The soil of Treblinka conceals the ashes of over 800 thousand people, victims of Nazism from 10 European countries: Poland, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, France, Greece, Yugoslavia, Germany, and the Soviet Union. This place has become a synonym of cruelty, bestiality, and martyrdom. It has become a terrible proof of the crime of genocide.
During the years of Nazi occupation in Poland, the name of Treblinka acquired a particularly sinister fame, for it meant only one thing - death. Here, the system of human extermination assumed near perfection. Victims brought here had but moments to live. Here, time was measured not by a chronometer, but by thousands of human lives gassed, shot, or burned on pyres. Hours became hundreds, and days - thousands of murdered victims. Each day, pillars of black smoke rose sky-high, each night flames from the pyres of human bodies could be seen from afar. Here, the crime of genocide was being committed - hurriedly, feverishly, unremittingly.
The punitive labor camp in Treblinka came into being in the summer of 1941, by the local gravel mine. It was surrounded with barbed wire. Inmates included both Poles and Jews, mainly from the Warsaw district. Detention usually ended with death, or the transfer to one of the larger concentration camps. At any given moment, on the average from 1000 to 1200 inmates were detained in the camp; their composition was constantly changing. The inmates worked in the gravel mine and at loading railway cars in Malkinia station. Some of them were employed in the camp workshops, and the women - on the camp farm. The regime was one of terror and starvation. More than 20000 persons have passed through the Treblinka punitive labor camp, and more than half of them have died of starvation, under torture, or were shot. The camp was wound up late in July 1944, when the Soviet army was approaching.
It came into being by the already existing punitive labor camp late in the spring of 1942. Inmates of that former camp were used to build the holocaust factory known as Treblinka II. At that time, nobody knew yet what role had the Nazis assigned to this particular camp. Treblinka II was to be used in the implementation of the Nazi plans of the so-called final solution of the Jewish question in Europe (Endlösung der Judenfrage). This was the place in which the decision of the Nazi ideologists to totally exterminate the Jewish people was to assume its demented and criminal form.
The new camp covered an area of some 15 hectares and was surrounded with a barbered wire fence over 3 meters high. The inmates were made to entwine pine branches in the wires and plant trees under them. This was to ensure that nothing happening in the camp could be seen from the outside. Guard-towers were build every dozen meters or so along the fence. Only Jewish inmates were used to build the interior of the camp. This sealed their fate, for according to Nazi plans, no inmate who was a witness of the genocide could remain alive. On the inside, the camp was divided into two parts. In the first part, housing barracks for the Nazi crew, storehouses and workshops were built. The second part, separated by a high hedge and fence, contained the gas chambers (3 art first, then 10 new ones were successively added).
The first rail transports of victims started in mid-July 1942, when the camp was ready. The first transport brought Jews from the Warsaw ghetto in the third decade of July (most probably on July 23rd). From then on, trains bringing people not only from Poland, but also from all over Europe reached the railway platform in Treblinka. In Treblinka, the perfidy of the Nazi criminals reached its heights. They made everything to deceive the victims, fool them and conceal the real reason why they were there.
And so, a make-believe railway station was built by the platform within the camp. Signs pointed to spurious passages to other platforms, to waiting rooms, cafeterias, ticket offices and other railroad-station installations. This completed the disorientation of the people brought here. There was also an exit door, but it only led to the death road - the "road of no return".
After the transport had arrived and the cars were unloaded, women were separated from men. Immediately after the separation, all victims were ordered to undress. Loudspeakers announced that all are going to the bath, and will receive new clothes and documents later. The transportees left all their valuables in the dressing room. The entire transport - naked men, women, children - was then driven along the road to the gas chambers. Inside the chamber, the victims were made to stand with their arms uplifted, so that more people could be contained at a time. Children were thrown in on top of that human mass. The gassings with exhaust fumes took about 15 minutes. The bodies of the gassed victims were then transported by a working squad of Jewish inmates to a place where special grates were prepared. The bodies were interspersed with wood and incinerated after dousing with a flammable fluid.
This immense mass grave, fed with flammable, burned day and night. The stench and ashes of burned bodies covered the entire area. On several occasions from 15 to 18 thousand victims were gassed and burned daily.
In their plans, the Nazis had also foreseen appropriate storage place for the victims' belongings. Clothes, shoes, furs, valuable jewelry were transported to Germany. Treblinka camp sent over 200 railway cars of shoes and clothing to the Reich. Approximately fortnightly special trucks took to the Reich crates of valuables, gold, jewels, bank notes, wristwatches and so forth.
The extermination camp Treblinka II was operational for a relatively short period - from July 1942 to August 1943 - but over 800 thousand were murdered here during that time.
The inmates staged an armed uprising on 2 August 1943. The few of the few, who had managed to survive, somehow gained access to the armory. They took out weapons - several dozen rifles, ammunition and hand-grenades. The shooting soon spread all over the camp. During the uprising some 25 Germans, 60 Ukrainians from the camp guard were killed, and about 800 Jewish workers lost their lives. Most of the camp buildings were burned. About 200 inmates managed to flee while Treblinka was burning. Most of them, however, were later killed while fighting the German pursuit.
After the revolt of the inmates, the Treblinka camp started to close down. In November 1943, the camp was practically disbanded. The gas chambers were destroyed; the remaining barracks torn down, the fence disassembled. The area of the camp, concealing the ashes of hundreds of thousands of people, was ploughed over by the Nazis, and trees were planted there.
The Council for the Protection of Monuments of Struggle and Martyrdom, aided and supported by the entire Polish society, has decided to commemorate the area of the extermination camp and of the punitive labor camp for all time. Eternal homage is paid to all those, whose ashes lay beneath the concrete slabs of the symbolic cemetery.
On May l0th, 1964, a great anti-war manifestation took place in Treblinka, connected with the unveiling of a monument commemorating the victims of Fascism. About 30 thousand people from Poland and abroad participated, including the few inmates of the extermination camp who had managed to survive.
On May 3lst, 1978, a commemorative boulder to the memory of the eminent Jewish educator, writer, social activist and doctor, Janusz Korczak, was unveiled on the grounds of what was the Nazi extermination camp. Janusz Korczak was killed in Treblinka in August 1942, after refusing to abandon his wards from the Warsaw ghetto orphanage on their way to the gas chamber.
There are, in Poland, thousands of places where battles and clashes with the occupant were fought, where the Nazis conducted mass extermination camps and their gruesome activity was conducted. On that tragic list, there are places, which still inspire dread, which have become testimonies of Nazi genocide and depravation. Treblinka in one of them.