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stella41b -> RE: war stories - remembering (11/11/2008 1:25:47 PM)
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"In this spot the Nazis executed 105 Jews and Poles July 10th 1942"
How many times did I walk past this plaque in the wall of the apartment block in Al. Jerozolimskie, the main street in the centre of Warsaw where I rented a studio apartment? Even today you can see the pockmarks in the walls from the shells fired during the Warsaw Uprising and this block is part of only 15% of the buildings which survived the destruction wreaked on the city by the Nazis.
My grandfather served in the British Army in North Africa, but instead I want to write about a place I visited back in 2004 that had a profound effect on me and brought it home to me just how real the Holocaust really was.
That place is Treblinka - which was both a concentration camp and a death camp set up under Operation Reinhard together with Auschwitz Birkenau and Sobibor. Over 850,000 Jews were exterminated in that camp over a period of months, second only to the 1.2 million exterminated at Birkenau.
Treblinka today is a sleepy little village just off the main Warsaw-Vilnius road not far from Bialystok in the far north east of Poland. You come to a turning in the road and it's here you find a narrow street which comes to an end some 100 yards further down. There are no buildings in this street. At the end of the street is a footpath which takes you into a forest. You follow the path as it meanders through the forest and you come to a clearing, and then some more treets.
Just beyond these trees you come to an area which resembles a large grassy field. However you look to your right and you see rectangles marked out by stone and concrete.
Welcome to Treblinka II - the death camp. Those rectangular squares are all what remains of large barrack huts which housed a laundry, a bakery, accommodation for 20 SS officers, around 120 Ukrainian guards, and anywhere up to 1,000 prisoners who worked at the camp.
Standing alone to your right is a large concrete wall about 20-30 yards long and about 15 feet high. The concrete on the side you approach from is smooth, but on the other side there are many pockmarks from bullets and shells which concentrate into a strip from the height of one's head down to one's stomach. Prisoners were continually whipped, punched, kicked and beaten. Those who were bruised or marked after inspection in the evening were lined up against this wall and shot. Those on whom the brusies appeared by the next morning were executed in the same way that morning.
You walk a little further and come to a trackbed of a disused railway line and a solitary railway platform. This is all that remains of Treblinka railway station. The line ran to the main Warsaw Bialystok railway at Malkinie, and it was to here that trains arrived carrying condemned prisoners from Warsaw in trains of up to sixty wagons. Beyond the platform there is a large concrete rectangle. This is a mass grave, and was once a large pit. The trains arrived at the station and the prisoners were herded out into the station building where they were stripped, had their clothes and belongings taken from them, and then they were made to sit at the edge of the pit after which they were shot by machine guns in the back which made them fall into the pit to join the piles of burning bodies.
There is another area, which is thick forest but which there is a long clearing, like a road of grass, which takes you steadily uphill to another area which is sunken and in which trees are planted. This grass road starts behind the railway station and runs for a mile or so uphill to an area which is sunken and where trees are planted. It was along this route that prisoners were forced to run naked up to the gas chambers where they would be separated into men, women and children. The men would be herded into the gas chambers and the doors locked. A Ukrainian guard would cry out 'Iwan! Woda!' ('Ivan! Water!') and the men would be gassed whilst their female relatives and children waited outside. The fear and the cries were so bad that these women literally shit themselves and so they were waiting ankle deep in human excrement. The women and children were then gassed and the bodies were thrown into a pit of burning bodies. The fumes and the stench were so bad they could be smelt miles away and many prisoners knew what was going to happen to them as the trains left Malkinie and some committed suicide.
There is another mass grave, which is a massive concrete rectangle by a memorial on which rocks are placed. Every rock bears the name of a city in Europe from where the Jews and other prisoners were brought but this is also where everyone living in the ghettos of Warsaw and Lodz were exterminated. This is the Holocaust Memorial.
There is no museum at Treblinka like there is at Auschwitz, just trees, forest, grass, graves, a solitary railway platform and peace. But what makes that silence so eerie is the knowledge that those 850,000 or so, 99% of which were Jews, were exterminated between July 22nd and October 3rd 1942. I have visited other camps at Auchswitz, Chelmno and Majdanek, but none quite had such a profound effect on me as Treblinka.
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