 25-30 German SS officers and 90-150 auxiliary guards, who were mostly former Soviet POWs or Ukrainian and Polish civilians. The prisoners came primarily from the Warsaw ghetto (265,000), the Radom District (346,000), and the Bialystock District (110,000). After the task of killing of these Jews and those from other areas was completed, the Nazis dismantled the camp before the advance of the Soviet Army, who were pushing their way westward, reached it.

The route of trains at Treblinka

The bus ride from Warsaw to Treblinka took well over an hour and we traveled on several rural roads through several small, rural villages before we finally arrived at the site. Once there, we were greeted not with a massive gate or barbed-wire fence, but with a simple gravel road leading into the woods. Most of the trees we passed on the way to the site had been planted by the Nazis in order to hide the remains of the camp. Even the train tracks had been torn-up, though rectangular stones were later put in place to show where they once ran.

The Memorial at Treblinka

The first thing we noticed was the emptiness. There were no original buildings remaining, no dreadful ovens or bleak barracks. There was only a field with a small building containing some basic information and a model of the camp during its operation. We ventured down a small path to reach the monument. Built between 1959 and 1963, the memorial exhibited the usual Soviet aesthetics, bold lines and impersonal feel.  

The monument was surrounded by various granite stones representing the numerous towns affected by the killings in Treblinka; in other words, the various stones 

serve as a gravestones for the Jewish communities that had 

there people murdered at Treblinka.

 

Treblinka differed from the other Operation Reinhard camps in that it did not have crematoria to dispose of the bodies of those murdered there; rather, they were buried in mass graves, torn out of the ground by a huge excavator. When the Germans decided to tear down the camp and destroy the evidence, they exhumed the mass graves and forced other Jewish prisoners to begin burning the corpses. A recreated "pit" lay within the memorial grounds, designed to draw the viewer's attention to the Germans' destructive furies towards Jews, even after death.

As we stood there surrounded by the memory of death, we were struck by the almost idyllic feel to the area. The birds were chirping, the bugs were buzzing, and there was nary a cloud in the blue sky. This scene stood in stark contrast to the realities of the camp. We were suddenly aware of how easily it can be to remove history from the landscape. Without a concerted effort to preserve the past, we run the risk of forgetting the lessons it can provide.  

After our visit to Treblinka, we returned to Warsaw and  ventured out for dinner into the reconstructed Old Town. Upwards of 90% of the city was destroyed by the Germans during the war and while large sections of the city bear the hallmarks of quick and cheap construction in the immediate post-war years, the Old Town has been meticulously rebuilt to look like the city center of old. 

As we sat and ate our dinner in the bustling square, the memories of where we had been earlier in the day continued to gnaw at us. The juxtaposition of the overwhelming despair and sadness at Treblinka and the joy and contentment found in the Old Town was one that gets to the heart of the paradox within the Holocaust and humanity as a whole: how civilization and barbarism existed simultaneously both during the 1940s and continues to today.