Treblinka was first started in 1942, it was one of the three "Aktion Reinhard" death camps.  This camp killed over 800,000 Jews and other people by gassing or just shooting people right on the spot.  This war wiped out a whole generation of men and women.
 
Jews gathered at a transport center at a central point to see which camp they would be sent to.  After about a day or two, a train would come not with passenger cars, but cattle cars to transport the Jews.  Abraham Goldfarb, a survivor of Treblinka says this: "The Germans forced 150-200 Jews into a freight car designed for sixty or seventy. " The cars were closed from the outside with boards.  Water and food were not provided to the Jews.  At Treblinka the welcome was rough, the torture of millions of Jews and other victims began long before they reached the camps.  Many people did not survive. Before Jews were sent to death camps they were concentrated in ghettos. The Judenrate were the people who chose the strongest to go to the labor camps.  In the trains, people found air cracks they could breath through because the train was an enclosed box.   
 
In Treblinka hunger was not the problem, a lot of people brought sausages, bread, and fruit with them.  But thirst was a different problem. "The children were so thirsty" said Goldfarb "that they licked their mothers sweat." In the winter when the trains stopped at the stations the people begged for them to throw snow at them.  "The lucky ones, who had caught the snow, fell upon it like madmen" quoted Gradowski.  "They quarrel and scuffle about each piece, they raise from the floor crumbs which fell due to carelessness" quoted Salmen Gradowski.  A survivor of Sodibar, Ada Lichman, wrote "soldiers entered the cars and robbed us and even cut off fingers with rings on them.   They claimed we didn't need them anymore."  
 
The medical treatment at Treblinka was like this ambulances bearing red crosses which showed up beside trains. "We were told that these would transport the ailing" wrote Lengyel. A prisoner wrote this "And then the body, which I thought was a dead man, rose up, looked at me with great eyes and asked: Is it still far?"
 
Less reassuring were the SS men standing on the platform. A survivor recalled this "beefy men with highly polished boots and shiny, brutal faces. Some have brought there briefcases, others hold thin flexible whips." "We meet people whose appearance is horrifying," wrote Gradowski. The smell of the burning bodies was an unsettling smell and the sight from the smoke coming from the crematory. 
 
Holocaust-deniers say that Treblinka death camp was a transit camp, where Jews were sent for a short while before being sent to work somewhere else.  Treblinka was one of the three "Action Reinhard" death camps.  Together with Belzec and Sobibor it served as the destination for well over a million people. As the Jews arrived they were immediately killed, except for a small group of prisoners. Treblinka was the last of the three built.  The first exterminations started in July in this camp.  In the first five weeks a quarter-million were killed in this camp alone. Bigger gas chambers were built in September and the extermination resumed.  Before the camp closed, over 800,000 people lost their lives within a sixty-acre plot of land. The destruction of Treblinka began after Himmler's visit to the camp of operation Reinhard and they also stopped the headquarters.  Before the camp could be closed, the bodies of eight hundred thousand victims still had to be exhumed and incinerated and other work to incriminate the evidence.  Convoys arrived from destroyed warsaw ghettos, from other places.  As SS sergeant Franz Suchonel described it, "Treblinka was a primitive but efficient production line of death." But it worked well, that production line of death, 1943, Heinrich Himmler visited the Warsaw ghetto, where tens of thousands of people and Jews still remained after being concentrated there for the last three years.   
 
As with all villages and towns with a twenty to thirty mile radius of this camp Treblinka was the final destination for almost 2,500 Jews of Bransk.  They were taken by train.  Treblinka was first established as a labor camp for those who were accused of crimes by authorities.  This was a quote from Raul Hillberg "The destruction of the European Jews."  At Treblinka death camp they had the star of David on the shower wall and the Hebrew inscriptions on a curtain that hung at the entrance.  It read "This is the gate through which the righteous pass."  Treblinka started with three gas chambers, but quickly expanded to at least six, they were made of brick.  The chambers at first appeared to be showers.  Pipes attached to the ceiling brought the gas to the death chambers.  Prisoners were told they were going to get a bath.  Not all deportees were gassed at Treblinka.  Some were forced to do other labored jobs, but in the end they too were gassed.  As allied forces got closer, evacuation of the camp began.  Orders were given to destroy the camp.  A farm was built on the Treblinka site and the Ukrainian ran it.  Visitors today are likely to have a powerful and eerie experience.  Visitors enter the camp the same way the deported Jews and others exited trains.  Standing there you see an open field with solid rock structures that serve as tombstones.     
 
The extermination camp in Treblinka was built in 1942 near a labor camp.  This camp was surrounded by barbed wire fence and camouflage to hide what was inside.  There were watch towers at every corner of Treblinka.  On June 22, 1942, the first transports arrived.  Jews deported from the Warsaw ghetto.  It also has been estimated that 850,000 people were killed in this deadly camp.  On August 2, 1943, an armed revolt of prisoners broke out of the camp.  Of the 840 involved only 200 made it successfully to freedom.  Of these people, only about 100 survived through the end of the war.  After the revolt, the camp was destroyed and camp buildings and installations had been demolished. 
 
It was known that the chambers were located in the center of the upper layer.  It is clear that the tube was three meters high and screened with pine boughs.  This leads to the conclusion that the tube must have run very closely along side the walls being erected for the new facility.
 
The upper camp was where the deaths took place.  The lower camp housed the slaves.  Today this whole camp does not even exist.  The gas chambers are destroyed.  However, there is a picture taken by kurtz Franz, the deputy commandant of Treblinka, which is unique and the only existent picture containing images of an Aktion Reinhard gas chambers.  Cremation of the corpses didn't start in Treblinka until March 1943.  At that time they began opening the mass graveyards.  Cremation was very horrible, they used all the trees around for wood to burn the bodies.  One can see numerous arrays of colored stuff piled up, which must be the ashes of the dead people.     
 
The living area contained houses for the Germans and Ukrainians that worked there.  They also had the camp offices, the clinic, storerooms, and workshops.  One section demonstrated by it's own fence contained housing for the Jew prisoners who worked in the camp.
 
The Jews who had been forced to pay exorbitant fares got to ride in nice passenger cars.  They got to stop on the way at places and buy food, but later in the war they were treated like all the other Jews jammed into tiny cattle cars.  A Sobibor prisoner said "The corpses were frozen and stuck to one another, and when they were laid on the trolley they disintegrated and parts of them fell off."  
 
Another thing added to the extermination camp was called the Lazerett.  When a transport arrived and they were to weak to reach the gas chamber on their own, they were told they were being put in the sick bay.  They were taken to an enclosed camouflage area with a red cross flag over it.  Inside was a ditch where the SS men waited and shot them on the spot. 
During the time from 1959 to 1964, the area of Treblinka death camp was made into a Polish National Monument in the form of a cemetery.  Hundreds of stones were sat in the ground inscribed with names, countries, and places from where the victims had come from.

"Pictures of graveyards"

 
1.5 million children were murdered during this horrible incident.  This includes 1.2 million Jewish children and tens of thousands of Gypsy children and thousands of institutionalized handicapped children.
   
Derek Hammer

7th Holocaust Project

Rossville Jr. High, April 2005

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